Conversations With Rossini

The autobiography that Rossini never got around to writing. The conversations the 63-year-old Rossini had with Ferdinand Hiller in Trouville in Normandy in September 1855, and the finely drafted impression of Rossini himself with which Hiller prefaces the conversations, will be of exceptional interest to all music lovers. No other single source offers so vivid a sense of Rossini the man and the musician, not to mention the many composers, performers, and people of influence he knew and met. This is the first complete publication of the conversations in English.

Ferdinand (von) Hiller (24 October 1811 – 11 May 1885) was a German composer, conductor, writer and music-director. Richard Osborne is one of Britain's best known and most widely respected writers and broadcasters on classical music. Born in 1943 in the East Riding of Yorkshire, he read English at Bristol University. He taught for a number of years, began broadcasting for BBC Radio 3 in 1969, and joined the review panel of Gramophone in 1974. His Rossini (1985) was widely acclaimed for its readability and scholarship and is now regarded as the standard work on the subject. In 1989, he published Conversations with Karajan.