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Every composer since Beethoven has composed in the shadow of Beethoven. And no one ever felt Beethoven’s enormous and enduring presence more keenly than…

We tend to be reluctant these days to say that one piece of music is better than another or that one composer is better than another. Often this…

You could write a book about the life of the German composer Georg Philipp Telemann– and as it turns out, Telemann himself wrote three – three separate…

During the time of Haydn and Mozart, the third movement of a four-movement piece such as a symphony or string quartet was invariably a stylized dance…

In The Barber of Seville and his many other operas, Gioacchino Rossini gave singers plenty of opportunities to show off their talents. But in a letter he…

A song cycle is a set of songs whose texts—often by a single poet—are linked by a common subject, mood, or story. Though the songs of the cycle are all…

Mozart, they say, could compose music while he was playing billiards. Rossini wrote that he had once composed an overture while standing in the water…

A colleague and I were listening to a Bach violin concerto on the radio some years back. After a while my colleague said, “You know, there are a thousand…

It’s often - not always, but often - interesting to read what composers have written about composing—especially if they’re good writers. Aaron Copland was…

“C” is for Charleston Library Society. The Charleston Library Society is the third-oldest institutional library in the United States. Established as a…