On 30 April 1855, an ensemble of 950 performers piled into the Church of Saint-Eustache, in Paris. They were getting ready to finally premier a Berlioz work that had been specifically composed for the coronation of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in

He was born Giorgi Melitonovitch Balandchivadze in Saint Petersburg in 1904, and he danced his way into the State Theater of Opera and Ballet, better known as the Mariinsky Ballet. After fleeing to Paris and westernizing his name to George

When Arturo Toscanini raised his arms at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan on 25 April 1926, he was getting ready for the premier of an unfinished opera. Turandot, the operatic adaptation of an originally 12th-century Persian epic filtered through

The Swedish diplomat Fredrick Silverstolpe wrote in May 1800, “Haydn is writing with new zeal since he has had the good fortune to lose his nasty wife.” By most accounts, Frau Haydn was not a particularly pleasant woman, and her

Czech music critics mercilessly criticized Antonin Dvořák for his supposed cosmopolitan musical tendencies. And as a result, he was performed and published less in Bohemia than in foreign lands. In stark contrast, Dvořák gained a particularly loyal following in England,

Here is the trivia question for today. Can you name the Puccini opera that the composer himself desperately wanted to forget? The answer is Edgar, and despite revising it repeatedly, Puccini eventually declared the work irredeemable. Edgar was Puccini’s second

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) loved children. Although he was not married and did not have children of his own, he always seemed to spend more time with children than with adults. In fact, he never outgrew his ability to see the

When Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto premiered at the Palau de la Música Catalana, in Barcelona on 19 April 1936, the composer was no longer alive. Shortly after he had finished the composition he was stung by an insect at the