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

Nikolai Gogol, a dramatist, novelist and short story writer of Ukrainian ethnicity, is considered a seminal figure of Russian literary realism. His fundamental romantic sensibility is marvelously infused with strains of Surrealism and the grotesque. In fact, Gogol established a

“The story of the creation,” Joseph Haydn wrote in 1801 “has always been considered the sublimest and most awe-inspiring image for mankind. To accompany this great work with appropriate music could certainly have no other result than to heighten these

The Catholic prayer called either Ave Maria or the Hail Mary has been a familiar setting in music, coming into favour in the Renaissance and extending to the current day. Mary, the mother of Jesus, holds a particularly beloved place

Music can be an all-consuming passion that serves as a daily spiritual and physical exercise. Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) certainly thought that way, as “music grasped me with a power that rapidly relegated all my other interests to the background.” Initially,

At age 23, Jean Sibelius “was pale and good-looking, slender and sensitive. He seemed to all a strange and attractive being. And of course, we were all in love with him…And he was lovable. Refined, attractive, polite, he had that