The love story between Robert and Clara Schumann is often regarded as one of the most romantic in classical music history. Happily for historians, many of their love letters survive. They document their inner thoughts and emotions, as well as
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- Beethoven’s Lairs
“Unter-Döbling” June 2nd, 2020In the summer of 1800, Beethoven took quarters for himself and a servant in a house in the village of Unter-Döbling, about one hour walk from Vienna City Center. Beethoven habitually escaped the oppressive heat of the inner city during -
Pablo Heras-Casado June 1st, 2020 ‘Be Instinctive, Reactive, Part of the Dialogue’ Spanish conductor Pablo Heras-Casado is renowned for a career that encompasses a wide range of repertoire and styles with orchestras all over the world. He has appeared with orchestras including the Philharmonia and -
Remote Teaching: Lessons From a Pupil May 31st, 2020 During this extraordinary period of one’s musical career – at the height of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic – every teaching musician affected by lockdown has a single professional goal: instrumental lessons must be kept safe, personal and inspirational, and pupils’ -
Live Music Returns to London’s Wigmore Hall May 31st, 2020 John Gilhooly, Director of London’s prestigious Wigmore Hall, has announced a new series of lunchtime concerts at the Hall, starting on 1 June. This is, sadly, not a return to “normal” for classical music – far from it – but -
Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843): Expressing the Content in Music May 30th, 2020 “For Our Generation Walks as in Hades, Without the Divine” German idealist poets and thinkers working in the late 18th and early 19th centuries were primarily concerned with the descent of the French revolution into Bonapartism, noting Germany’s failure to - Lieder ohne Worte III
Composer’s Fancy and Player’s Delight May 30th, 2020Because of its brevity and seeming simplicity, the “Lied ohne Worte” became a musical and technical test bed for a good many aspiring composers. In addition, it could deliberately, or as was the case with Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, inadvertently express -
The Rhythmic Voice in Music May 29th, 2020 Rhythm begins in the womb with the heartbeats of the mother and the child. The synchronisation of the heartbeats of a mother and her foetus does actually occur at times, this shows us how important that rhythm is to us -
Train-Spotting Composers May 28th, 2020 Can you imagine naming a whole class of trains after composers? That’s what British Rail did with its Class 92 electric locomotives. From Beethoven to Wagner (or, so cite British composers, from Britten to Sullivan), the names of composers from
