I recently came across a discussion that took place in the pages of the literary criticism magazine The Explicator in 1944. Its subject was the poem “When the lamp is shattered” by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Most of the experts characterized…
“Either I’m wrong, or The Queen of Spades is really a masterpiece,” Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky remarked in a letter to Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich. Unfortunately, I have no idea what he answered the composer. But if I were in his…
When somebody asks me, “What should I start with if I want to try listening to opera?” I usually answer, “Listen to Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.” It is incredibly beautiful, relatively short, and surprisingly understandable. We can easily understand Dido…
Franz Schubert wasn’t blessed with happy love. The composer twice experienced deep affection for women who were above him in social status. One of them returned his feelings, yet they couldn’t marry; another treated him as a friendly acquaintance. Schubert’s…
What do we do when the first act of an opera ends, the curtain falls, and the entr’acte begins? We rush off to the buffet, of course. Relaxation with a glass of good sparkling wine – that’s what entr’actes are…
The time machine, which science fiction authors often dream about, already exists. This is music. It can transport us to the very distant past, up to the beginning of AD: the oldest surviving example of musical symbols is dated to…