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• Personalities
• Classical
• Classical Era
• Composer

(Kärl Fre’-drikh A’-bel) 1723–87 German composer Abel was born at Cöthen, where his father played in J. S. Bach’s group. In 1759 he travelled to London, where he eventually settled, becoming a chamber musician to King George III’s wife Charlotte. It was also in London, in 1764, that Abel, together with J. C. Bach, established ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Early Romantic
• Instrumentalist

(Fre’-drikh Koo’-lau) 1786–1832 Danish composer and pianist Kuhlau grew up in Germany, but when Napoleon invaded Hamburg in 1810 he fled to Copenhagen. He earned a living as a pianist and through various appointments (among them chamber court musician and chorus master), and to supplement his income he fulfilled the considerable demand for flute music, although not himself a flautist. ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Modern Era
• Singer

1888–1952 American bass-baritone Born in Hungary, Schorr spent his early career in central Europe. He made his name as the leading Wagner bass-baritone of the inter-war years, appearing at Bayreuth 1925–31, Covent Garden 1925–33 and the Metropolitan 1924–43. He was in particular demand as Wotan and Hans Sachs. Introduction | Modern Era | Classical Personalities | Richard Tauber ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

1888–1953, Hungarian Schorr’s rolling Wagnerian bass was the model of grandeur and his poetic sensibility invaluable to his portrayal of Hans Sachs in Die Meistersinger. After studying in America, Schorr sang small roles in Chicago before returning to Europe. His real debut was in 1912, performing Wotan in Die Walküre and his tenure with the Berlin Staatsoper allowed ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Early Romantic

(Fre’-drikh fun Flo’-to) 1812–83 German composer Flotow was a prolific composer of operas. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire (1828–30) and was influenced by the major opera composers of the day, including Rossini, Meyerbeer and Donizetti, and later by his friendships with Charles Gounod (1818–93) and Jacques Offenbach (1819–80). His early operas are in the French lyric style, but ...

• Personalities
• Early Romantic
• Opera

1813–83, German Though German-born, Friedrich von Flotow studied in Paris and became largely identified with French opera. His first operas in the French style were written for private salon performances. Alessandro Stradella (1844), his first international success, revealed his penchant for building a work around one ‘hit tune’, in this case ‘Jungfrau Maria’. After leaving Paris for Vienna ...

• Personalities
• Early Romantic
• Opera

1759–1805, German Friedrich von Schiller, the great German poet, playwright and historian, trained for the Church, the army, the law and military medicine before he finally found his niche. It happened when, at his own expense, Schiller published his revolutionary drama Die Raüber (‘The Robbers’, 1781). When the play was staged in Mannheim ...

• Opera
• Classical Era

The Enlightenment was a natural, if late, consequence of the sixteenth-century Renaissance and Reformation. Also known as the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment advanced to be recognized in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and brought with it new, controversial beliefs that upended the absolutisms on which European society had long been based. Absolute monarchy, ...

• Classical
• Early Romantic

The first half of the nineteenth century was essentially a period of insurgence in Europe, from the French Revolution in 1789 to the series of uprisings that rocked the continent around 1848. Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution was also underway, beginning in Britain, then spreading south through the rest of Europe. With these two strands of revolution came ...

• Opera
• Early Romantic

The early nineteenth century was a period of insurgence in Europe, beginning with the French Revolution in 1789 to the uprisings in 1848. The Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain before spreading south to the rest of Europe, was also making its mark. These two strands of revolution caused transformations in society: growing awareness of national identity, ...

• Opera
• High Romantic

In 1891, when the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) wrote his famous words ‘Life imitates art far more than art imitates life’, he had somehow managed to overlook the artistic realities of the late nineteenth century. By that time, after some 50 years of the High Romantic era, music and opera had brought real life on stage and ...

• Classical
• Late Romantic

The political structure of Europe changed greatly during the second half of the nineteenth century. Germany and Italy became united countries under supreme rulers. The Habsburgs’ Austrian Empire, ruled from Vienna, became fragmented into Austria-Hungary. The borders of this new confederation contained the cauldron of difficulties that eventually developed into the confrontations which culminated in World War I in ...

• Influences
• Classical
• Classical Era

The literary movement known as Sturm und Drang (‘Storm and Stress’) takes its name from a play of 1776 by Maximilian Klinger, about the American Revolution. Confined to the German-speaking lands, although it had parallels elsewhere, it contradicted (or reacted to) much current ‘enlightened’ thinking by emphasizing the emotional, the passionate, the irrational, the terrifying. ...

• Inside the Music
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

The synthesizer has become hugely influential since the 1960s, but it had many antecedents in twentieth-century electronic instruments. The theremin, invented in 1920 by the Russian Lev Theremin, consists of a box containing thermionic valves producing ethereal oscillations which were modified by moving a hand around an attached antenna. The ondes martenot was first demonstrated in 1928 by ...

• Inside the Music
• Classical
• Classical Era

It was in the late eighteenth century, as Enlightenment thinking developed, that the business of writing about music for an informed public began to flourish. There were historians, such as Padre Martini in Italy, La Borde in France, Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg in Germany and Charles Burney in England; there were lexi­cographers; and there were theorists, ...