“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 […]

The famous organist Reincken heard Bach play. Bach improvised for half an hour on the hymn “By the Waters of Babylon”.  Reincken said: “I thought such art was dead, but I see it still lives in you.” Siblin, Eric (2009) The Cello Suites.  Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, p. 58.

Sondheim is a lover of games, and collects antique ones (many were destroyed in a fire that swept through the lower floors of the house in 1995). He has a passion for murder mysteries, puzzles (he once spent 18 months devising cryptic crosswords for New York magazine), word play and anagrams. His own name, he […]

Brahms was invited to the family of one of his students, Fräulein von Meyensbug, in Detmol : The Meysenbug ladies proved very prim and conventional. Brahms was ill at ease. He was so afraid of shocking his aristocratic hostesses that he hardly knew what to say or how to behave. Their young nephew Carl, however, […]

Puccini was a very sociable man, quote often putting this before his composing.  Even when he was working hard, he maintained an active social life: With the opening of the 1894-1895 season not far way, Puccini began steady work on La Bohème in Torre.  But he also needed a place to relax, so his “second […]

“The creative urge is the demon that will not accept anything second rate.” —Agnes de Mille (1905-1993), American dancer and choreographer. Gardner, Kara Anne. Agnes de Mille: Telling Stories in Broadway Dance. United States, Oxford University Press, 2016.

The interpreter is really an executant, carrying out the composer’s intentions to the letter. He doesn’t add anything that isn’t already in the work. If he is talented, he allows us to glimpse the truth of the work that is in itself a thing of genius and that is reflected in him. He shouldn’t dominate […]

Now the nature of man consists in this, that his will strives, is satisfied and strives anew, and so on for ever. Indeed, his happiness and well-being consist simply in the quick transition from wish to satisfaction, and from satisfaction to a new wish. For the absence of satisfaction is suffering, the empty longing for […]

Stokowski’s ability to inspire musicians was sometimes balanced by the ability to turn them off.  Saidenberg altered me to a remarkable violinist who quit the Philadelphia Orchestra and went on to become America’s greatest authority on constitutional law.  “Raoul Berger was a wonderful violinist in the Philadelphia Orchestra.  One day at rehearsal, Stoki stopped the […]

“It takes less time to do a thing right than to explain why you did it wrong.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, poet