For Richard Strauss, music was always capable of telling a good story. In his tone poems, we find a composer “capable of making poetic or narrative content and formal design coalesce with great brilliance.” Strauss’s tone poems—although he preferred to

During his early compositional career, Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) exhibited a heightened sense of musical insecurity. He self-consciously responded to criticism, even when leveled by his closest personal friends, by ruthlessly destroying or severely reshaping his compositions. His Piano Quintet in

It is difficult to make a living as a composer at the best of times. But when you are trying to make your mark at the peak of music’s history as a cultural form, your chances of success diminish significantly.

Sergei Rachmaninoff and Natalya Satina knew each other since childhood. This is hardly surprising as Natalya was the child of Alexander Alexandrovich Satin and Varvara Arkadyevna Rachmaninoff. Her mother Varvara, as such, was the sister of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s father, Vasily

Just four days shy of his 70th birthday, Sergei Rachmaninoff died of melanoma on 28 March 1943 in Beverly Hills, California. He always wished to be buried at his estate in Switzerland, but the ravages of WWII only allowed for

She experienced “shades of the living light” at age three, and understood that she was experiencing visions by the age of five. Her parents, a family of the free lower nobility, had absolutely no idea how to deal with the

Leonard Bernstein had always longed to write the Great American Opera. Yet, as it happens, he ended up writing the great American musical! In 1949, the theater producer and dance choreographer Jerome Robbins envisioned a modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo

In a recent Interlude article, Oliver Pashley introduced us to the prestigious Conservatoire de Paris. This venerable institution has been an integral part of French musical life, and annually trains a significant number of high-profile national and international musicians. And