If you are someone, like me, who reads books about music, I have a very important piece of advice.
In musician and composer biographies, memoirs, retrospectives, etc., many authors, perhaps jealous of the kinds of affects music is capable of, spend many pages describing music. Lengthy descriptions, colorful language, the most adjectival adjectives. I can think of several culprits, but the worst is Jan Swafford. Of the 848 pages of his Mozart: The Reign of Love (a magnificent biography by every other measure) I would estimate 200 pages are dedicated to descriptions of operas. So many pages that he runs out of words to describe them; at least three opera plots are described as possessing “various contretemps”. (I haven’t read his Charles Ives biography but I can only imagine how his thesaurus felt after that one was finished.)
Here’s the advice: when an author begins describing a piece of music, stop reading. Go listen to the music. Skip the description and carry on. You will be much the better for it.