Cosima Wagner wrote pointedly in her diary of 1873, “Die Walküre is the most emotional, the most tragic of Richard’s works.” Here as elsewhere, Cosima is responding to the classical theory of drama that Wagner had outlined during the initial

Premiered at the Stadtteater in Leipzig on 25 June 1850, Robert Schumann’s (1810-1856) four-act opera Genoveva elicited a strong response from Richard Wagner. “Schumann is a strange man,” he writes, “who has no sense of melody, and his opera Genoveva

Covid-19 has fundamentally changed the way we work, educate our children, care for others, and also the way we communicate. As a reporter stated, “the pandemic didn’t bring us together; in fact, it was never going to be the common

Violinist Pamela Frank, born to noted pianists Claude Frank and Lilian Kallir in New York City on 20 June 1967, took to the violin at an early age. She started her studies at the age of 5 as a student

Shortly after Tchaikovsky joined the staff of the Moscow Conservatoire in September 1866, a young boy was admitted to study piano. He was only 9-years old, and after a brief interruption, he resumed his studies in composition with Tchaikovsky. That

Becoming joint winner of the Silver Medal at the 1982 International Tchaikovsky Competition, with no Gold Medal awarded that year, propelled Peter Donohoe to international stardom. Renowned as one of the foremost pianists of our time, his performances radiate mature

The German classical pianist and violinist Julia Fischer was born on 15 June 1983 in Munich. Her parents Viera Krenková and Frank-Michael Fischer, a mathematician from East Germany, met as students in Prague. Julia started playing the violin around the

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