On today’s date in 1853, expectations both on stage and off must have been pretty high when a 20-year-old German pianist and composer named Johannes Brahms made his public debut in Leipzig. Just two months earlier, the older composer Robert Schumann had published a glowing prediction that young...Episode details...
In the spring and summer of 1921, the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev was living the good life in a quiet village on the coast of Brittany. He wrote: “I get up at 8:30, put on a collarless shirt, white pants, and sandals. After drinking hot chocolate, I look to see if the garden is still where...Episode details...
Most composers, when they write a Violin Concerto, usually consult with a good violinist during the process—unless, that is, they play violin themselves. That was the case with the Swiss-born American composer and violinist Ernest Bloch, who completed his big violin concerto in 1938.
Bloch was...Episode details...
On today’s date in 1936, just one day after the premiere of his Symphony No. 1, the young American composer Samuel Barber attended the first performance of his String Quartet No. 1. Both premieres took place in Rome, where Barber was enjoying the benefits of the Prix de Rome, which included a...Episode details...
In 1935, when he was 25 years old, the American composer Samuel Barber was selected as “the most talented and deserving student of music in America” and awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome. This meant that Barber could study at the American Academy in Rome for two years, with free lodgings, a...Episode details...
On today’s date in 2001, the San Francisco Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas gave the first performance of a new work by the American composer Henry Brant. The new piece was entitled “Ice Field,” and it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2002, the year Brant turned 89.
The Pulitzer...Episode details...
The Great Depression put many Americans out of work, and in 1935 the Roosevelt administration created the Works Progress Administration, putting some of the unemployed to work on various public projects. A Federal Music Project was also created for unemployed musicians, and thirty-four new...Episode details...
The great American poet Emily Dickinson was born on today’s date in 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she lived until her death in 1886. The seemingly confined and rather mundane chronicle of her life stands in stark contrast to the breathtaking scope of her imagination, as expressed in the...Episode details...
The 19th century Russian composer Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka ranks as the founder of a distinctive national style of Russian classical music, and as the composer of the first great Russian opera, which premiered in St. Petersburg on today’s date in 1836.
That opera tells the story of Ivan...Episode details...
