The city of Rome is a city of ancient forums and modern traffic, fabulous fountains and busy markets, solemn churches and resonant spaces. It’s a walking city and all of history seems to have happened here.

The American soprano Kathleen Battle read the words of the poet Toni Morrison and commissioned Morrison and the composer André Previn for a song cycle. Seeing the names of those three people in one sentence tells you from the beginning

Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann, and Johannes Brahms are surely the most famous love triangle in the history of Western music. Details of the courtship, ensuing legal troubles and the eventual marriage between Robert and Clara are well known.

Dancing and flowers seem to go together – the beautiful flowers moving gently in the breeze and the dancers weaving their way around the floor.

Cairo – the ancient and modern city. One side of the river are the modern buildings of today, and on the outskirts of town is the Giza plateau with the familiar pyramids and the sphinx. The city itself is a

As far as women were concerned, Claude Debussy was a bastard! “There was a woman at each crossroad of Debussy’s life,” Marcel Dietschy writes. “Certainly women of all ages seemed fascinated by him, and they attached themselves to him like

When we speak of musicians, we often credit their parent or a likely aunt as their first influence at their instrument. For the Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924), we find his father, clarinettist Fernando Busoni (1834-1909), important to his development

The extraordinary dynasty of dance music composers and musicians named Strauss originated in the Hungarian town of Buda. Around 1750, Grandfather Johann moved to Vienna, and his son Franz Borgias operated a small tavern in the suburb of Leopoldstadt. That