When Frédéric Chopin graduated from High School his final report stated, “Chopin F., third year student, exceptional talent, musical genius.” His hometown of Warsaw, however, had long known about this gifted musical prodigy, who was dubbed “a second Wolfgang Amadeus

On her wedding night, the heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune climbed atop an armoire armed with an umbrella and told the groom “I am going to kill you if you come near me!” Winnaretta Singer had married Prince

The market town of Zlonice in the Central Bohemian Region is currently home to a population of roughly 3000 people. And between 1853 and 1856 it was home to Antonín Dvořák. He arrived during the early autumn of 1853 to

Albert Einstein once famously remarked “Mozart’s music is so pure that it seemed to have been ever-present in the universe, waiting to be discovered by the master.” In the end, both Einstein and Mozart were successful in untangling the complexities

The initial meeting between Winnaretta Singer aka Princesse de Polignac and Maurice Ravel was described as “an audacious feat of social climbing” in 1899. The Prince and Princess de Polignac had established a salon in Paris, and the music room

Arnold Simon of Hamburg published a composition by Franz Liszt in 1881 with the title Romance oubliée. Interestingly, this little gem was published in four versions simultaneously, for piano solo, for violin and piano, for viola and piano, and for

On 27 May 1784, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart bought a pet starling bird at a Viennese pet shop. Normally historians and musicologists don’t pay much attention to composers’ pets, but this starling wasn’t your average pet. Because when Mozart recorded the

Her father was the American sewing-machine inventor Isaac Merritt Singer, and her mother the Parisian model Isabelle Boyer. Winnaretta was born in New York in 1865, and her 14th birthday present was a private performance of the Beethoven Op. 131