We all remember that Johann Sebastian Bach was jailed for overstaying his holiday, and that Beethoven, mistaken for a homeless vagrant, spent a couple of days in the slammer as well. Michael Tippet was arrested for conscientiously objecting to WW2,

It’s graduation season and we start to hear music for ceremonies. At my high school graduation, the concert band played a bit of Wagner: ‘Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral’ from Lohengrin. It was wonderful music, but when you’d repeated it

Do you imagine that social climbing is a modern day phenomenon? Think again! Here’s a piece that humorously illustrates this societal failing— Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme Op. 60 by Richard Strauss. It was written between 1911 and 1917 and is a

Elektra (1909), proved crucial to Strauss’s later development as a composer of opera, since it marked the beginning of his collaboration with the young Viennese poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal. This tale of multiple murder and bitter vengeance is musically and

When you look at the output of composer and conductor Carl Davis, you get a wonderful overview of the many ways that a classical orchestra can take on the pop repertoire. There are orchestral renderings of the music from the

Throughout his life, Richard Strauss surrounded himself with beautiful women!

We think of instruments as being so well-established (look at any orchestra), that we don’t think about the instruments that were there and are now gone, or have been replaced with something else, or just changed into something else.

Yo-yo Ma, cello Emanuel Ax, piano Richard Strauss: Cello Sonata in F Major, Op. 6, TrV 115 Richard Strauss was controversial as a person and as a composer, despite being one of the more prominent composers of the 20th Century.