Franz Schubert’s young life was spent at the imperial-royal municipal seminary as a choir boy, and thought he’d been sent to prison – the day was a cycle of obligatory mass attendance, hours of daily prayer, weekly confession, all in

The advent of the home piano changed music immeasurably. Now it was possible to have music available when you wanted it and something that you’d heard at a concert could be yours at home. It wasn’t until the advent of

In 1909, in the papers of the Academic Concert of the University of Jena, the music director found complete parts for a Symphony in C. Written on the 2nd violin part was ‘par Louis van Beethoven’ and, on the cello

César Franck (1822-1890) came to Paris in 1835 where he studied privately. When he became a teacher in Paris at the Conservatoire, he taught the students who would go on to define French music at the turn of the century:

We are most familiar with Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826) from his opera Der Freischütz. Weber’s connections with the theatre began in childhood where he grew up in his father’s traveling theatre. His father, uncle to Mozart’s wife Constanze Weber,

When one door closes, another opens, and so it was for Rameau. Shortly after his opera Dardanus was given its premiere at the Opèra, Rameau quarrelled with the management of the theatre and so from 1740 to 1744, he wrote

In his catalogue, Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) only has two concert overtures and they were both written the same year: 1880. The first is the well-known Academic Festival Overture, written as a thank-you following the awarding of an honorary degree by

In 1777, the German poet Johann von Goethe was traveling in the Harz mountains in the winter. He ascended the Brocken, the highest peak in the Harz, arriving at midday, and gazed out on a white world, with the landscape