Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) was not one of the usual child musical prodigies. He was a gifted child as a pianist and organist but it wasn’t until he was in his 50s that he made his name in music with his

Born on 27 January 1806, Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga y Balzola shares his birthday (and his middle name) with Mozart, but at a 50-year remove. Like Mozart, his career was cut short; he didn’t even get the 34 years of

The 1920s in Europe became a time of strong nationalism, often covering not just a country but a whole region. Leoš Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass, for example, was his offering to pan-Slavism. The 1926 Sinfonietta, on the other hand, was his

Edvard Grieg (1843-1907) brought the music of Norway out of the shadow of the other Scandinavian countries. Musically educated at the Leipzig Conservatory, he returned home having met a world of international composers from England’s Arthur Sullivan, Denmark’s Niels Gade,

By the time of his seventh book of madrigals in 1619, Monteverdi was in the middle of changing the concept of the madrigal and starting to approach the musical style that would become the most prominent in the following centuries:

Lord Byron’s 1817 poem Manfred brought out all the elements of the Gothic novel into a dramatic poem. In 1816, Byron was traveling with Mary and Percy Shelley in Switzerland with her sister Claire Clairmont. The two couples began a

Franck’s Symphonic Variations (1885) for piano and orchestra takes the piano and orchestra relationship out of the typical concerto contest of piano versus orchestra and places the two as equal partners. We’re used to the piano as a soloist, but

Outside Vienna, the finest waltz composer the world was acknowledged to be Tchaikovsky and another Russian master of this light genre was Alexander Glazunov (1865-1936). Between 1905 and 1928, he was director of the St. Petersburg Conservatory and shepherded it