Debussy at the piano! One had to have seen it to appreciate its magic. No words could describe the mysterious enchantment of his playing…– Jacques-Emile Blanche, 1932 2018 marks the centenary of the death of French composer Achille-Claude Debussy (he

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

Civilization survived the exuberant nationalism of World War I (1914-1918), bruised but still intact. Weapons technology did not yet match military ambition, and civilians were spared.

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,

For years I told myself I couldn’t play Liszt – or Rachmaninoff for that matter – because of the relatively small size of my hands. I can stretch a ninth, just about. Any more and it’s painful – and a

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

Born in 1897 in Milan, the Italian cellist Enrico Mainardi had a small cello in his hands at the age of three. He astonished everyone by performing one of the Beethoven Cello Sonatas flawlessly just a few years later. Hailed