In between his two academic years serving as director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York, Antonin Dvorak spent the summer in Spillville,…

Back in the 1500s and 1600s, you couldn't just use your Eurailpass to hop on a train from one country in Europe to another. Yet a surprising number of the…

In 1892, Antonin Dvorak, rapidly becoming the toast of Europe, accepted the director’s post at a New York conservatory. The school – totally integrated…

A keyboard duet can be anything from two kids picking out "Chopsticks" on an old upright piano to the cathedral-filling two-organ concerti of Antonio…

Late 19th-century Paris opera-goers felt cheated if their evenings-out didn't include a ballet scene somewhere in the performance. When Giuseppe Verdi was…

Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite used to be one of those "Introduction to classical music" pieces than many first heard as children -- like Peter and the…

Two years after being kicked out of the Salzburg Cathedral – literally, "with a kick to the arse" – Mozart returned to his hometown to debut his new Mass…

They say politics makes strange bedfellows.Well sometimes music makes strange politics -- or maybe it just takes a few decades to sort itself out. The…

Felix Mendelssohn, one of music's great prodigies, wrote a dozen chamber symphonies for string orchestra beginning when he was twelve. At fourteen he…

By the turn of the 20th century, Gustav Mahler was readily acknowledged as one of the world’s great conductors, but as a composer, he didn’t find such…