“It’s good! Awfully emotional! Too emotional, but I love it…” Edward Elgar on his own Violin Concerto Jeremy Pound, “First Violin”, BBC Music Magazine, October 2010, p. 36.

You’re travelling to another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound… but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land, whose boundaries are only that of the imagination… you’re entering… the Twilight Zone… – Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone

When Mozart was in Naples, he so impressed his audience that they suspected “musical sorcery”. They ordered him to play without wearing his ring, the apparent source of his “magic”. Source: Marek, George (1969) Beethoven: Biography of a Genius. London: William Kimber, p.20.

Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge, for it requires from its disciples, composers and performers alike, not only talent and enthusiasm, but also that knowledge and perception which are the result of protracted study and reflection. Hector Berlioz, A Travers Chants. Cited in I. Lipsius, Thoughts of Great Musicians, London, Augener, […]

Tchaikovsky disliked teaching at the best of times, but he particularly didn’t enjoy teaching female students, most of whom, in this period of history, were of an amateur status: Although it is a dreary business to have been forced to explain to my young men’s classes for eleven consecutive years what a triad consists of, […]

Title: Prayer of Thanksgiving to the Trinity Text: St. Catherine’s Dialogue on Divine Providence Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: Piano (easy)     Related products:     – Prayer of Thanksgiving to the Trinity

Andrew Lloyd Webber originally composed the melody that is now known as “Memory” from Cats for a miniature opera about Puccini and his wife. The opera was never performed, but the melody was brought out of retirement as possible song for Juan Peron in Webber’s Evita.  That show was certainly performed but the melody in […]

Rachmaninoff had a little help with a fugue exam at the Moscow Conservatory in 1891: By mistake the examinations of Rachmaninoff in both piano and fugue were scheduled for the same day and hour, so his fugue examination was transferred to the following day, when he was to be examined alone, the rest of the […]

An account of Beethoven being lost in his creative world: Thayer tells us of a conversation he had with a Professor Blasius Höfel, a teacher of fine arts at Weiner Neustadt, a little town near Vienna.  one evening, Höfel was in a tavern with some of his colleagues, the Commissioner of Police being a member […]

“There was a time, not so long ago, that Klaus Heymann was accused of trying to destroy the classical music industry. That was around the same time that the world realized that Naxos, Heymann’s budget-record label, was not just another series of CDs in the bargain bin. At first, nobody really knew what to make […]