Long before Howard Shore got his hands on writing the score for Peter’s Jackson’s monumental Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, Dutch composer Johan de Meij had taken up the call. His Symphony No. 1, “The Lord of the Rings,”

The genius pianist Friedrich Gulda (1930-2000) was lauded for his extraordinary interpretations of the music of Bach, Mozart, Schubert, and Beethoven. Highly sought after as a piano teacher, his students included Martha Argerich and Claudio Abbado. However, Gulda openly flaunted

I always thought that my grandfather was the luckiest person on earth! No matter how dull the conversations, boring the sermon or uncomfortable the journey, he always managed to nod off. At first I thought he was just pretending, but

It is prohibitively expensive to stage an opera. In 2012 alone, the Metropolitan Opera in New York had expenses totaling 317 million US Dollars! For one, you need singers, an orchestra of roughly 80 players and a conductor. Some popular

Johann Strauss II, or Junior, or the younger The Waltz King, (not related to Richard), composed over 400 of the world’s most beloved waltzes, polkas, quadrilles, dance music and operettas. These include the perennial favorites: An der Schonen Blauen Donau

After Esther Burney died of cancer in September 1762, Charles Burney remained a widower for five years. The reason it took him so long to remarry and find a new mother for his six children was because Elizabeth Allen turned

Music and Literature are like twin sisters. Not necessarily identical, but deeply connected in ways that can’t be easily explained. When the great Russian novelist and writer Leo Tolstoy published his1889 novella on the ideal of sexual abstinence and jealous

In 1990, the average size of individual households in the industrialized word ranged from a low 2.1 individuals in Sweden to a high of 3.1 in Ireland. According to this study, the group of 7 countries that make up the