For most in the world, it is Nikolai Rimsky Korsakov’s 1888 symphonic suite Scheherazade that brings the stories of The Arabian Nights tales (collected as One Thousand and One Nights folktales) to the musical stage. The framing device for the

Commended by the French government in 2020 for her significant contributions to the arts, the Franco-Italian mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre has established herself as a leading voice in early-music performance. Desandre started her career as a ballet dancer, and to celebrate

Why is it that some musical works remain forever, while others slowly fade away? When we look back at the repertoire of Western classical music, what is most striking is how a relatively small selection of pieces has passed the

Every legendary music career has a “Year Zero”—that precise moment when a raw talent transforms into an international superstar. For George Frideric Handel, that year was 1707. He was just twenty-two years old, bursting with ambition, and ready to conquer

Few composers have generated as many myths and misunderstandings as Richard Wagner. Depending on who you ask, Wagner either invented modern music – or ruined it. The man redefined what opera was. He wrote some of the most harmonically radical

When you put the three leading violinists in close proximity, you can expect fireworks! Isaac Stern (1920–2001) was the leader. Itzhak Perlman (b. 1945) was born in Tel Aviv and came to New York at age 13 to study at

The history of classical music is filled with extraordinary lives – and, in some cases, extraordinarily unsettling deaths. In Part 2 of our series on strange composer deaths, we move into the twentieth century – an era shaped by modern

Carl Czerny was an incredibly industrious musician, teaching Franz Liszt and Theodor Leschetizky and thereby training the two most important piano teachers of the 19th century. He gave as many as ten or twelve lessons a day, yet he still