One of Rimsky-Korsakov’s most beloved operas in Russia was Sadko, a tale of a musician-fisherman who makes good. This opera was given its premiere in 1896 and was staged in Moscow in 1898. The opera’s libretto was written by the

Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767) published his collection of “Little Chamber Music” in 1716. As he writes in the preface, “it consists of 6 Parties, which are arranged in a light and singing manner for the violin, transverse flute, and for

The tale of the Greek god Pan and the nymph Syrinx is a tale of unrequited love and the invention of a musical instrument. After doing readings in Ovid’s Metamorphses, the Danish composer Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) took up the take

The problems with performances in the age of Covid is that the large orchestral works are just too dangerous to assemble. In Erwin Stein’s 1921 arrangement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4, created for Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘Society for Private Musical Performances,’

Sometime in the late 1920s, American composer Aaron Copland went to a performance of S. Ansky’s play The Dybbuk, a tale of pre-destined love and demonic possession. For a production of the play in Moscow in 1919, composer Joel Engel

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart loved billiards, his pet starling, and food! Food was plentiful in Vienna during Mozart’s time, and a cheap and common meal would have consisted of two large meat dishes with soup, vegetables, bread, and a quarter liter

Franz Schubert (1797-1828) took up the story of the beautiful miller’s daughter in 1823 using selections from a longer poem published in 1820 by his friend Wilhelm Müller. Müller’s original poem is made up of some 25 separate poems, only

George V, alongside Queen Mary, was crowned King of the United Kingdom, the British Dominions, and Emperor of India at Westminster Abbey on 22 June 1911. It had already been announced that the royal couple would travel to India to