David, first premiered in a concert version on 1 June 1954 in Jerusalem, is Darius Milhaud’s longest and most extensive work. The opera was composed at the suggestion of conductor Sergei Koussevitzky who was organizing a Festival to mark the

For a number of scholars, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths) is “the first masterpiece of electronic music.” It was premiered in the large auditorium of Cologne’s Westdeutscher Rundfunk on 30 May 1956. The subject of the

When Léo Delibes (1836-1891) was asked by the head of the Paris Opéra to compose a 90-minute ballet score, he leapt at the opportunity. For Coppélia, premiered on 25 May 1870 at the Théâtre Impérial l’Opéra in Paris, Delibes crafted

With Europe spiraling towards a massive war that would eventually devastate the continent, Béla Bartók gave voice to the general sense of anxiety and foreboding by starting work on his only opera in 1911. The libretto for the one-act Duke

Richard Strauss had reached the ripe old age of 84 when he decided to compose his musical last will and testament. Setting poetry by Joseph von Eichendorff and Hermann Hesse, the Four Last Songs emerged individually. When Strauss died on

What do you get when you mix religiosity with sexual passion? Audiences got the answer on 17 May 1890 at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome. It was on that date that Pietro Mascagni’s one-act melodrama Cavalleria Rusticana saw its official

Have you ever thought about writing a full-fledged piano concerto in a little less than 3 week? For most of us, this seems an almost impossible task, but it was not a problem for Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921). You see, Anton

In 1920, Mildred Barnes and Robert Woods Bliss acquired a historic estate in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., which they eventually named Dumbarton Oaks. They engaged an architect to renovate and enlarge the house, and designed a series of