It is interesting how a combination of multiple factors, such as modern music itself, the astonishing ease of access and, at the same time, the rarity of chance encounters and natural guides, has made it extremely difficult to orientate oneself in the great works of music. To reasonably know a prolific composer such as Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, or Brahms, it is not enough to have an unusual taste for classical music: it takes a conscious and focused effort to get to know them, an effort to search for a guiding light that seems hidden behind the tangle of hundreds of compositions. Carpeaux’s book, of course, solves the problem and falls like a godsend into the hands of the modern music lover. But long before thinking of reading it, most have already succumbed to disorientation.