'There are lots of sublime geniuses in this book. But there's lots of other music, too. Inevitably, this story leads on the great works and the great lives. But it also attempts to put those lives in context. Who were these musicians? What were they like? How did they make a living (or more often, in Mozart's case, not)? How does their music fit into the intellectual, social and technological tenor of their times? What other music did they hear? What...