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

The nice thing about going to an opera performance is that you get to have fictional dates with characters your mom would almost certainly disapprove of. Take for example Robert le diable (Robert the Devil), an opera in five acts

Tōru Takemitsu (1930-1996) fell in love with western classical music via American forces radio broadcasts during the post-war U.S. occupation of Japan. In fact, he “considered the radio as his first real teacher.” Almost exclusively focused on Western musical styles

When Astor Piazzolla went to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger, he was embarrassed by his non-classical music past, and that he played tango music with a bandoneón in a cabaret at night. No matter how hard he tried to

Throughout his life, Johannes Brahms equated corporeal infirmity with frailty of character. An avid outdoors enthusiast, who boasted that he had never consulted a physician or taken any medication, Brahms confidently asserted the connection between a healthy body and a

The outstanding French pianist Pascal Amoyel takes on the chameleon-like Franz Liszt in this recording of the Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (S.173) in this two-disc set that also include the Ballade No.2 (S. 171) and the Liebestraüme, (S. 541).