In the aftermath of a performance of Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser in 1861, everybody tried to figure out what the so-called “Music of the Future” was all about. Many critics mock Wagner for trying to depict absurd narrative details and even

Bruno Walter [Schelsinger], born on 15 September 1876 in Berlin, is celebrated as an outstanding conductor in an era of great conducting. He worked closely with Gustav Mahler and held major positions in Europe and the United States. His work

Arguably, the person who composer Claude Debussy loved most in the world was his daughter, Claude-Emma. Father and daughter were extremely close and extremely like each other. Claude was inspired by fatherhood to write several of his most famous works,

Fairy tales normally start with “Once upon a Time,” and generally end with “and they lived happily ever after.” But some of the supposed musical fairy tales I’ve been reading about are not nice stories at all. I am talking

Samuel Barber had always been looking for success in the opera house, an achievement that sadly eluded him. The story was markedly different in the field of instrumental music, as his Overture The School for Scandal was performed by the

Enclosed in a wooden box lies a magical mechanism: things whirl, a pinned cylinder turns, a little tuned comb is plucked, and music comes out. We looked earlier at all the different ways composers played with Johann Strauss II’s Blue

The violins of the great violinists are fascinating works of art. They’ve been coveted for centuries, heard by audiences around the world, and inspired countless musical masterpieces. Some have been stolen; others have been copied; all have been loved. Today,

Igor Stravinsky visited the Chicago Art Institute on 2 May 1947. He was struck by a series of eighteenth-century paintings by William Hogarth titled “The Rake’s Progress.” This series of scenes from a drama suggested the subject for an English-language