Premiering in 1937 in Frankfurt during the Third Reich, there is a ritualistic force to Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. This makes it a guilty pleasure for some and perfect fodder for ad jingles.
It’s repetitive — playing the same drum rhythm like a heartbeat — with two simple melodies entwined. But this masterful composition shifts just when it needs to.
From ‘Comfort ye’ to the Hallelujah chorus, the music of the Messiah is a much-loved Christmas tradition. Yet it was originally written as an Easter offering.
“They have been crucifying Othello into an opera,” Lord Byron later wrote after watching Rossini’s opera. But the performance does much to highlight the play’s racial politics.
Pelléas and Mélisande tells a story of forbidden love between its title characters, set in the fictitious kingdom of Allemonde. However the action offstage before the opera’s 1902 premiere was just as dramatic.
In its original form, Rossini’s William Tell went for five hours. Yet soon after its 1829 debut it was being cut for the comfort of its audience. Its Overture - a mere 12 minutes - has become one of the most famous pieces of classical music.
The last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony gave us ‘Ode to Joy’, one of the most famous tunes of all time. But the composer initially thought he’d made a grave mistake with it.
Johann Sebastian Bach was 30 when he became head of music in Anhalt-Cöthen, in what is now Germany. Here he started an uncharted experiment in classical music: solo works for string instruments.
Sergei Rachmaninoff fled the Russian revolution 100 years ago. Spending the remainder of his life in the US, he composed what is perhaps his greatest work in 1940, the Symphonic Dances.
On September 29 1941, Nazis murdered more than 30,000 Jews in a ravine outside Kiev. Dmitri Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony, Babi Yar, is a damning critique of the Soviet Union’s lack of recognition of the massacre, and a condemnation of Stalinism.
A year before his death at 31 Franz Schubert published ‘Winterreise’ or ‘winter’s journey’, a series of 24 poems set to music exploring unrequited love. Schubert described them as ‘truly terrible’.
Debussy’s Clair de Lune, meaning ‘moonlight’, is one of the most easily recognised pieces of music, but its origins are complex. The piece was influenced by poetry, Baroque music and the Impressionist movement.
With An Alpine Symphony, Richard Strauss achieved something remarkable: the painting of the German alps, complete with cow meadows and waterfalls, in sound.
Whoever finds it beautiful is beyond help, quipped critic Eduard Hanslick upon hearing Franz Liszt’s Sonata in B minor for the first time. Fortunately, posterity did not agree with him.
Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Art of Fugue is a work of high art. But in keeping with the late works of artists such as Shakespeare, Beethoven and Goya, it contains elements of pathos, humour, gravity, exuberance and tragedy.