The nineteenth-century composer has a persistent image problem: inspired, unworldly, male, writing works of genius for posterity. If it has been the project of musicologists for the last 30 years to erode this checklist, he lingers still like a bad smell.

This book uses Antoine Reicha (1770-1836) as a case study through which to develop alternative approaches to the nineteenth-century composer. That Reicha was a composition teacher and prolific writer of instruction manuals, for example, prov...