Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise has none of the bright optimism of his earlier Die schöne Müllerin. The spring day of ‘Das Wandern’ is now the cold frozen dusk of ‘Gute Nacht’. Our hero starts off isolated, leaving town in the

A blind woman steps on a Viennese stage and makes her way to a strange new instrument called the glass harmonica. The sounds it makes are whistle-like and otherworldly. (Eventually, rumors would circulate that playing it or even hearing it

Lying at home recovering from an illness, the young Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) took the opportunity to reassess his life. In early 1889, he’d played solo violin in Beethoven’s Romance in F with the Academic Orchestra. When he fell ill in

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) was a master of orchestration and his 1844 book on the subject was the standard not for years, but for decades after his death. He lived his life with his heart on his sleeve and works such

Let’s address one of the elephants in the music room; do we really recognise and pay attention to quality nowadays? Do we even understand what it is? How many of us can recognise high from low levels of quality? How

Clara Haskil has been trumpeted as the quintessential pianist’s pianist, and yet many music lovers don’t know who she is. It’s time to fix that. Today we’re looking at the incredible true story of the life and tragic death of

More poking around the Gallica site and we happened on a section that deals with sound that can be sent – but using the post instead of the internet. One of the early inventions for communicating via sound was the

What the audience doesn’t know behind the scenes typically won’t hurt their enjoyment of a performance. But these recent mishaps chill a performer’s bones even if in retrospect we like recounting these stories! A dear friend of mine, award-winning actress,