In 1939, in the middle of writing his opera Die Liebe der Danae, Richard Strauss wrote a work that’s rarely performed but commemorates an event few countries can claim. His Japanische Festmusik was written for the 2,600th anniversary of the

The German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) is best known for his allegorical landscapes. Contemplating nature, he sought to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. He was looking not just to explore the blissful enjoyment of

It seems extraordinary to us now, in these equality-conscious times, that women composers and musicians were, until fairly recently, sidelined, ignored or simply erased from music history. Now, women such as Clara Schumann, Amy Beach and Cécile Chaminade are recognised

What is it about conducting fathers whose sons followed in their footsteps? Many professional musicians sire musical offspring, (myself included) but I was struck by the number of conductors in the bunch and thought you’d like to hear more about

He was proclaimed “Britain’s greatest living composer” in the Performing Right Gazette of 1929. That assessment was based on the overall number of performances of his works, and his apparent popularity caused a good deal of professional jealousy. Today, he

This atmospheric miniature was composed in 1963 as a test piece for the inaugural Leeds Piano Competition (which was won by Michael Roll, the seventeen-year-old pupil of Dame Fanny Waterman, the competition’s founder). The competition committee regarded it as a

“If only grown-ups were like children, free from prejudice against everything new!” Anton Webern and Wilhelmine Mörtl, the daughter of his mother’s sister, were married in Danzig on 22 February 1911. They had kept their affair ingeniously secret until she