Mitrofan Petrovich Belaieff (1839-1904) was a music publisher in Imperial Russia but made his money in the wood industry. Despite inheriting his father’s business and being successful in it for some 30 years, his heart was really with music. He

In Germany, in the early years of the 20th century, with rapid industrialization and growing urban populations, we see a return to, and a longing for, the simpler past of rural life, in opposition to the fast-paced life of the

In my last article, ‘Visions of Arcadia in Music, Art and Literature I’, I focused on the Arcadian theme in the classical period. Today I will concentrate on its continuation in the 19th century — with the music of Jacques

In my last article ‘Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Frederick the Great and the Architecture of the Rococo’ I focused on the re-emergence of pastoral themes in music and the arts. Members of the aristocracy, dressed as shepherdesses and shepherds appeared

C.P.E. Bach (1714-1788), second surviving son of Johann Sebastian Bach and Maria Barbara Bach, was the true successor to his father’s legacy. Considered by his contemporaries as one of the most important composers and harpsichordists of their time, his enormous

In last month’s article I focused on the relationships between musicians, artists and writers in 19th century Russia, which foreshadowed the even more drastic changes of the beginning of the 20th century. Not only would the artists and painters, associated

Wilhelm Furtwängler had asked Paul Hindemith to write an orchestral work for the Berlin Philharmonic’s 1933/34 season – just at the moment when Hindemith had decided to write an opera based on the famous Isenheimer Altar (now in the Unterlinden

The current exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. “Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, 1909-1929: When Art Danced with Music” brings into focus one of the most productive eras in the arts, in which poetry, art, theater,