The Beloved Vision – Music in the Romantic Age Stephen Walsh
Faber & Faber 432pp (hb) £25
Stephen Walsh traces the first stirrings of musical Romanticism back to Haydn’s unruly phase of the late 1760s and early 1770s. But the real subject of his book is 19th- and early-20th-century music, from Beethoven and Schubert to Sibelius and Elgar. Walsh makes much of the lingering influence of Wagner (though Schoenberg’s lushly post-Wagnerian masterpiece curiously fails to rate a mention), and he has an enviable ability to penetrate
