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Best Quotes from Chopin’s Letters: Emotional, Witty, and Heartbreaking
In addition to being one of the greatest composers and pianists of the Romantic Era, Frédéric Chopin was a famously witty and sensitive writer. Here are some quotes from his letters that paint a picture of what Chopin really felt
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Three Violinists Who Survived the Nazi Concentration Camps
One of the major difficulties of studying the Holocaust is understanding its sheer scale. The human brain isn’t built to process what the murder of millions of people really means. However, by zeroing in and looking at individual stories, we
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What Was It Like Being Liszt’s Student?
Pianist Amy Fay was born in Louisiana in 1844. She began studying piano as a child and quickly proved to be very talented. She studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in the 1860s and, in 1869, took the
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What Happened to Stravinsky’s Children?
The relationships between composers and their family members are always fascinating. Those family dynamics tell music lovers valuable information about the so-called Great Composers’ characters, priorities, and inner lives: what things meant the most to them, what moved them, and
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Ten Shortest Composer Marriages in Classical Music
Audiences are always fascinated by composer love stories, especially when there’s an element of tragedy to them. Today, we’re looking at ten of the shortest marriages in classical music history, and all of them have that element of tragedy. Despite
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How Accurate About Mozart and Salieri’s Rivalry Is the Film Amadeus?
Perhaps the most famous film about a composer, Miloš Forman’s 1984 Amadeus, brings to life the rivalry between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri. The only film about a composer to win an Academy Award for Best Motion Picture, Amadeus
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Five Must-See Klaus Mäkelä Performances: His Most Popular YouTube Videos
Klaus Mäkelä is a sudden superstar in the classical music world. Born in 1996, he is the most successful twentysomething conductor in the world today…and accordingly, one of the most controversial. Everyone in the field is asking: is he at
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How Clara Schumann’s Father Taught Her Piano
Friedrich Wieck (1785-1873) is best-known as Clara Wieck Schumann’s litigious father, the man who did everything he could to keep his daughter from marrying Robert Schumann. However, he was also a well-respected piano teacher. Despite the fact that he only
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