George Friederic Handel – Majesty and Drama
It is April 1742 in Dublin. A crowd presses into the Music Hall on Fishamble Street, their anticipation electric. The hall is packed beyond capacity—ladies are asked not to wear hoops in their skirts,…
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Classical Music Giants
Composers and musical innovators whose work reshaped the classical tradition.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – The Prodigy of Grace
It is December 5th, 1791, in Vienna. A young man lies in bed, fevered, his body wasted from illness. Outside, the city is cold, silent, waiting. Inside, he clutches the unfinished score of a…
Franz Schubert – The Lyric Voice
The room is dim, the air heavy with pipe smoke, and a group of young men sit crowded around a piano in a modest Viennese apartment. Bottles are on the table, laughter rises, verses…
Robert Schumann – The Romantic Imagination
The year is 1830, and a young man sits at his piano in Leipzig, his hands restless, his mind ablaze. Around him lie notebooks filled with poems, essays, fragments of stories. He is as…
Frédéric Chopin – Poet of the Piano
The room is small, lit by candlelight, the air filled with perfume and whispers. In the corner stands a piano, polished, its lid raised, its keys waiting. A young man, slight of build, pale,…
Franz Liszt – The Virtuoso Showman
The stage is lit, the hall crowded, the air electric. A tall man with flowing hair strides to the piano, his presence alone sending murmurs through the audience. He sits, and with a flourish…
Arnold Schoenberg – The Liberator of Dissonance
On a September evening in 1940, in Los Angeles, a gathering of émigré musicians and intellectuals sat in a modest house. Outside, the palms swayed in the Pacific breeze; inside, a frail man with…
Dmitri Shostakovich – Witness of an Era
In the autumn of 1937, in Moscow, an orchestra sat poised to begin a new symphony. The composer, a thin, bespectacled man with nervous eyes, had been living under the shadow of fear for…
Jean Sibelius – The Architect of Northern Light
The hall is dark enough that you can hear the architecture. It is winter outside, that kind of northern winter that does not so much snow as restrain, and inside the orchestra waits with…
Richard Strauss – The Architect of Operatic Shock and Grace
Richard Strauss was born in 1864 in Munich, a city whose opera house was both a workplace and a pulpit for his father, Franz, principal horn and uncompromising guardian of classical virtues. Franz Strauss…