Yvonne Lefébure, who passed away on 23 January 1986 in Paris, was one of the premiere French pianists and teachers of the 20th century. She was a remarkably well-rounded and cultured musician with a no-nonsense approach to performing and to

Plácido Domingo is recognized as one of the best and most influential singing actors in the world of opera. He has recorded over 100 complete operas in addition to arias and duets compilations, and his crossover recordings have earned him

On 20 January 2014, Claudio Abbado died at the age of 80 after a long and severe illness in Bologna. One of the greatest conductors of his time, he led La Scala, the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics, and the Lucerne

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