AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Major Operas
• Modern Era
• Opera

Composed: 1911 (re. 1912; 1918) Premiered: 1918, Budapest Libretto by Béla Balázs, after a fairy-tale by Charles Perrault Bluebeard and Judith appear in the doorway of his castle. She has left her family and declares she will never leave him. He closes the iron door. She offers to warm the stones and let in the light. There are no ...

• Personalities
• Jazz & Blues
• Twenties

Universally acknowledged as one of the twentieth century’s emblematic composers, Edward Kennedy ‘Duke’ Ellington used his long-standing touring orchestra as a tool to create wholly unique tonal colours and a distinctive harmonic language in jazz. His career was characterized by the close and long-lasting relationships that he struck up with particular musicians and other figures from the music business, ...

• Personalities
• Contemporary Era
• Jazz & Blues

(Guitar, vocals, b. 1948) Robillard’s grasp of blues and jazz has kept him in demand since he founded Roomful of Blues in 1967. He was born in Woonsocket, Rhode Island and was influenced by Bill Doggett, T-Bone Walker and many others, absorbing the fine details of playing and arranging. He left Roomful in 1979 for a ...

• Personalities
• Country
• War Years

(Banjo, comedian, 1901–86) DeSoto, Missouri-born Benjamin Francis ‘Whitey’ Johnson was, for decades, one of country music’s most popular comedians. He appeared on the Renfro Valley Barn Dance, in Kentucky in the late 1930s and starred on an NBC network radio show called Plantation Party in the early 1940s. He also appeared frequently on the Grand ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

1899–1974 American composer Although his heartland was the chiaroscuro world of jazz, Ellington transcended its boundaries, frequently lauded as ‘America’s greatest living composer’. A fine pianist, his keyboard skills were overshadowed by his writing abilities – evident in a multitude of jazz standards – and by his arranging. With the Ellington Orchestra he created dynamic unison passages using ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Instrumentalist
• Modern Era

(Ba’-la Bar’-tok) 1881–1945 Hungarian composer and pianist Bartók’s earliest works were influenced by Johannes Brahms (1833–97), by Hungary’s famous Liszt and by Richard Strauss, then regarded as the last word in modernism. Bartók’s personal style, though, was formed by his discovery of Debussy and of Hungarian folk music. The strongly rhythmic, percussive, sharply dissonant music that ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

1881–1945, Hungarian Widely recognized as one of the twentieth century’s most important composers, Bartók was a complete original in terms of his musical language, creating a national style that merged folk melodies with the asymmetric patterns of Hungarian speech. His vocal lines, often punctuated by a heavy chordal style, are evident in Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, ...

• Opera
• Modern Era

The opera house and, more specifically, opera audiences, were among the last to be receptive to the new musical language that developed during the twentieth century. Slow, as well as reluctant to vary their traditional musical tastes, perceptions and expectations, many viewed the opera house with nostalgia; as a symbol of the establishment, holding ...

• Classical
• Late Baroque

The late Baroque era (1700–50) was a time of major political change throughout Europe, involving a shift in the balance of power between sovereign states. Across the continent it was a period of almost continuous warfare, the effects of which were later felt in other parts of the world as a result of conflicting ambitions among the various trading ...

• Classical
• Medieval Era

‘Medieval’ as a concept is very hard to define, and the period itself is just as difficult to delineate. It was a term invented by Renaissance writers who wished to make a distinction between their modernity and what had gone before. Although the onset of the Renaissance is often taken to be around the beginning of the fourteenth century, ...

• Classical
• Renaissance

‘Renaissance’ is a French word meaning ‘rebirth’. It has been used since the nineteenth century to describe the period between c. 1300 and 1600. Three hundred years is a long time for a single historical or cultural period, and the strain shows in any attempt to define the term ‘Renaissance’. The cultural phenomenon central to the Renaissance was a revival ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) is said to have written the first film score with L’assassinat du duc de Guise (‘The Assassination of the Duke of Guise’, c. 1908). Many composers in the US and Europe followed suit, although few wished to make a career in films. A famous exception was Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957), whose scores include the Academy Award-winning The ...

• Houses & Companies
• High Romantic
• Opera

King Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845–86), a homosexual and a strange, obsessive character, came from a royal family, the Wittelsbachs, which had a strong streak of madness in it. Ludwig virtually fell in love with Wagner and his music, calling the composer his ‘one true friend whom I shall love until death.... If only, ...

• Influences
• Classical
• Medieval Era

Winchester Troper: one of the earliest sources of polyphony, an English manuscript dating from the early eleventh century and originally used in Winchester; now in Cambridge. Montpellier Codex: an important source of motets, compiled during the thirteenth century; now in the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire, Montpellier. Roman de Fauvel: a satirical poem about the church written in the early fourteenth ...

• Influences
• Classical
• Late Baroque

By the eighteenth century many musicians had become accustomed to travelling far from their native cities or countries in search of employment, or in response to invitations from rulers of different states. In the late-Baroque period this type of wandering existence had become a standard feature of musical life in Europe, involving singers, instrumentalists and composers, in ...