The same year composer Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) met dramatist W.S. Gilbert (1836-1911), he wrote his Overture di Ballo, which, as one scholar suggested, might be better titled A Dance Overture. Before his famous collaboration with Gilbert, Sullivan was an up-and-coming

The Austrian composer Hugo Wolf (1860-1903) was a superb song composer, bringing the late Romantic lied into the modern age and, with it, imbuing the lied with a new conciseness that was more a hallmark of Schoenberg’s Second Viennese School.

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) made his piano recital debut at age 10, audaciously telling the audience that he would perform any one of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas as an encore. Liszt considered him as the greatest organist on earth. Over some

When we think of the pairing of ‘Prelude and Fugue’ our mind first casts itself back to the early 18th century and Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. What if it’s 200 years later? It’s the Post-Romantic early 20th century and you can’t

There is something so undeniably cheerful about the first movement of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4. It just sweeps you up and makes you look around and admire the glory and beauty of Italy. For Germans from the cold north, and,

Alexander Borodin (1833-1887) followed Balakirev and became a member of The Five, that group of up- and-coming young composers who set out to create a true Russian music. Holding down a day job as professor of chemistry, he was a

Polish-born composer and virtuoso violist Henryk Wieniawski (1835-1880) made his name early as a violinist and was an exceptional student at the Paris Conservatoire for two reasons. The first is that he wasn’t French and the second was that he

The Russian composer Mily Balakirev (1837-1910) had a fundamental place in changing Russian music from being too emulative of German music and making a strong case for it being Russian. Working first through the idea of nationalism, he instilled in