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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Gustav Mahler: Songs on the Death of Children January 13th, 2015 There can be nothing more tragic to a parent than the loss of a child. Imagine the grief of the German poet Friedrich Rückert, who lost two of his children to scarlet fever within a period of six months. Attempting -
Asteroid 22369 Klinger January 12th, 2015 Between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter lays a vast region of space occupied by numerous irregularly shaped celestial bodies. Known as asteroids and minor planets, this so-called asteroid belt was formed by violent primordial collisions. Scientist have -
Mozart in The Jungle
Spoiler alert! January 11th, 2015Beware—Mozart in The Jungle recently released on Amazon has sexual situations, graphic violence, adult content, and adult language. A racy shoot-em-up movie? No. It’s a ten part series about classical musicians in New York City and ostensibly what they have -
Le Gibet January 11th, 2015 It might be natural to assume that a starting point to playing a piece of music is to play all the notes as they are written. In this article, the question why composers might write notes that cannot be played -
Music be the Food of Love
Hans Gál and Hanna Schick January 10th, 2015An ancient proverb says, “a successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.” And that is exactly what happened to Hans Gál and Hanna Schick. They were married for 65 years, and their devotion, dedication, -
Bach the Healer January 10th, 2015 In the last decade of the 19th century, European culture was perceived as increasingly decadent and degenerate. Visual art had abandoned representation and liberated color and line; literature weakened the narrative structures and loosened meanings, and music used a technically -
A Timeless Journey
Liszt’s Petrarch Sonnet No. 47 January 8th, 2015Franz Liszt was the ultimate rock star of the 19th century! Handsome, flamboyant and a genius performer with a natural aptitude for the stage, he eventually turned into a prolific thinker and monumental composer. Yet, that path towards enlightenment was -
Name That Tune! January 6th, 2015 How on earth do you remember all those melodies, all those little turns of phrase and all that invention by all those composers? We know from brain studies that combining words and music is a positive way to combine both