In 1921, Maurice Ravel moved to a tiny villa outside of Paris, close to both culture and countryside. He named his cramped cottage “Belvedere.” It was his first house, and his dream house, and the last he ever had. Inside

In Act II of Edvard Grieg’s music of the play Peer Gynt, our eponymous hero enters the hall of the mountain king. As the scene’s introduction describes: “There is a great crowd of troll courtiers, gnomes and goblins. The Troll

“Minors of the Majors” invites you to discover compositions by the great classical composers that for one reason or another have not reached the musical mainstream. Please enjoy, and keep listening!

Without the extraordinary generosity of legendary conductor, patron, and impresario Paul Sacher, a myriad of masterworks by twentieth-century composers would simply not exist. An artist of unusual stature and one of the world’s richest men—he married the heiress of the

You may be surprised how many quotes come from the 1606 play King Lear, perhaps William Shakespeare’s greatest of tragedies—a work, which continues to electrify and has stirred composers Debussy, Shostakovich, and Berlioz as well as some popular music. The

The Mixolydian mode is somewhat of a paradox! Ancient tradition used it for lamentations, while modern authors ascribed erotic and joyous qualities to it. And to make it even more confusing, Plato entirely shunned the Mixolydian mode because he claimed

Written about children, but not written for children, the collection of short piano pieces entitled Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood) by Robert Schumann was a gift to Clara Wieck in 1838, two years before they were finally married. The final 13

Christiane Eberhardine of Brandenburg-Bayreuth, Electress of Saxony and titular Queen of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, was a bit of a religious celebrity. For years she resisted the pressure of the court to embrace the Roman Catholic faith, which her husband had