Abbado broke new ground whatever he did: In the 1970s, he put on concerts in factories with his friends Maurizio Pollini and Luigi Nono. He was a persistent supporter of contemporary music. He founded several youth orchestras and sought out connections between music and literature. Schreiber shows us Abbado the intellectual as well as Abbado the mesmerizing performer, and follows the conductor around the centres of the world of music: from the Scala in Milan, via London, Chicago and Vienna State Opera to Berlin, where he became chief conductor for the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and shaped a whole era. Then, after a period of sickness, Abbado’s art reached yet further heights at the helm of Lucerne’s Festival Orchestra, which he had co-founded. This first complete biography honours the exceptional artist as well as the person Abbado, for whom music was not a world apart, but an echo of reality.