When Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn put on Shakespeare’s comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream to entertain their family, the two of them played all the characters! Mendelssohn's music for A Midsummer […]
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Pizzicato is the Italian word for „plucked“ — it tells string players how to play their instruments at a given spot in the music. A lot of musical „traffic signals“ […]
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The Hungarian Dances by Johannes Brahms were never really intended for dancing. But that doesn’t mean that people in Hungary don't dance! Richard Graber, the director of a Hungarian dance […]
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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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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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Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov spent years as a professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Many of his students became famous composers themselves: Anatol Liadov, Alexander Glazunov, and Igor Stravinsky. A lot of […]
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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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„Rhapsody“ is an ancient word that means „songs stitched together“. The Greeks used to write long poems in praise of their heroes, and then take bits and pieces of those […]
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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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The polonaise is a dance that was fashionable in the Polish court. Since Polish nobility used to like to speak French, the name „polonaise“ is French. Eventually, the polonaise caught […]
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