Transfigured Night

During his years of permanent exile in America, Arnold Schoenberg (1874 – 1951) once remarked “There is nothing I long for more intensely than to be taken for a better sort of Tchaikovsky. People should know my tunes and whistle them”.

Philip Glass and La Boulangerie

In his recently published memoirs, Words Without Music (2015), the American minimalist composer Philip Glass tells the story of a lesson in musical counterpoint he had one afternoon with the formidable Nadia Boulanger.  

A Bohemian in New York

Antonín  Dvořák (1841 – 1904) was a genial, unassuming man for whom life was “a very wonderful, uncomplicated thing”. Arriving in New York in 1892, his patron handed him over to the music critic James Huneker for the day’s excursion. This started innocently enough with Mass at a Bohemian church, but it soon degenerated into…