The D’Aranyi Sisters Play Spohr’s Duo in D minor 1927 Two sisters and outstanding violinists inspired several great musical works of the 20th century. Born in Budapest, Adila (1886) and Jelly d’Aranyi (1893) possessed royal musical blood. Their great-uncle was

You want to travel with your guitar, but your luggage just won’t let you. How do you manage? The French inventor François Baschet ran into that problem when he wanted to travel after WWII. His guitar proving too big to

Carl Czerny, unquestionably one of the towering figures in the history of nineteenth-century pianism, died on 15 July 1857 at the age of 66. As a contemporary publication notes, “The death of Carl Czerny, although it cannot be said to

It still ranks as one of the biggest sensations in classical music when Harvey Lavan “Van” Cliburn Jr. won the inaugural International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958. With the Cold War raging, the Soviet Union scored a huge technological

While the war years provided much opportunity for stirring patriotic films, the industry underwent a number of significant changes immediately following. With money in short supply, the lush symphonic scores of the Golden Age gradually declined, and composers started to

In 1936, George Gershwin told a friend, “I am thirty-eight, famous, and rich, but profoundly unhappy. Why?” Gershwin had been experiencing severe headaches, but many of his friends simply attributed his unhappiness to his working conditions in Hollywood, “or to

Described as “the hottest tenor in the world,” Jonas Kaufmann is constantly trying to live down the “greatest living tenor hype.” While the tabloid press focuses on his physical attributes and his earlier supposed liaison with Madonna, Kaufmann has a

After having made his name in jazz, clarinetist Benny Goodman set out to make his name in classical music, feeling that he was likely to leave a longer impression in classical music than in jazz. To fill that need, he