Along with the usual terrestrial subjects, composers have not hesitated to look to the skies for inspiration, starting with our own moon. In 1920, Leoš Janáček took two popular Czech novels by Svatopluk Čech and created The Excursions of Mr.

Around Christmas time, opera houses around the world open their stages to special seasonal productions. And it doesn’t get more festive than watching your favorite Christmas ballet! Combining highly technical performance dance, choreography, music and lavish costumes and staging, the

Many passages in the Gospel according to Luke read like poetry. Among the most beautiful chapters is the story of Christ’s nativity and childhood. In Luke 1:46-55, the angel Gabriel has visited Mary and announced that she will bring forth

Depending on your location, there might already be a touch of frost in the air. Days might be getting shorter and nights much darker and longer. But whatever your geographic location, you will undoubtedly have noticed that Christmas is once

Gustav Holst is best known for a single work: The Planets. A unique symphonic work, it has little precedent in the orchestral literature. It might be compared to Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition or even Elgar’s Engima Variations, but both

When Janne Sibelius and Aino Järnefelt gazed at each other across a family dinner, love was definitely in the air. “My eyes never left you,” Sibelius wrote later, and her brother Arvid loudly proclaimed, “Don’t look at my sister like

Franz Liszt (1811-1886) was one of the few composers to take on the Ave Maria multiple times. His own religious interests would have guided him to the Ave Maria text, and when he made it his own, he carries us

The comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of Shakespeare’s most popular works, which has spurred composers’ imaginations, is next in our ten-part series of Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare was a young man when he wrote this fanciful tale—two couples that become