In 1916, Swedish composer Hugo Alfvén was commissioned by the Royal Swedish Opera for a ballet that he completed in 1922. He considered it one of his finest works, but after its first season in production, opening on 7 February

Initially, an entire population loved her, yet in the end, that love turned to hatred, and she lost her head in the French Revolution. Marie Antoinette (1755-1793) embodied everything that was rotten with royalty, and she certainly got some very

In 2014, American conductor, pianist, and composer Leonard Slatkin wrote Endgames, a work that would focus on the End Instruments, the instruments that sit at the ends of their respective sections in the orchestra, the highs and lows of the

The invention of the Gutenberg press set in motion a musical and societal revolution. For one, the demand for music as entertainment and as a social activity for educated amateurs increased with the emergence of a bourgeois class. From this

Imagine that you’re a composer. You grew up loving music. Maybe in your childhood you listened to works by giants like Mozart, and Beethoven, and Brahms. You spent decades learning an instrument. You attended elite educational institutions for many years,

Polymaths are individuals who have mastered more than one discipline. Some of the most extraordinary polymaths have excelled in a wide range of disciplines, such as science, mathematics, philosophy, literature, arts and music. Whether artistic or not, their lives have

Although his compositions are all but forgotten today, Sir Eugene Goossens (1893-1962) was considered a fresh and highly promising musical voice. At the height of his popularity as a composer in the 1920s and 30s, his music placed on par

Think about Classical Era composers and you might think of men in splendid attire wearing white wigs: men like Mozart or Haydn. But you might be surprised by how many classical era composers were actually women! Most historians agree that