When one door closes, another opens, and so it was for Rameau. Shortly after his opera Dardanus was given its premiere at the Opèra, Rameau quarrelled with the management of the theatre and so from 1740 to 1744, he wrote

In his catalogue, Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) only has two concert overtures and they were both written the same year: 1880. The first is the well-known Academic Festival Overture, written as a thank-you following the awarding of an honorary degree by

In 1777, the German poet Johann von Goethe was traveling in the Harz mountains in the winter. He ascended the Brocken, the highest peak in the Harz, arriving at midday, and gazed out on a white world, with the landscape

As happened with many composers in the 19th century, just as they set off to be composers, their fathers intercede and off they went to commercial college, or law school, or medical school. Such was the case of Emmanuel Chabrier

Lord Byron’s narrative poem from 1819, Mazeppa, was one of the great influential pieces of Romantic writing. Plays, musical pieces, operas, novels, even circus performances were based on the work. The poem tells the legend of Ivan Mazepa (1639-1709). Mazepa

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) didn’t come from money and spent the summers of his youth playing the piano to entertain guests at summer inns outside Hamburg. He was promoted by Schumann in his role as editor of the Neue Zeitschreift für

When fathers have plans and their daughters have other plans, it made for any number of comic operas and Cimarosa’s The Secret Marriage is one of them. Geronimo has two daughters, Elisetta and her younger sister Carolina. He wants a

In the Baroque era, the Concerto grosso, the big concerto, was the workhorse genre. Unlike a regular concerto where one soloist contrasted with the orchestra, in a concerto grosso a small group of soloists, known as the concertino alternates with