Franz Liszt’s flamboyant personality and colorful pianistic mannerisms frequently detract from the fact that he was a highly gifted composer. What’s more, he was instrumental in establishing the intellectual foundations for a musical form that derives its movement and its

The premiere of Gioachino Rossini’s opera buffa The Barber of Seville on 20 February 1816 at the Teatro Argentina in Rome was a verifiable disaster! It probably had very little to do with how the music was performed that evening.

For Johannes Brahms, the composition and performance of the German Requiem was a highly personal undertaking. Brahms had been highly distressed by the breakup of his parents. Tension over money, exacerbated by the great difference in age—his mother was 17

When the original two-act version of Madama Butterfly premiered in Milan on 17 February 1904, the audience was not impressed. Puccini had struggled to complete the score, and there simply wasn’t enough time for proper rehearsals. Despite notable singers Rosina

The exceptional Polish violinist Bronisław Huberman never tired of asking Erich Korngold for a violin concerto. Huberman had been an old family friend from their days in Vienna, but having been forced into exile to Southern California, Korngold was determined

When Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky‘s Symphony No. 4 in F minor premiered at a Russian Musical Society concert in Moscow on 10 February 1878, it represented a veritable breakthrough in terms of emotional depth and complexity. This symphonic hybrid, which subsequently

Béla Bartók did not see the premiere of his 3rd Piano Concerto. After completing the score—he wrote the Hungarian words “the end” after the last measures of this concerto—Bartók was transferred to a West Side hospital where he died four

Hector Berlioz published his famous handbook on the art of orchestration, his Traîté d’instrumentation, in January 1844. It remains, even today, a landmark in the history of the symphony orchestra. It is a concise and brilliant historical document that details