News, Announcements & Ideas

Get inspired and learn about classical music, famous composers and more.


Famous Composers: Frederic Chopin

Frederic Chopin was born at the village of Zelazowa Wola, near Warsaw; whether the date was 1809 (as some authorities maintain) or 1810 (officially accepted) matters little. What does matter is that his father, although bred in Lorraine (which had cl…

Read More →

Famous Composers: Gioacchino Rossini

Gioacchino Rossini was born on 29th February 1792. One doubts whether his parents deliberately planned that their first and only child should be a leap-year baby and therefore able to celebrate his birthday only once in every four years - or, indeed,…

Read More →

Famous Composers: Ludwig van Beethoven

When I was a small boy the master who had to correct my fortnightly ‘essays’ used to insist that they should stress only the best features of the subject under discussion, skirt round any defects and avoid deleterious comparisons. But I think I w…

Read More →

Famous Composers: Joseph Haydn

JOSEPH HAYDN was born on 31st March, 1732 at the village of Rohrau, thirty miles east of Vienna on the verge of that low-lying region round the Neusiedlersee (Ferto Tava) which has always been a bone of political contention between Austria and Hungar…

Read More →

Famous Composers: Antonin Dvořák

Observant tourists with a bent for sociology may have noticed that in many continental countries the village pub is often combined with a retail shop of some sort: in Italy one finds perhaps an osteria/alimentari, in central Europe more likely a Gast…

Read More →

Famous Composers: Felix Mendelssohn

Almost alone among famous composers Felix Mendelssohn underwent no struggle to achieve fame or fortune. Born in 1809 in the outskirts of Hamburg and brought up in Berlin, he was the son of Abraham Mendelssohn, a wealthy banker who was better placed t…

Read More →

Famous Composers: Camille Saint-Saëns

Chronologically speaking CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS (1835-1921) was a ‘bridge figure’: he began to compose music during the lifetime of Luigi Cherubini - who was only five years younger than Mozart - and was still hard at it after the death of Claude D…

Read More →

Famous Composers: Antonio Vivaldi

During the late seventeenth century and the early eighteenth Italy was not only the land of opera but also the land of the violin, an instrument whose potentialities were developed to a hitherto undreamt-of degree by such exponents as Corelli (whose …

Read More →