In his memoir A Musician’s Blood (Musikantenblut) the apprentice locksmith and later court musician Wenzel Abert (1842-1915) describes his youth in Northern Bohemia and his journeyman years. Abert travelled through Austria and Bavaria, the violin with which he sometimes earned an extra crust always in his pack. These memoirs are a unique voice from the vanished world of travelling journeymen and wandering minstrels. The author paints a colourful and vivid picture of his music-filled life against the background of the Habsburg monarchy, as it stood on the cusp of becoming an industrialised society. This book offers an authentic view of everyday life in the waning 19th century to anyone looking to understand how our ancestors lived.

Edited with a critical study of the sources by the musicologist Dr Torsten Fuchs (died 2004), it is a highly interesting social history of the transformation of the Habsburg monarchy into an industrialised society.