In 1879, the French composer Emmanuel Chabrier requested leave from his job at the French Ministry of the Interior so that he could travel to Munich, which was the only place in the world to hear Wagner’s opera Tristan und

The composer and educator Dmitry Kabalevsky wrote, “We should never for an instant forget our main purpose, which is to interest our audience in music, to emotionally fascinate them, to infect them with our love of music.” The composer’s interest

The 1970s brought us musicals based on contemporary society (Company), memories of the past (Follies, Gigi, Evita, Sweeney Todd, Cats), stories based on the Bible (Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat) and stories from French novels of a century earlier

Over a period of 20 years, Johannes Brahms cautiously approached composition via different genres, carefully isolating the required musical elements. He experimented with orchestral colors in his Serenades, blended symphonic sketches with a sonata for two pianos to produce his

The American novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder penned his play The Long Christmas Dinner in 1931. This one-act drama focuses on the life of the Bayard family, somewhere in the American West. At the center of the play is a

Joseph Haydn has entered music history as a jovial, grandfatherly figure with a reputation for a quick wit. Generations later, we still chuckle at the stories behind the Surprise Symphony or the Farewell Symphony. His famous good humor is all

The 1960s saw the continuing evolution of the musical. More and more it took looks at contemporary society, either in the wild world of Wall Street, as in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, or at today’s youth,

Franz Joseph Haydn is recognized today as the central figure in the creation and establishment of the Viennese Classical Style. Famous around the mid-1760s, by the 1780s he had become the most celebrated composer of his time. And from the