How private was Maurice Ravel’s private life? Well, to this day nobody has uncovered conclusive evidence that he ever had a sexual relationship. While his music is passionate and distinctive, Ravel’s personality remains mysterious. His friend and biographer Alexis Roland-Manuel

As we all know, Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was a man of numerous contradictions. And that is certainly true of his eating habits as well. According to his second wife Cosima, Richard Wagner was “in principle” a vegetarian, but “in practice

We hate them and we love them – they can make us jump up in fright just as much as we can admire their filigree webs. Composers have spiders in their music and we end up with a marvelous variety

Seen by his contemporaries as an ‘authentically French’ composer, Jacques Ibert (1890-1962) brought not only artistry but also humour to the orchestra. His 1924 work Escales (Ports of Call) was a product of his Rome residency as winner of the

The German group Bündnis Mensch & Tier (Alliance for Humans and Animals) has chosen its Pet of the Year: The Donkey. The group points out all the benefits of the alliance between donkeys and humans and closes with the thought:

In his 2009 violin concerto, composer Brett Dean looked at an art form that is not only being lost in today’s world but being replaced with something that gives a different level of satisfaction: the letter. The Lost Art of

In 1944, John Cage wrote a work for prepared piano that reached beyond the sound into emotion. The Perilous Night takes its title from Arthurian legend, where the knight Gawain, in the Marvelous Castel, encounters a bed on ruby wheels

Of all the water animals, the frog appears most often in music. Most of the time it’s for its repetitive and rhythmic sound, but sometimes, particularly in vocal music, as a representative of various human characteristics, most often envy of