The emergence of the new media of television, cinema and radio in the 20th century brought Scheherazade into the mainstream of popular culture. Hollywood went into overdrive, and The Adventures of Prince Achmed of 1926, is the oldest surviving feature-length

On 3 January 1781, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote his father from Munich, “My head and my hands are so fully occupied with my third act, that it would not be wonderful if I turned into a third act myself, for

Composers are inspired by the world, by their experiences, and by others’ imaginations. Novels and stories have been set by composers as everything from little piano pieces (here, Debussy was inspired by the Golliwog character in children’s book by Florence

In much of the English-speaking world, a traditional folk song set to the words of a Scots poem is used to bid farewell to the old year at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve. “Auld Lang Syne,” probably

Maurice Ravel wrote two works with Shéhérazade, the heroine and narrator of The Arabian Nights as the title. One of his earliest surviving orchestral pieces, the “Ouverture de Shéhérazade” makes use of a Persian melody, but it was not well

The memoirs of Franz Schubert’s friends are full of references to Caroline Esterházy. In fact, Eduard von Bauernfeld wrote in February 1828. “Schubert was, in fact, head over ears in love with one of his pupils, a young Countess Esterházy,

A good many carols associated with X-mas were composed between the 14th and 17th century in England, Italy, France, Germany, Spain and elsewhere. However, it took the scholarly efforts of the 19th century for these old songs to be collected

When John Adams visited an exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris detailing the history of the “Arabian Nights,” he was struck by how the archetypal story of Scheherazade has evolved over the centuries. “The casual brutality toward