Episodes on Mahler, Puccini, Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, and Richard Strauss examine the expanded orchestra, opera, nationalism, and late-Romantic intensity.
The city of Vienna in the late nineteenth century was alive with contradictions: waltzes spun in glittering ballrooms, yet political unrest simmered in streets; scholars debated philosophy, while painters broke with tradition. Into this…
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 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…
The hall is full but strangely quiet, the kind of hush that happens when an audience senses a performance will not be “played” at them so much as drawn out of the room like…
It is a crisp winter night in Milan in 1896. The lights are low, the orchestra breathes, and on stage four young men shiver in their attic apartment. They burn manuscripts to keep warm,…
On a spring day in May of 1911, a funeral procession wound its way through the streets of Vienna. Thousands lined the path, musicians, admirers, ordinary citizens, all come to bid farewell to Gustav…
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