Born in Hamburg, Johannes Brahms was looking for a professional appointment in his native city early on. In fact, he applied for the directorship of the Hamburg Philharmonic Concerts in 1862 and again in 1867. The result was the same,

The “Lower Rhine Music Festival” was founded in 1818 as the immediate result of a prodigious passion for music by an increasingly affluent middle class. This large choral and orchestral festival took place annually on Pentecost Sunday, with the venue

Violinist Fritz Kreisler was one of the great musical personalities of the early 20th century. An easy-going and charming personality combined with insightful interpretations and technical mastery to produce memorably recordings and live performances. Yet behind the immediate exterior of

The game of Rugby was developed in English public schools in the 19th century, and none withstanding a number of regional variations, it involves running with an oval ball in hand. It is a contact team sport, and each team

Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571) lived a life of action, for a goldsmith, that is. His father was a Florentine musician and musical instrument maker and the young Benvenuto was, as a rarity, pushed towards music but persuaded his father to apprentice

In the early 19th century, composers and performers started to look again at the music of earlier times. Choral societies around Germany started to look at the music of the Renaissance and Baroque, such as compositions by Palestrina and Carissimi

The composer and violinist Louis Spohr (1784-1859) is largely lost to us today but at his time, was as highly regarded a composer as Beethoven and, as a violinist, was compared to Paganini as a virtuoso.

Wilhelm Petersen-Berger (1867-1942) was a feared and controversial music critic for a Stockholm newspaper from 1896 to 1930. He hated the music of Arnold Schoenberg and his followers, and fought tooth and nail against the increasing influence of modernism in