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

It was one of those memorable evenings in the history of music. Joseph Haydn had come to London at the age of 62 on a second concert tour arranged by the impresario Johann Peter Salomon. And on 2 February 1795,

Romantic artists have long been fascinated with the Orient. Paradoxically, this attraction became even more powerful because it concerned essentially unknown territory. Guided by a more or less imagined Orient, a good deal of music was motivated by the picturesque.