Music Lessons

Stephen Johnson is the author of How Shostakovich Changed My Mind and The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910. He has taken part in several hundred radio programmes and documentaries, including BBC Radio 3’s weekly Discovering Music series, and has made numerous appearances on TV, contributing as a guest interviewee on BBC Radio 4’s coverage of The Proms, ITV’s The South Bank Show, and on BBC1’s The One Show. Additionally, he made an important contribution, both as commentator and narrator, to Tony Palmer’s controversial film about the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, Oh Thou Transcendent, and more recently to Palmer’s film about Gustav Holst, In the Bleak Midwinter. He lives in Herefordshire.

‘This book, in seven essays on individual pieces or parts of them by the composers Bruckner, Rachmaninoff, Bach, Lili Boulanger, Wagner, Sibelius, and Beethoven, tells the story of Johnson's redemption through music and love. He makes no apology for the amount of personal detail he reveals. In fact, this is the point of the book and what gives it its extraordinary power.’