American clarinettist Richard Stoltzman was born on 12 July 1942. He has brought the clarinet firmly into the modern age. The clarinet first came to people’s attention through the Classical-era compositions of Mozart, Reicha, and others. It made its way

Born in Lublin on 10 July 1835, the Polish violinist and composer Henryk Wieniawski was, according to Anton Rubinstein, the greatest violinist of his time. He lived and worked during a period in history when many composers were searching for

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

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

Stephen Foster, born on July 4th (1826–1864), was an American Romantic-era composer who, almost exclusively, wrote songs and even today, when we celebrate the 200th anniversary of his birth, those songs live on. Stephen Collins Foster was born in Lawrenceville,

The compositions of the Czech composer Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) draw on the melodic and rhythmic irregularities of folk music, particularly from Moravian and other Eastern European traditions, which he collected, edited, arranged, and used as the basis of his own