On 19 January 1873, the French cellist, viola da gamba player and instrument maker Auguste Tolbecque premiered Camille Saint-Saëns’ Cello Concerto No. 1 in A minor, Op. 33, a work specifically composed for him. Tolbecque was a close personal friend,

On New Year’s Day 1957, Arturo Toscanini suffered a stroke. Unable to recover, he passed away on 16 January at the age of 89 at his home in the Riverdale section of the Bronx in New York City. His body

On 25 May 1888, Ivan Vsevolozhsky, the Director of the Imperial Theatres in St. Petersburg, approached Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893). “I am planning to write a libretto on “La Belle au Bois Dormant” after Perrault’s fairy tale,” he writes. “I

Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) saw Victorien Sardou’s play La Tosca in Florence in 1895 with Sarah Bernhardt in the leading role. He immediately envisioned an opera without excessive proportions or a decorative spectacle, nor one that called for a superabundance of

Robert Schumann (1810-1856) always envisioned a national German opera that presented a complete union of text and music with a plot based upon a supernatural and mythical German legend. As he confessed to a friend in 1842, “Do you know

Happy Birthday Mischa Maisky, born on 10 January 1948 in Riga, Latvia. Maisky has the distinction of being the only cellist in the world to have studied with both Mstislav Rostropovich and Gregor Piatigorsky. The legendary Rostropovich praised Maisky as

On 8 January 2012, the legendary pianist Alexis Weissenberg died in Lugano, Switzerland. Weissenberg possessed otherworldly technical prowess, but was taken to task for his unsentimental and cold performances. Sitting stoically at the keyboard, he barely raised an eyebrow, cracked

Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) was one of the most original and sincere voices of the 20th century. His music and personality mirror the often-conflicting nature of humanity. Simultaneously earthy and refined, a promiscuous homosexual who fathered a daughter late in his