Igor Stravinsky based his ballet The Firebird on a Russian folk tale about an evil demon named Kashchei, who has thirteen princesses under his spell. A prince who wanders into […]
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Vivaldi is not the only composer who wrote music about the seasons, or about spring. Many other composers wrote springtime music.
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Fanny Mendelssohn, Felix Mendelssohn’s older sister, was a talented pianist and composer. So was Clara Schumann, wife of composer Robert Schumann. Also featured: music of Elizabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre, […]
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Prokofiev was not the only classical composer to paint a musical portrait of a sleigh ride on a snowy day. Listen as we take you through several other examples of […]
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Guiseppe Verdi — „Joe Green,“ in Italian — was a great opera composer and Italian patriot. His music became part of the Italian fight for independence and unity.
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Originally, a musical fantasy was a piece that instrumentalists made up as they went along. Eventually, fantasies evolved into pieces that composers built out of various melodies they liked — […]
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Russian composer Igor Stravinsky had a big hit with his first ballet, The Firebird. Stravinksy kept on writing ballets, followed by operas, and orchestral and choral music.
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Brahms, Bach, and Beethoven are known as the „Three B’s“ of classical music. Brahms always knew that he wanted to be a composer — by the time he was six, […]
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Clara Wieck was born in 1819 in the German city of Leipzig. Her father, Friedrich Wieck, was a piano teacher who decided even before his daughter was born that she […]
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After Dmitri Kabalevsky wrote music for a play called The Inventor and the Comedians, he put selections from that music into a concert suite called The Comedians. Listen to what’s […]
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