Some curious answers for the Society of Arts published in the Musical Times (English Journal), July 1888: The Examiner’s report on the papers worked by the candidates in the recent Theoretical Examinations of the Society of Arts shows some very curious facts. … Mistakes in spelling have not been accredited with loss to to the […]

“Great intellects are skeptical.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Antichrist, 54.  Digitally archived at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19322/19322-h/19322-h.htm, accessed 12 September 2021

Conductor James Levine on Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin: Eugene Onegin is very special, an incredibly successful piece; there is nothing quite like it. The character of Tatyana is so extraordinary. Tchaikovsky absorbed certain things from Pushkin’s original poem, and then composed his own opera, which of course angered some other great Russian artists, like Stanislavsky […]

After Robert Schumann was admitted to a mental assuming in 1854, Johannes Brahms stayed with Robert’s wife, Clara Schumann to support herself and her eight children. Although Robert’s sad condition was always present in the minds of those who loved him, there was occasional happy times at the Schumann’s home in Düsseldorf.   On the […]

An artist groping his way forward can open a secret door and never understand that this door hid an entire world. So it is that, if a man who passes for the father of a school, because he determined it, one day shrugs his shoulders and renounces it, that by no means discredits the school. […]

“To accomplish great things we must first dream, then visualize, then plan… believe… act!” – Alfred Montapert, Author Cited at: QuotationsBook

“I was born with eyes closed listening to my heartbeat from my mother’s womb… There, without knowing it, I discovered that I would be born and would die for music…” – Alicastro Source: Peer Music.‘

The composer Karol Szymanowski was born into a landowning class family.  Even, later in life, when short for money, he always retained the mindset of this class: At one time in Vienna, Szymanowski discovered that he did not have enough money to travel to Cracow, so some friends of him lent him the required sum. […]

Stewart Warkov, assistant manager of the Symphony of The Air in 1961 described Stokowski playing Bach on the organ: Stokowski played Bach on the organ for me, each time one of the great pieces he had arranged. The sound, the phrasing, and the registration, the ritards and the accelerandos, gave me the impression of hearing […]

“One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.” Oscar Wilde, Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young