Listen with Father: How I Learned to Love Classical Music

Listen with Father is a book about the transformative power of listening, and about how we remember those we have loved and lost.

At four years old, Caroline Sanderson fell in love with the music of Mozart after listening to it with her father. At eight, she fell even harder for the songs of David Bowie. Her dad made many gentle attempts to persuade her to back to his world of classical music, but it wasn’t until after he died that she returned to it, in memory of him. Listen with Father tells of how she set out to listen, with great care and attention, to the music her dad loved, to work out why he so appreciated it and whether she could too.

In a beguiling blend of memoir and biography, Sanderson explores the music of composers from Igor Stravinsky to Clara Schumann and Frédéric Chopin, hearing Mozart recitals in Salzburg, visiting Sibelius’s house near Helsinki and playing Robert Schumann at home on the piano. Beautifully touching and absorbing, Listen with Father is a story of a beloved father, told through the classical music he cherished.