As soon as an opera hit the London stage in the mid-to-late 19th century and everyone was familiar with the tunes, it immediately became subject of humorous versions. Beethoven’s Fidelio was turned into Pizzarro the Great Tyrant or the Little

On 3 February 1809, Felix Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg into a highly prominent Jewish family. His grandfather Moses Mendelssohn was the “preeminent Jewish philosopher of the Enlightenment in Germany, who had argued for religious tolerance and the assimilation of

After the 19-year-old Jascha Heifetz played his London debut, Georg Bernard Shaw wrote to him, “If you provoke a jealous God by playing with such superhuman perfection, you will die young. I earnestly advise you to play something badly every

Born on 1 February 1973, the Russian pianist Alexander Melnikov began his musical studies at the Moscow Central Music School at the age of 6. Although he never considered himself a child prodigy, he did play Rachmaninoff’s first piano concerto

Franz Schubert was born in the early afternoon of 31 January 1797 in a one-room apartment in a house called “The Red Crab”, then located in the district of the “Himmelpfortgrund,” an area northwest of the bustling and overcrowded center

Canadian bass-baritone Gerald Finley is widely acclaimed as “one of the classical music world’s great communicators.” Having exceptional control and command over a wide variety of repertoire, Finley is one of the premiere dramatic interpreters of our time. In fact,

Remembered as one of the best and most refined violinists of all time, Fritz Kreisler died at the age of 86 on 29 January 1962. Old age and a persistent heart condition had finally taken its toll, but Kreisler had

The violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840) wrote his set of 24 Caprices for Solo Violin between 1802 and 1817. Dedicated by Paganini to ‘all artists’ upon its publication by Ricordi in 1820, his own score carries names of performers and