Wanda Aleksandra Landowska, born to Jewish parents in Warsaw on 5 July 1879, was the first person to record Bach‘s Goldberg Variations on the harpsichord in 1933. Her decision to revive harpsichord music was by no means uncontested. To celebrate

In the annals of operatic history, George Frideric Handel‘s Deidamia (1741) occupies a bittersweet position. As the composer’s forty-second and final opera, it marked the end of a momentous era for Italian opera in London. For centuries, it was often

Having arrived as the newly appointed Festival Manager, I sat at my desk in the King’s Lynn office, surrounded by the cobbled streets of this historic port town, considering the legacy I now help steward. King’s Lynn is steeped in

Stephen Foster, born on July 4th (1826–1864), was an American Romantic-era composer who, almost exclusively, wrote songs and even today, when we celebrate the 200th anniversary of his birth, those songs live on. Stephen Collins Foster was born in Lawrenceville,

The compositions of the Czech composer Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) draw on the melodic and rhythmic irregularities of folk music, particularly from Moravian and other Eastern European traditions, which he collected, edited, arranged, and used as the basis of his own

Working from the Habsburg court in Vienna, Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck, born on this day, 2 July (1714–1787), freed opera from the stranglehold of opera-series practices that had been accruing over time and created a new opera style that

In 1912, Claude Debussy bowed reverently to a long-forgotten predecessor: “Rameau is, whether we want to admit it or not, one of the most solid foundations of music, and one can advance without fear on the beautiful path he traced.”

Few composers in classical music history are as shrouded in mythology as Franz Liszt. He is the ultimate nineteenth-century showman: a dazzling virtuoso whose thunderous piano works are often dismissed as all flash and ego. His fame, scandalous love life,