It’s easy to forget that many famous composers, despite their creative and professional productivity, lived with debilitating chronic illnesses. Sometimes these health issues sprang up after accidents, or were exacerbated by accidents. Today, we’re looking at four great composers whose

Max Steiner, hailed as the “father of film music,” is one of the most influential composers in the history of Hollywood. Over the course of a career that spanned half a century, Steiner crafted some of the most iconic scores

To mark the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, the Sitkovetsky Trio embarked on an ambitious project to record the complete set of the composer’s piano trios for BIS Records. This project, with the exception of a couple of small fragments,

Today we’re going to talk about symphonies. What exactly is a symphony? Is it different from a sinfonia? And, depending on your answer to that question, which composer has written the most symphonies of all time? And how many symphonies

How would you like to be part of a fabulous ride through the glittering world of Der Rosenkavalier? It’s Richard Strauss’ opulent opera that’s basically a Viennese pasty of romance, wit, and plenty of wigs! This 1911 masterpiece, with a

Franz Liszt, arguably the greatest pianist who ever lived, wasn’t keen on giving formal music lessons. He preferred to work with pianists one-on-one in mentor relationships instead. One of the rare exceptions was Polish pianist Karl Tausig, an outrageously talented

Toward the end of her life, Eugenie Schumann published a book called The Schumanns and Johannes Brahms: The Memoirs of Eugenie Schumann. Eugenie Schumann was a music teacher, pianist, and writer, but she was always best known for being the

These compositions show that new music is not a monolith, containing as many varied approaches as there are composers, even if common threads tend to emerge. The term “new music” is itself hard to define, broadly referring to compositions in