Know Your Composer
His seven-opera cycle, “Licht,” shows that he was not only a master of far-out spectacle but also a composer of impeccable craft. In 1991, Karlheinz Stockhausen, the mystical showman of the musical avant-garde, was commissioned to write a string quartet for the Salzburg Festival. Being Stockhausen, he offered up the
Know Your Composer
He was falsely cast as Mozart’s murderer and music’s sorest loser. Now he’s getting a fresh hearing. On a chilly, wet day in late November, I visited the Central Cemetery, in Vienna, where several of the most familiar figures in musical history lie buried. In a musicians’
Meet the Maestro
There has long been a nimbus of greatness and moral quandary around Wilhelm Furtwängler, but listening to his wartime work in chronological order is a demythologizing experience. The German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler has long held an exalted place among practitioners of the enigmatic art of waving one’s arms in
Know Your Composer
How a reclusive Frenchman created some of the most radical, beautiful music of the modern era. Claude Debussy died a century ago, but his music has not grown old. Bound only lightly to the past, it floats in time. As it coalesces, bar by bar, it appears to be improvising
Know Your Composer
How an African-American composer’s works were saved from destruction. In 2009, Vicki and Darrell Gatwood, of St. Anne, Illinois, were preparing to renovate an abandoned house on the outskirts of town. The structure was in poor condition: vandals had ransacked it, and a fallen tree had torn a hole
Know Your Composer
The composer has long been seen as a symbol of divine order. But his music has an unruly obsession with God. “O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!” The words of the Psalm look bright on the page, but the music pulls them into
