Meet Alexander Borodin – His Life and Work

Alexander Borodin (1833–1887) was a Russian Romantic composer and accomplished chemist. A member of The Five, a group of nationalist composers, Borodin is best known for his opera Prince Igor, the symphonic poem In the Steppes of Central Asia, and his string quartets....

Meet Robert Schumann

  Robert Schumann is most often remembered for the mental hardships he endured, which led him to live out his final years in a mental asylum. But much of his music expresses a heady, high joy that is hardly present in the work of any other composer. Much of that...

Meet Frédéric François Chopin

People tend to think of Chopin as the ultimate romantic – a composer of music that seems to speak of languid infatuation, heartbreak, and love. Yet there is much more to his music than that. He was, in fact, a composer of piano music that was ahead of its time...

Meet Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy

  Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, possibly more than any other composer in history, seemed to arrive as a fully formed masterful composer when he was still in his teens. Before he was yet twenty, he had written his masterful string Octet, his ravishing incidental...