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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Making Fun of Wagner December 29th, 2017 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 -
2017: The Year in Music
Let’s hear Women’s Voices December 27th, 2017What an extraordinary year! Some of the well guarded secrets that have long been circulating in the shadow of the operatic spotlight as sheer “rumours” before, were revealed for the first time to the general public. It followed a Me -
Dmitry Kabalevsky: Classics for Kids December 27th, 2017 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 -
Ring Bells! Sing Songs!: The Musical V December 26th, 2017 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 -
At the Center of the Musical Universe
Franz Joseph Haydn II December 25th, 2017Over 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 -
What’s Your Idea of an Instrument
An Interview with Lapo Vettori December 24th, 2017We spoke recently with Florentine luthier Lapo Vettori, a third-generation string instrument maker. The Vettori family began instrument making in 1935 and continues today, making violins, violas (Lapo’s specialty) and violoncellos. Over the past 80-some years, the family has made -
The Pianist’s Self-Compassion December 24th, 2017 The life of the pianist is, by necessity, solitary. For many of us, the solitude is not an issue: we crave a sense of apartness to enable us to do our work and to create special connections with audiences when -
Christmas at the Opera II December 23rd, 2017 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