In 1972, Jascha Heifetz – widely regarded as the greatest violinist of the 20th century – retired from the concert stage following a shoulder surgery that was only partially successful. He was 71 years old. His career had been one

Classical music anniversaries in August span four centuries of the art form – from the birth of Baroque composer Barbara Strozzi in 1619 to the death of Sviatoslav Richter in 1997. The month includes the anniversaries of the births of

Composer Ethel Smyth was the first woman to have an opera performed at the Metropolitan Opera. She befriended some of the most important composers and authors of the late nineteenth century, and once conducted her own suffragette anthem from a

One of the central and fully integrated pillars of promoting the life and works of Frédéric Chopin is the Chopin Museum, housed in a fortified mansion in the city centre of Warsaw. The mansion was originally constructed by the powerful

The story of composer Robert Schumann’s life contains a number of Romantic archetypes: musical genius, alter egos, literary obsessions, artistic manifestos, mental illness, and a tragic early death. He was also at the centre of classical music’s most famous love

Since its founding in 2001, the Fryderyk Chopin Institute (Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina) in Warsaw has grown into one of the world’s leading centres for Chopin scholarship and performance. It is unique in combining research, publishing, education, museum curation, historically

The string quartets by Antonín Dvořák are a treasure trove of Bohemian spirit and deeply felt universal emotion. What started as eighteen love songs under the title Cypresses in 1865 became a string quartet cycle of twelve miniature movements twenty-two

It’s a perfect assortment of situations for the summer: running in wild water, mediating at night in a difficult situation, and then flying above it all. American composer Mark Edwards Wilson (b. 1948) describes the works as ‘my latest approach