Few works in the orchestral repertoire have had a stranger journey to the concert hall than Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 in C major, often nicknamed the “Great” C-major Symphony. For one, it started with composer Robert Schumann rediscovering the

Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936) spent much of his creative life searching for an Italian musical identity. And that is precisely what he found in the artistic expressions of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque. As an editor, he produced critical editions of

When we listen to Claudio Monteverdi‘s L’Orfeo today, we often treat it as the “first” great opera. But the documents surrounding its 1607 premiere and the 1609 score reveal a work that was bleeding, experimental, and deeply conflicted. To understand

Western classical music has evolved in an intriguing way — almost cyclic in its nature, like many things in life. In its earliest forms, the composer was a complete musician: composer, performer, conductor, and often teacher all at once. Figures

As you make your way around the musical world, you start with the easy ones – a bit of Haydn, some Mozart, a venture into Beethoven. Then what? As your tastes mature and you desire something more, there’s Mahler. Each

The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) was one of the first women artists who changed the role of women in art. She illustrated concepts and ideas rarely explored by male artists to the foreground in her work, including chronic pain,

Wanda Aleksandra Landowska, born to Jewish parents in Warsaw on 5 July 1879, was the first person to record Bach‘s Goldberg Variations on the harpsichord in 1933. Her decision to revive harpsichord music was by no means uncontested. To celebrate

In the annals of operatic history, George Frideric Handel‘s Deidamia (1741) occupies a bittersweet position. As the composer’s forty-second and final opera, it marked the end of a momentous era for Italian opera in London. For centuries, it was often