From Flow My Tears to Lachrimae, or Seven Tears The composer John Dowland (1563-1626) perfected the idea of the lute song. He also thought himself as suffering from melancholy, a known illness of his time. Melancholy was one of the

The Birth of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony When he started work on his second symphony, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) started with a funerary idea. After a performance of Carl Maria von Weber’s comic opera Die drei Pintos, which Mahler had completed from

The English composer John Dowland (1563-1626) wanted to be lutenist to the English court. Unfortunately, the difficulties in England between Protestants (the court) and Catholics, made Dowland’s desire difficult to achieve, as he had converted to Catholicism while traveling in

The American showman and businessman P.T. Barnum famously quipped, “Every crowd has a silver lining.” As the founder of the Barnum & Bailey Circus, an entertainment institution that ran for almost 150 years, he certainly knew how to draw in

These days, when we hear of the doomed lovers Pelléas and Mélisande, we most often think of Claude Debussy’s opera, but there were other composers who took up the story by Maurice Maeterlinck. In Maeterlinck’s 1893 play, Golaud finds Mélisande

Picking unpublished poems from the manuscripts of his neighbor romantic poet and writer Théophile Gautier, Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) created his song group (not a cycle) Les nuits d’été (The Nights of Summer). Completed in 1841, the songs, written for mezzo

In 1954, British author T.H. White, known for his children’s Arthurian novels such as The Sword in the Stone, translated a medieval bestiary. His interest in the medieval started in the late 1920s, when he discovered Thomas Malory’s 15th-century chronicle

The repetitive click of the cricket is a sound for a summer night. They are all over the world with the greatest variety of them being in the tropics. They appear in literature and movies, such as The Cricket in