As a welcome relief to the seemingly unending lines of poor operatic heroines who are victims of poor choices in lovers, relatives (fathers, brothers) who want to marry them off to inappropriate old men, etc., we have Camille and Alice,

The bandit leader Michele Pezza (1771-1806) defended his native Naples against the invading French using his native knowledge of the territory and his inadvertent army duty. Pezza, who had received the moniker of ‘Fra Diavolo’ as a child because he

Alfonso Ferrabosco the Elder (1543-1588) was an Italian composer who came to England around 1562 where he was nearly the only Italian in the country. A composer and son of Domenico Ferrabosco, he worked for Queen Elizabeth I, some say

Ernest Chausson (1865-1899) studied under César Franck and Jules Massenet at the Paris Conservatoire. Sole living child of an affluent building contractor who had made his fortune in the redevelopment of Paris in the 1850s under Baron Haussmann, Chausson dabbled

What is a capriccio? It has its roots in late 16th-century Italy, where it was used to describe a set of madrigals by Jacquet de Berchem in 1561. According to Furetière in his Dictionnaire universel (1690), ‘Capriccios are pieces of

The problem for Liszt was how to expand the orchestral genre into something less confining than the symphony – 4 movements, alternating slow and fast, contrasting triple section. Sigh. It’s all so old. Ok, we have the concert overture, but

The Spanish-Catalan Baroque composer Antonio Soler (1729-1783), usually known as Padre Soler for his religious appointment, started his music study at age 6 at the school of the Monastery of Montserrat. By 1744 (age 15) was organist in La Seu

When we think of Austria and the Waltz, we think of the Strauss family (Johann, Johann II, Josef, and Eduard) but they didn’t hold the monopoly on waltz music in Vienna. Karl Michael Ziehrer (1843-1922) was one of their primary