We forget that violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini was also a virtuoso on other instruments. He encouraged Hector Berlioz to write Harold in Italy for the debut of his new Stradivarius viola (although he turned the work down in the end

The waltz began life in the 18th century as a triple-meter dance popular in impoverished Austrian towns. No one could have predicted that it would become a metaphor for imperial glamour, psychological instability, and even civilizational collapse. Today, we’re looking

Few works in the orchestral repertoire have had a stranger journey to the concert hall than Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 in C major, often nicknamed the “Great” C-major Symphony. For one, it started with composer Robert Schumann rediscovering the

When we listen to Claudio Monteverdi‘s L’Orfeo today, we often treat it as the “first” great opera. But the documents surrounding its 1607 premiere and the 1609 score reveal a work that was bleeding, experimental, and deeply conflicted. To understand

Western classical music has evolved in an intriguing way — almost cyclic in its nature, like many things in life. In its earliest forms, the composer was a complete musician: composer, performer, conductor, and often teacher all at once. Figures

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

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,