The compelling drama of Leonore Overture No. 3 has earned it a life of its own in the concert hall.
Read MoreJames Agee’s essay is a dreamy, conversational, almost improvisatory piece of prose reflecting on summers spent with his family at their home in Tennessee.
Read MoreMozart’s 31st symphony was a colorful three-movement work tailored for Parisian audiences.
Read MoreFelix Mendelssohn wrote a letter to his mother catching her up on some recent news:
Read MoreYou want to know how it went with my overture for Ruy Blas? Funny story...
Gone are the ponderous sonorities and heavy textures so prominent in Vaughan Williams’ earlier music. In their place, we find a work of majestic power and shimmering beauty.
Read MoreThe score for Pulcinella was something new— not an original composition, but more than just an arrangement.
Read MoreThe “Dance of the Hours” was intended to depict neither dancing hippos nor desperate letters from summer camp.
Read MoreAs difficult as it may be to believe, The Firebird was Igor Stravinsky’s first large-scale work for orchestra.
Read MoreMozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major stands out as one of the composer’s most intimate and expressive works.
Read MoreBeethoven was unmatched in the musical portrayal of complex heroic characters.
Read MoreTheir songs and stories have become such an integral part of our culture that it is easy to forget how revolutionary the team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II were.
Read More“I was anxious to write a work that would immediately be recognized as American in character,” Copland later recalled. Music for the Theatre was a five-movement suite exploring several different moods while trying very consciously to create a new national sound.
Read MoreThe comic plots and infectious melodies of operetta were a natural fit for Johann Strauss, Jr., whose polkas and waltzes had been delighting Viennese audiences for years.
Read MoreWe’re all familiar with the ending of Shakespeare’s most famous play: Romeo, discovering the seemingly lifeless body of his bride, drinks a lethal poison. Juliet, awakening from her faked death, finds him and, heartbroken, stabs herself with his dagger. This wasn’t how Sergei Prokofiev thought it should end.
Read MoreHis two piano concerti— opus 21 in F minor and opus 11 in E minor— were the only pieces Chopin ever composed for orchestra.
Read MoreIn his review of the premiere, Charles Kjerulf wrote that the symphony “seems to presage a coming storm of genius.”
Read MoreIn the 86 years of his life, this law school dropout may have written more music than any other composer in history.
Read MoreOn Wednesday, July 17, 1717, the most impressive public event in recent memory was produced along the River Thames. King George I and members of his court boarded a lavishly-decorated barge. Over fifty musicians were stationed on another nearby barge under the leadership of George Frideric Handel.
Read MoreFew scenes in opera present the conflict between love and duty quite so touchingly as the finale of Die Walküre.
Read MoreIt was with the 24-year-old Richard Strauss’ Don Juan that the tone poem truly came into its own.
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