In music, nobody felt the anxiety of the past—specifically the looming shadow of Ludwig van Beethoven—more acutely than Johannes Brahms. Brahms told his friends that it was “horribly difficult to compose anything with Beethoven standing on his shoulders.” Over a

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) wrote his orchestral showpiece The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra in 1946 as a commission for an educational film on the instruments of the orchestra. Britten used a theme from the Baroque British composer Henry Purcell

Sweden’s best Romantic composer Franz Berwald (1796-1868) holds the dubious distinction of being one of the most neglected composers in music history. In fact, he was so obscure that in 1946 the Swedish postal service, given the choice between putting

Laments continued to be very special works – rarely written and always filled with a very high emotional intensity. Elegies, on the other hand, were more of a late-19th-century phenomenon. Rather than heart-felt cries of despair, they were more like

It’s not really known who wrote the Toy Symphony, and it’s credited to both Joseph Haydn and Leopold Mozart. One problem is that the work didn’t appear in print until 1820, long after the death of either composer. The original

Johann Jakob Brahms was a double bass player in the six-man band that performed daily at the Alster Pavilion, Hamburg’s most fashionable meeting-place. Wealthy families and citizens of Hamburg liked to stroll and drive along the river, stopping for a

During the first decades of the 19th Century, the city of Vienna was a thrilling and highly competitive musical melting pot. Conductors, performers and composers from all parts of Europe had flocked to the city to take advantage of the

Over the last 150 years, the Nordic countries have produced two important composers. Both were born in 1865, however, Denmark’s foremost composer Carl Nielsen was never able to match the popularity of his contemporary Jean Sibelius. Sibelius hailed from an