In classical music, the Romantic Era lasted from around 1810 to around 1910. That century gave us some of the most famous symphonies in the repertoire. Nineteenth-century composers like Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Dvořák, Schubert, Mahler, Rachmaninoff, and others elevated the symphony
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Unexpected Christmas Treats December 12th, 2015 Depending on your location, there might already be a touch of frost in the air. Days might be getting shorter and nights much darker and longer. But whatever your geographic location, you will undoubtedly have noticed that Christmas is once -
Holst: The Planets December 11th, 2015 Gustav Holst is best known for a single work: The Planets. A unique symphonic work, it has little precedent in the orchestral literature. It might be compared to Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition or even Elgar’s Engima Variations, but both -
Jean Sibelius: The Dances of Courtship December 10th, 2015 When Janne Sibelius and Aino Järnefelt gazed at each other across a family dinner, love was definitely in the air. “My eyes never left you,” Sibelius wrote later, and her brother Arvid loudly proclaimed, “Don’t look at my sister like -
Liszt and the Ave Maria December 9th, 2015 Franz Liszt (1811-1886) was one of the few composers to take on the Ave Maria multiple times. His own religious interests would have guided him to the Ave Maria text, and when he made it his own, he carries us -
I Have a Little List: Was Don Giovanni the Great Lover? December 8th, 2015 In the opera Don Giovanni, there’s a particularly cruel scene where the Donna Elvira, meeting Don Giovanni’s servant Leporello, has to hear how she is just one of a large number of women that the Don has seduced. In the -
Sleigh Bells: Early collision warning system December 7th, 2015 Lush forests and forbidding mountains covered in deep snow, together with sweet smells of roasting chestnuts and mulled wines inescapably conjure up images of Christmas time. The only thing missing in this idyllic Victorian winter scene is the rhythmic ringing -
Music and Art: O’Keeffe December 6th, 2015 The American West was a unique inspiration for a number of artists, but it is in the work of the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe that a new eye was cast on the broad horizons. Her three watercolors from 1917, Light -
“If music be the food of love, play on.”
Shakespeare and Music II: Midsummer Night’s Dream December 6th, 2015The comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of Shakespeare’s most popular works, which has spurred composers’ imaginations, is next in our ten-part series of Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare was a young man when he wrote this fanciful tale—two couples that become