Franz Schubert (1797–1828) wrote over 600 vocal works, one of the oddest and yet most powerful of which is a ballad about a Queen, her dwarf, and a fatal encounter. The story opens in the middle of the night: we

For its 25th year, the Oxford Piano Festival has put together a splendid array of world-class pianists, vibrant, varied programmes, and inspirational teaching. Founded by the renowned pianist and conductor Marios Papadopoulos in 1998, and hosted by the Oxford Philharmonic

Francisca Edwiges Neves Gonzaga (1847-1935), known as Chiquinha Gonzaga, is considered one of the most important female figures in Brazilian music history. She was a feminist and abolitionist, and she was the first of many things: the first Choro composer,

The Gallica digital library at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris is one of the great research treasuries of the world. It was established in 1997 and now holds more than 10 million documents accessible online: books, magazines, newspapers, photographs, cartoons,

As a solo pianist, Ernő Dohnányi (1877–1960) was usually compared to Liszt and was seen as the successor to that 19th-century virtuoso. As a composer of chamber music, however, he was usually associated with following the Brahmsian tradition. As a

In the early 1890s, Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) stepped away from his strongly Bohemian folksong–influenced orchestral music to write three overtures that he originally intended as a unified set entitled Nature, Life and Love. In the end, however, he published the

At the risk of stating the incredibly obvious, the violin is hard to play. Some players find that, in order to master a specific skill, it’s useful to strip it from a wider musical context and focus on the specific

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) penned a vast number of letters, starting from about the age of 14 and ranging to the last month of his life. Literally, thousands of these documents have been preserved, thanks to the foresight of his