As a mythological character, Hercules is one who has always captured our attention. Famed for his strength and for his adventures around the known world, he’s caught the attention of writers and musicians for centuries. The stories and feats of
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On This Day
15 July: Weill’s Down in the Valley Was Premiered July 15th, 2023In the summer of 1945, Kurt Weill received a commission for a series of short radio operas. Olin Downes, the music critic of The New York Times, and a businessman named Charles McArthur, envisioned a combination of the old English -
Photographing the Infinite
The Art of Charles Brooks July 14th, 2023The cables stretch above as you stand on a richly patterned and textured floor. A seemingly infinite set of repetitive curves are set off by rich red balusters and an angled roof through which light comes. This is the new -
Music of the Past and the Future
Dohnányi’s Sextet in C Major, Op. 37 July 14th, 2023As a solo pianist, Ernő Dohnányi (1877–1960) was usually compared to Liszt and was seen as the successor to that 19th-century virtuoso. As a composer of chamber music, however, he was usually associated with following the Brahmsian tradition. As a -
Together or Separate: Dvořák’s Three Overtures
In Nature’s Realm, Carnival and Othello July 13th, 2023In the early 1890s, Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) stepped away from his strongly Bohemian folksong–influenced orchestral music to write three overtures that he originally intended as a unified set entitled Nature, Life and Love. In the end, however, he published the -
On This Day
13 July: Arnold Schoenberg Died July 13th, 2023The great composer Dimitri Mitropoulos said in 1951, “I was profoundly shocked to read of the death of Arnold Schoenberg. He was one of the greatest geniuses of our time. He did for music in the twentieth century what Einstein -
Five of the Best Violin Etude Books July 12th, 2023 At the risk of stating the incredibly obvious, the violin is hard to play. Some players find that, in order to master a specific skill, it’s useful to strip it from a wider musical context and focus on the specific -
On This Day
12 July: Anton Arensky Was Born July 12th, 2023Anton Arensky was born on 12 July 1861 in Novgorod, on the banks of Lake Ilmen. His father was a physician and played the cello, and his mother was said to have been a good pianist. Young Anton showed great -
Béla Bartók In and Out of Love July 11th, 2023 Béla Bartók (1881-1945) started his musical journey at age 5 with piano lessons at home before he went to the Budapest Academy of Music in his teens. His teacher, István Thomas, had been a student of Liszt and his training