Scores for Orchestra

This wonderful, short choral masterpiece has a confusing heritage. Spuriously attributed in 1910 to Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-1736), the six-movement MAGNIFICAT was actually composed by France...

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) wrote his Oratorio de Noël in a matter of weeks, completing the work ten days before it premiered on Christmas in 1858 in Paris. Written and structured in a style that...

While it scandalized Parisian audiences at its premiere by the Opéra-Comique in Paris on March 3rd, 1875, Georges Bizet's (1838-1875) Carmen became, a mere decade later, one of the most popular and fr...

Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848) composed his popular two-act opera buffa L'elisir d'amore hastily over six weeks in 1832 for a premiere that took place on May 12 of that year at the Teatro della Canobbi...

Don Pasquale, regarded as one of the crowning gems of comic opera, had its first performance on January 3, 1843 by the Theatre-Italien at the Salle Ventadour in Paris. Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848) co...

Umberto Giordano (1867-1948) wrote the four-act verismo opera Andrea Chénier in 1896, and it remains his best-known work. It premiered on March 28, 1896, at La Scala in Milan. Loosely based on the lif...

WERTHER, an opera in four acts by Jules Massenet (1842-1912), found its inspiration in a novel by Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, which in turn based its story on the actual suicide of a young m...

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) wrote music for William Shakespeare's play A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM on two separate occasions. He first wrote the concert overture in E Major, Op. 21 in 1826 at the age...

A dream inspired Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884-1920) to compose The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Kahn, based on the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The composer originally wrote it for piano in 1912. Fou...

LA BOHÈME, one of the most beloved and commercially-successful operas, is based on the 1851 novel Scenes of Bohemian Life by Henri Murger. With a libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, Giacomo...

The Barber of Seville (Il barbiere di Siviglia) was written by Giocchino Rossini (1792-1868) in 1816. The two-act comic opera is considered one of the greatest opera buffas ever written, and it remain...

Alexander Borodin's (1833-1887) Symphony No. 3 in A minor was written between 1886 and 1887. However, it remained unfinished at the time of his death, with only a sketch of the first movement and a co...

Probably composed in the early months of 1877, the VALSE SCHERZO, OP. 34, occupies an important position in the oeuvre of Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) as it prepared him to begin work on the...

Because he had formerly won the Prix de Rome prize in composition, George Bizet (1838-1875) had the opportunity to write his opera LES PECHEURS DE PERLES (THE PEARL FISHERS) on commission. With a libr...

Because he had formerly won the Prix de Rome prize in composition, George Bizet (1838-1875) had the opportunity to write his opera Les pecheurs de perles (The Pearl Fishers) on commission. With a libr...

Richard Strauss (1864-1949) wrote Four Lieder (Four Songs), Op. 27 for voice and piano originally in 1894, and they are among his greatest songs, when taken as a set. While the text came from a trio o...

Based on the 1832 play LE ROI S'AMUSE by Victor Hugo, Guiseppe Verdi's (1812-1901) RIGOLETTO was the composer's sixteenth entry into the genre and is widely considered one of the first operatic master...

In October 1880, as he was completing his sixth symphony, Antonín Dvorák (1841-1904) wrote to his publisher Fritz Simrock that he wanted to complete a set of duets for piano in the next month. On Janu...

Symphony No. 16 in C Major, K. 128 was composed when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) was 16 years old. It was the first of three written in May 1772 while he stayed in Salzburg. The first movement...

Written between 1879 and 1881, Anton Bruckner's (1824-1896) Symphony No. 6 was considered his "boldest symphony" by the composer, though many critics of the time would have certainly disagreed. It is...

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) completed his first published work for orchestra, RAPSODIE ESPAGNOLE, between 1907 and 1908, dedicating the work to the Belgian violinist Charles de Bériot. The Orchestre des...

Originally written for piano four hands in 1879, Hungarian Dances (WoO 1), a set of 21 lively dance tunes mostly based on Hungarian themes, are among Johannes Brahms' (1833-1897) most popular works to...

LES CONTES D'HOFFMANN (THE TALES OF HOFFMANN) was written betweem 1876 and 1880 and is the final work composed by Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880), who died four months before the premiere, a fear that O...

The creation of the opera Il Trovatore by Guiseppe Verdi (1813-1901) was complicated by a variety of circumstances. The original play by Garcia Gutierrez needed simplifying, and the traditional notion...

Finished in 1848 and premiered in 1950 in Weimar, Germany, Richard Wagner's (1813-1883) LOHENGRIN tells a story of a tragic medieval German romance in the Knight of the Swan tradition. Elsa, a princes...