In the Romantic era, the Fairy was a lovely creature – rarely seen but with sometimes beneficial charms. In no work was Fairy music better expressed than by Mendelssohn in his incidental music for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In

After grooming his conducting career under Hans von Bülow in Meiningen between October 1885 and April 1886, Richard Strauss was offered the post as third conductor at the Munich Hofoper. Before he took up his post in Munich, Strauss —

In 1950, singer Theresa Brewer had a top 10 hit with ‘Music! Music! Music!,’ also known as ‘Put Another Nickel In’ and for one classical composer the song was so prevalent and so annoying that he turned into a piece

There can be no doubt that Lotti Speyer had seriously enflamed the romantic passions of the young Richard Strauss. After a short ten days at the little spa of Heilbrunn, however, the two lovebirds had to return to their respective

The murderous composer lies abed, dreaming fevered dreams about the love that he lost and the evils that he did….or was it all just an opium-induced nightmare? In his 1830 work, the French composer Hector Berlioz wrote a symphony that

Just the mention of Arnold Schoenberg strikes fear in the hearts and ears of most listeners. But can you guess what struck the fear of god into Arnold Schoenberg? Somewhat ironically, the composer experienced a paralyzing fear of the number

We’ve already looked at Modest Mussorgsky’s creation for piano, Pictures at an Exhibition. This best-known of Mussorgsky’s works had an afterlife as an orchestral work that has resulted in dozens of orchestrations. There are also arrangements for other performing forces

Carl Maria von Weber : Clarinet Concerto No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 73, J. 114 The comparatively late addition of the clarinet family to our modern catalogue of musical instruments at the turn of the 18th-century immediately spawned countless