Leonardo Vinci (1690-1730), not to be confused with his more famous countryman Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), was an Italian opera composer active in the city of Naples. He became an overnight success at age 29 with his comic opera in

As a young critic, Robert Schumann famously introduced Frédéric Chopin to European audiences with the words, “Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!” In a later review on the Chopin piano concertos, Schumann suggested, “If the autonomous, mighty monarch of the North

When Stefi Geyer rejected Béla Bartók’s proposal of marriage, the composer fell into a deep depression. Unable to sleep, he lost his appetite and obsessed with not being able to attain something he truly desired. And for many years to

Béla Bartók (1881-1945) was one of the most influential figures in the history of classical music. Composer, performer, educator, and ethnomusicologist, Bartók’s powerfully shaped the way subsequent generations approached and listened to music. Born near the Hungarian city of Nagyszentmiklós,

One of the essential things about music is how it’s so hard to pin down, so hard to fix in time, and so hard to be definitive about. In looking at cadenzas, those virtuosic flourishes that appear in concertos, we

It’s odd, when we think about it, that when we think of music for cowboy movies, we think of movies made in Spain by an Italian director with an Italian avant-garde trumpet player as composer. Ennio Morricone’s film music written

Many composers Used special ways of organising Sounds that, when played on Instruments, spell out Cryptic messages!

The strong public nationalism in America is often a puzzle to visitors – the national flags hanging on people’s houses, the T-shirts that declare one’s love for country, etc. are highly unusual elsewhere. At most, you might have things in