A berceuse is a piece to put you to sleep – particularly if you’re a small child in a cradle. It’s usually in triple meter with a very simple tonality – wild and chromatic is just out of the question

Edvard Grieg (1843 – 1907) invented the idea of Lyric Pieces, but it’s really part of a long list of character pieces for the piano. With the rise of the home piano, there was an immediate market for music for

When we imagine the stories from A Thousand and One Nights, we think of Aladdin, Ali Baba, and the 40 Thieves, which were added by the French translator Antoine Galland in the 18th century, or even Sheherazade herself, the story

Robert Schumann (1810–1856), like Brahms after him, had to confront the symphonic legacy left to the world by Beethoven. Schumann was very much the composer of the Romantic where ‘music should be, above all else, a means of expressing intense

François Couperin (1668–1733) was a French composer, organist, and harpsichordist from a distinguished musical family. His father, Charles, was an organist, as was his uncle Louis; both had served at the Church of Saint-Gervais in Paris. In addition to being

The combination of the Prelude and Fugue seems to be a particularly 18th-century construction. The two works should be in the same key and have different compositional rules: the Prelude as an introductory piece, sometimes of an improvisatory nature, and

In his opera Tannhäuser, Richard Wagner (1813–1883) combined two German legends, that of the German Minnesänger and poet Tannhäuser, and the story of the Wartburg Song Contest. Although the contest is the surface, the story is really about the battle

In the 1870s, Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) wrote a set of symphonic poems on classical subjects, including Phaéton, Danse macabre, La jeunesse d’Hercule, and Le Rouet d’Omphale (The Spinning Wheel of Omphale), which tell of an episode in Hercules’s life. Omphale