Slowly, behind the heroine, the shadow rises….the audience shrinks back in their cinema seats, helped with a hearty push from the music, generally starting in the cellos, which signal the terror that awaits. Then the violins take over, strident in

In the fifteenth century, when manuscript book production really took off, the problem of blank space in the margins had some unique solutions. When these were music books, even the initial letters of songs were decorated.

The image of Jesus on the cross has inspired artists of many kinds for centuries. There are of course many striking paintings of the scene by artists from Veláquez’s Cristo crucificado to Salvador Dali’s Christ of Saint John of the

Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen was first produced at the Vienna Opera on 23 October 1875, with an extremely curious Johannes Brahms in the audience. Brahms had been aware of the scandalous Parisian premiere, summarized by a local critic. “Mr. Bizet

We’ve looked at English ceremonial music – now let’s cross La Manche and look at French music of the same kind. A king such as King Louis XIV and centrality of the court at Versailles meant that there was the

Six years after the dismal failure of his opera Guntram in Munich, Richard Strauss collaborated with the librettist Ernst von Wolzogen on a project he hoped would exact revenge on the bourgeois provincialism of his hometown. Feuersnot (In need of

The American composer George Crumb took the idea of the classical string quartet and turned into an electric ensemble of darkness. His 1971 work, Black Angels: Thirteen Images from the Dark Land, extended the string quartet by electrifying it, and

The Allied initiative to rid German and Austrian society, culture, press, economy, judiciary, and politics of any remnants of National Socialist ideology was launched after the end of the Second World War. The directives of “denazification” identified specific groups and