Giuseppe Verdi’s Les vêpres siciliennes premiered at the Paris Opéra on 13 June 1855. It was well received, and even the notoriously difficult Hector Berlioz found much to admire, praising “the penetrating intensity of the melodic expressiveness, the sumptuous, wise

When a marital disagreement between the king and queen of fairies spills into the human realm, it creates a tangle of misdirected spells and misplaced love affairs. With the fairies spreading accidental chaos far and wide, nothing is what it

By 1928, Frederick Delius was going blind and had lost the use of his limbs due to syphilis. His mental acuity, however, remained unimpaired until his death. But one thing for sure, he could no longer compose. Having learned of

“Fyn,” also known as “Funen” is the third-largest island of Denmark. Sometimes known as the “Garden of Denmark,” this predominantly flat island hosts a mainly mild climate. It is also the birthplace of pop singer MØ, a footballer named Christian

Set on the Greek isle of Lesbos, the ancient Greek novel Daphnis et Chloe is a pastoral tale of shepherds and shepherdesses authored by the Greek writer Longus. It tells the story of a boy and a girl, each abandoned

Born on 7 June 1934 in Reims, the French pianist and conductor Philippe Entremont came from a musical family. His father was a violinist and conductor, and his mother a “Grand Prix” pianist and piano teacher. However, Entremont’s first instrument

A veritable mania for Carl Maria von Weber’s (1786-1826) opera Der Freischütz swept London in 1824. Despite suffering from the advanced effects of tuberculosis, Weber accepted an offer from the impresario Charles Kemble to conduct the opera season and compose

The city of St. Petersburg was founded in 1703, and it quickly developed into “the most opulent, precocious, and enlightened metropolis in the Russian empire.” The Academy of Sciences was founded in 1717, and Mikhail Glinka produced the first nationalist