The Paris horn player Louis François Dauprat was professor at the Conservatoire de Paris, thus having a great influence on the French school of horn playing. He wrote his compositions mostly for didac...
'The world famous tale Hansel and Gretel by The Brothers Grimm was set to music in the 1890s by German composer Engelbert Humperdinck. The children's opera is performed regularly at many opera houses....
The 'Mass in b minor' (BWV 232) by Johann Sebastian Bach is a musical setting of the complete Ordinary of the Latin Mass. The work was one of Bach's last compositions, not completed until 1749, the ye...
In 1882 Richard Strauss wrote his 'Horn Concerto No. 1' in E-flat major, Op. 11. The horn concerto has become the most frequently performed horn concerto written in the 19th Century. At the age of 18...
German composer Richard Strauss composed 'Don Juan', Op. 20, in 1888. The work is based on 'Don Juans Ende', a play derived from an unfinished 1844 retelling of the tale by poet Nikolaus Lenau after t...
Capriccio' is the final opera by German composer Richard Strauss. It is subtitled 'A Conversation Piece for Music' and received its premiere performance at the 'Nationaltheater München' on 28 October...
The somewhat wayward French composer Erik Satie was often criticized that his compositions would have no form. So he collected some of his pieces into a kind of 'best of' and put them in the shape of...
Rachmaninov composed the symphonic poem 'The Isle of the Dead' (Die Toteninsel) op. 29 in 1908 in Dresden, inspired by a black and white print of the eponymous painting by Arnold Böcklin that he has s...
'Tarantelle for Flute and Clarinet' was Camille Saint-Saëns the first concertante piece. He wrote it in 1857 for the first flute and first clarinet of the imperial academy, and it was they who premier...
Ignaz Moscheles (1794-1870) was a Bohemian composer and piano virtuoso, whose career after his early years was based initially in London, and later at Leipzig, where he succeeded his friend and someti...
Czech composer Leos Janácek (1854-1928) has been inspired by Moravian and other Slavic folk music to create an original, modern musical style and along with Dvorák and Smetana, he is considered one of...
Reinhold Glière composed the Concerto for Horn and Orchestra in 1950 for the Russian hornist Valery Polekh. Nowadays it's the best known of Glière's acclaimed works and despite being composed in the 1...
Beethoven's only opera 'Fidelio' embodies his ideals of heroism and freedom from political oppression. The opera was first produced in Vienna in 1805, under the title of 'Leonora' with the overture no...
