Music played an important role in the life of Heinrich Heine. He did more than just write brilliant reviews of music and operas. For Heine, music was a great vital force that occupied an important place in the content sphere

Perhaps you too have seen several articles of late about “Saving the Symphony Orchestra”. The demise of classical music has been a viewpoint touted for decades, but it seems to be a worthy conversation today. Audiences are dwindling, music education

We were visiting the Richmond Museum of Fine Arts the other week and noticed two wonderful pieces of particular musical interest. In the Museum’s extensive holdings of silver items, we found two pieces commemorating operas by Richard Wagner. A sterling

The very idea of making music inspired by the art form known as Abstract Expressionism seems an anathema. How do you pin down the undefinable? The music style that might match the art form of expressionism has come and gone

High in the skyscrapers of Hong Kong, a tragedy is being played out involving the father, the mother, the child, and between them all is the domestic helper, Mila. She’s the observer of the family dynamics and how the father

The international news is full of reports of the battle of Hong Kong – students battling the government, destroying facilities, battling police, taking control of the streets – and yet, at the same time there’s another side. The streets may

Composers know only too well the difficulty of maintaining the highest quality of craftsmanship and expression across genres. Beethoven wrote some real clunkers, as did Schumann and Rachmaninoff. Because Brahms very carefully controlled his output—we know that he mercilessly burned

William Jones first translated Hafez into English in 1771. It quickly fired the imagination of writers and poets such as Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who referred to him as “a poet’s poet.” Friedrich Engels, who together with Karl Marx