Berlioz, Rossini, Meyerbeer, Wagner, Chopin, Offenbach, Pauline Viardot – these and many other artists live, love, and suffer in the musical capital of the 19th century, contributing to the score of a metropolis caught between revolution and electricity, railway and empire. For the first time, this book explores Paris as the center of European music in the 19th century, while relating the music to its surroundings. We experience the leap into modernity, which unfolds here at an unprecedented pace, from Napoleon's death to the Second Empire, as Rossini poses for a photograph, Berlioz struggles to pay rent, Meyerbeer anticipates Hollywood, and Chopin travels by train, while Balzac, Flaubert, and Baudelaire attend the opera and Offenbach outsmarts censorship. This panorama brings together social misery and expensive soirées, everyday life and upheaval, love and art; the search for traces in the present connects us with the morning of our era. In music, we come as close to it as nowhere else: in the sound of Paris.