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

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

In 1912, Claude Debussy bowed reverently to a long-forgotten predecessor: “Rameau is, whether we want to admit it or not, one of the most solid foundations of music, and one can advance without fear on the beautiful path he traced.”

Few composers in classical music history are as shrouded in mythology as Franz Liszt. He is the ultimate nineteenth-century showman: a dazzling virtuoso whose thunderous piano works are often dismissed as all flash and ego. His fame, scandalous love life,

July is a month of extremes in classical music history. It gave us some of the most consequential births in the canon – among them, Janáček, Mahler, and Liszt – and also tragically claimed some of its greatest lives, including

Trying to choose a single “best” violinist for each decade of the twentieth century is a fool’s errand – but an instructive one. The process is less about choosing stars and more about understanding what greatness meant in different decades,

The oldest wind instrument is also the world’s most universal. A special exhibition at the Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) in Phoenix, Arizona—The Magical Flute: Beauty, Enchantment and Power—traces the flute‘s extraordinary role in society and its evolution over the millennia.