Risultati Editore "Naxos AudioBooks" in Biografie e memorie

Well over a century after Wagner's death, the man and his music are as controversial as ever. Praised for his profound insights into the workings of the human heart, he has also been condemned as a dangerous libertine, a proto-fascist and an arrogant bore. His vast four-part operatic Ring cycle has been elevated as one of the greatest achievements of western culture and dismissed as an unparalleled example of creative megalomania.

This is a story from the Famous Composers collection.

Is there any music more instantly recognizable and beautifully scored than Tchaikovsky’s wildly popular ballet Swan Lake? These and other works have become enduring classics, yet they were not uncontroversial in Tchaikovsky’s day, and there are those that still wonder if his style is fundamentally European or ardently Russian. Find out more about Tchaikovsky’s childhood obsession with music, his turbulent relationships with friends and colleagues, and how he overcame the deepest of personal crises to transcend all with an ambition that has left us with some of the greatest music ever written.

Giuseppe Verdi, the son of an innkeeper from a poor village in the Po Valley, was a "self-made man". At the age of 26 he produced his first opera at La Scala in Milan, at 35 he became a landowner, and at 48 he was a member of parliament. This audio biography describes Verdi's life in the exciting worlds of the stage, agriculture, music and politics.

For a period of seven years, Wilfred Thesiger canoed through the marshes at the confluence of Iraq's Tigris and Euphrates rivers, living among the native Madan tribes and their islands made of reeds. Now extinct, their ancient way of life is speculated to have existed for 5,000 years, going back to the days of ancient Sumer, and possessed a unique culture found nowhere else in the Middle East. Thesiger documents the tribes' conflicts, traditions, cuisine, relationships, justice systems, and art, and reveals how they built their unique water-borne society

Ben Hur could be said to be the first American blockbuster. It combines all the best elements of popular classic, epic and action story against a background of authoritative historical detail. As this vivid reading shows, the story, together with the sweeping rhythm of the writer's prose, make it ideally suited to the audiobook.

Tchaikovsky is one of the most popular composers of all time. His melodies are known to many people who may never have heard his name. They crop up on mobile telephones, alarm clocks and answering machines as often as on records and concert programs. Like his music, the man himself was widely loved, but his inner life was fraught with sufferings, confusions and a deep vein of self-doubt. The drama of his emotional life is vividly reflected in his music, letters and diaries, all of which play a major part in this intimate portrait-in-sound.

Following on from the events in A Zoo in My Luggage, The Whispering Land sees Gerald Durrell and his wife Jacquie travel to Argentina to collect animals for their newly established zoo. With rare insight and unique charm, Durrell pulls the listener into the tropical landscape of Patagonia, where he witnesses magical moments with penguins, seals and ocelots, and encounters a hilarious cast of characters, including a swearing parrot and a belching guanaco.

A Zoo in My Luggage is the colorful, first-hand account of Gerald Durrell's six-month animal-collecting trip in British Cameroon, and his attempts to create his own zoo. Motivated by a passion for wildlife, and a desire to save endangered species from extinction, Durrell assembles a glorious panoply of exotic animals - including a female baboon called Georgina, who later runs amok in a department store; a black-eared squirrel, who tries to bury nuts in his ear; and a gentlemanly chimpanzee named Chumly, who greets him with an outstretched hand.

The lives and music of the great composers of classical music unfold in this entertaining account, introduced by the conductor and musical personality Marin Alsop. In 1200 years, classical music grew from the chanting of medieval monks through the symphonies of Beethoven and the grand operas of Wagner to the huge orchestral sound-world of the 21st century, with its electronics and its film music.

Thanks to the invidious reputation of his most famous work, The Prince, Niccolo` Machiavelli exerts a unique hold over the popular imagination. But was Machiavelli as sinister as he is often thought to be? In Machiavelli: His Life and Times, Alexander Lee reveals the man behind the myth, following him from cradle to grave, from his father's penury and the abuse he suffered at a teacher's hands, to his marriage and his many affairs (with both men and women), to his political triumphs and, ultimately, his fall from grace and exile.

Arabian Sands is Wilfred Thesiger’s stunning account of five years spent crossing the Arabian Peninsula by foot and on camels, with nomadic Bedouin tribesmen as guides. Travelling between 1945 and 1950, the British explorer treks through Yemen, the Empty Quarter, Oman, and parts of the then Trucial States, crossing and re-crossing around 250,000 miles of this most inhospitable terrain. He was the first European ever to set eyes on the dunes and wadis of these deserts.

On 8 August 1914, five days after the outbreak of World War One, the Endurance, a wooden-hulled, coal-fired icebreaker, set sail for the South Pole, in a bid to complete the first-ever trans-Antarctic expedition, which would cross the continent from the Weddell Sea to Scott's base at Cape Evans, via the Pole. However, despite the best planning, the ship succumbs to the ice floes of the Weddell Sea, and is subjected to months of uncontrollable drifting before its crew makes a scramble for Elephant Island, where they battle constant cold and starvation.

In the tumultuous world of revolutionary France, the enigmatic diplomat Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord survived–and shaped–five regimes. Duff Cooper’s elegant biography reveals a man as brilliant as he was controversial; the ‘quick-witted little boy’ who enjoyed the anachronistic world of his great-grandmother’s château became the shrewd, silver-tongued servant of multiple kings and revolutionary leaders. From the salons of pre-revolutionary Paris to the negotiating tables of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna, the turncoat Talleyrand exercised his wit, pragmatism and moral ambiguity.

Dass in Franz Schubert, der aus seiner Geburtsstadt Wien nie weit hinauskam, gleichwohl die Sehnsucht nach der Ferne schlummerte, zeigen etliche seiner Kompositionen, die das Wandern besingen, die Natur im Lauf der Jahreszeiten ausdeuten. Im Geiste der Romantik sind dabei Trennung, Einsamkeit und Todesgedanken stets unterschwellig präsent.

Fanny and Felix, the two eldest children of the music-loving banker Abraham Mendelssohn and his wife Lea, were both highly musical. While Felix became a famous composer and conductor, Fanny had to subordinate her compositional talent—according to the customs of the time—to a role as wife and mother. This audio biography deliberately focuses not only on Felix Mendelssohn but also on his sister Fanny.

Erstmals widmet sich die erfolgreiche Reihe der BR-KLASSIK-Hörbiografien einem Komponisten des 20. Jahrhunderts: Dmitri Schostakowitsch. Seine Symphonien sind nach wie vor Highlights im Konzertsaal, sein Schicksal inspiriert großartige Romane. Doch was weiß man von seinem Leben wirklich? Er ließ sich nicht gern in die Karten schauen. Und er hatte Grund dafür...

The story of Richard Wagner's life–with its adventures and affairs, splendour and misery, delusions and visions–is almost like a novel. This audio biography conveys it brilliantly from all the material provided by music, original texts and contemporary documents. Colourful, polyphonic, and always authentic.

Ludwig van Beethoven's life story is that of a radical individualist in uncertain times. The music–effective and profound, quirky and poetic, sensual and philosophical, and constantly in search of the new–plays a leading role here.

Auch diese Hörbiographie wird das Rätsel Mozart nicht lösen. Aber Mozart soll, verkörpert von dem Wiener Schauspieler Florian Teichtmeister, lebendig werden in seinem Denken und Fühlen, seinem Alltag und seiner Epoche—streng nach den Originalquellen. Erzähler ist Udo Wachtveitl, Autor ist wiederum Jörg Handstein, der bereits in der Reihe BR-KLASSIK WISSEN das Leben von Mahler, Wagner und Verdi in Form von Hörbiografien nachzeichnete.