As long as anybody could remember, Niels Gade had always been in love with music! He taught himself to play a variety of instruments, and started composing at a super early age. Once his musical education was formalized, he steadfastly

The reputation of Ralph Vaughan Williams as the most important English composer of his generation squarely rests on his compositions for the operatic stage and the Concert Hall. These theatrical dramas and orchestral essays characteristically reference the landscapes, myths and

Claude Debussy composed very little music for the theatre. Although he conceived a substantial number of theatrical projects with the playwright, novelist, poet and translator Gabriel Mourey, they somehow never fully materialized. The notable exception is the three-act dramatic poem

Before she ingloriously lost her head, Marie-Antoinette reigned over music in France in the Age of Enlightenment for nearly twenty years. She invited and actively supported foreign composers, and simultaneously fostered the great tragédie lyrique of Gluck alongside the opéa

A New Year’s Eve tradition in the opera world is Johann Strauss II’s operetta Die Fledermaus (The Bat). A year earlier, Eisenstein abandoned his friend Falke in center of town, drunken and dressed as a bat (hence the title), and

In April 1817, a merry little band of artists decided to form a small private club called the “Unsinnsgesellschaft” (Nonsense Society). Based in Vienna, this congenial group of artistic friends published a weekly magazine, the “Archiv des menschlichen Unsinns” (Archive

From its first notes, Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker takes us to someplace warm and magical. Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker, Op. 71: Overture (Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra; Simon Rattle, cond.) The ballet originates in a story by E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Nutcracker and the

The tale of the two children and how they fool the wicked witch who has captured them in her gingerbread house has become a holiday opera. The recasting of the Grimm Brother’s tale into something more family friendly was done