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There was something innately cool about Johannes Brahms. Down to earth, unpretentious and blessed with a rich sense of humour, he was the Romantic who never got too carried away. He had an uncanny knack for always appearing to know what he was doing and where he was going. As an artist, he was a model for ...

Musical fashions can be as fickle as authoritarian regimes, especially if you’re a composer. One moment your name is everywhere, everyone wants a piece of you and you are feted as an integral symbol of the zeitgeist. Then a coup d’etat swings by and switches government, and suddenly you’re out in the cold ...

You can love or loathe Richard Wagner. But you can never overstate his monumental influence. Few other western artists have left such a profound impression upon their age. He revolutionized operatic norms, opened up new realms of harmonic possibility and, most strikingly, fused music, dance ...

Although a musical giant of mid-nineteenth century France, Jacques Offenbach was surprisingly tiny in person. A spindly, bird-like figure, seldom weighing more than forty-five kilograms, he was “the least imposing man in appearance one could imagine” according to an American music critic ...

Whenever we talk about the tragedy of an artist being cut off in their prime, we might spare a particular thought for poor Julius Reubke. He was cut off almost before he had got started. So brief was his time on earth that he made the likes of Schubert, Mozart and Chopin look like venerable old men by comparison ...