On 1 February 1908 Emilia Manfredi filed a formal lawsuit charging Elvira Puccini with causing the suicide of her daughter Doria. Subjected to continual and blatant defamation, the lawsuit read, Doria Manfredi had swallowed a lethal amount of sublimate, a

Looking for a movie about classical music to watch? You’re in luck! Today we’ve not only assembled a list of thirty movies about classical music, but we’ve also checked in with movie review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes to see which

As if we musicians don’t have more than our share of challenges to contend with, we heard the recent story of the energetic and exultant conductor who kicked a soloist’s violin right out of his hands. The Czech violinist, classical,

Current research has suggested that the castrati “were considered to be a gender of their own, partly because they were not classified as male or female in society. They drifted, so to speak, in a gender limbo, often carrying a

Bohuslav Martinů (1890-1959), the younger compatriot of Czech composer Leoš Janáček (1854–1928), was much more widely traveled than Janáček, largely due to the wars of the 20th century. Martinů, living in Paris in 1940, emigrated temporarily to Portugal and then

You’ve probably never heard of the charcoal merchant Thomas Britton (1644-1714). He came from a small village in Northamptonshire and moved to London to become a highly successful merchant. In his spare time, he started to take singing lessons and

Castration for musical reasons was never really officially legal. In fact, it was banned under Canon Law and punishable with excommunication. The music historian Charles Burney traveled through Italy in search of places where the operation was carried out. He

The natural trumpet, i.e., one that’s just a length of tubing, get its pitches from the overtone series. However, this is a limited range of pitches and to get ones that are in a particular key requires that the trumpet