By the time of his seventh book of madrigals in 1619, Monteverdi was in the middle of changing the concept of the madrigal and starting to approach the musical style that would become the most prominent in the following centuries:

Lord Byron’s 1817 poem Manfred brought out all the elements of the Gothic novel into a dramatic poem. In 1816, Byron was traveling with Mary and Percy Shelley in Switzerland with her sister Claire Clairmont. The two couples began a

Franck’s Symphonic Variations (1885) for piano and orchestra takes the piano and orchestra relationship out of the typical concerto contest of piano versus orchestra and places the two as equal partners. We’re used to the piano as a soloist, but

Outside Vienna, the finest waltz composer the world was acknowledged to be Tchaikovsky and another Russian master of this light genre was Alexander Glazunov (1865-1936). Between 1905 and 1928, he was director of the St. Petersburg Conservatory and shepherded it

In two different ballets, Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky added in a set of national ballets. In The Nutcracker (1892), part of Clara’s entertainments in the Land of Sweets at the Palace were a set of national dances depicting where sweets came

The long slow fall of the French monarchy during the French Revolution had several highlights, starting with the Storming of the Bastille. Next the French Guards mutinied, and the royal family was forcibly moved from the palace at Versailles to

Best-Known Chopin Music: Nocturnes for the Piano At age 20, Frédéric Chopin composed one of his best-known nocturnes for the piano, the iconic Chopin music. Nocturnes were brief piano works that were inspired by the night. It was Chopin who

Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884) synthesized his native Czech music with the larger Classical tradition. He’s best known today for his opera The Bartered Bride and his massive 6-part symphonic poem Má vlast. Smetana was the 11th child of a brewer who