William Melton Engelbert Humperdinck's opera Hänsel und Gretel is one of the best-known in the repertoire, its melodies as familiar as folk-tunes - and yet no full-length biography of Humperdinck...

Alfred Brendel In this definitive collection of a renowned pianist's writings—some of them never before published in English—Alfred Brendel brings the clarity and originality of expression that characterize his performances to the...

Caryn Rose Patti Smith arrived in New York City at the end of the Age of Aquarius in search of work and purpose. Through her poetry, her songs, her unapologetic...

Alex Ross The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century is a voyage into the labyrinth of modern music, which remains an obscure world for most people. While paintings of...

Richard Wagner A superb new translation of the libretto to Wagner's Ring cycle'Smiling in sorrowI sing of love'The Ring of the Nibelung, Wagner's epic cycle of four musical dramas about primal envy,...

Yuval Sharon From “the most imaginative director in the US” (New York Times) comes this generational work with a vision for transforming opera into a powerhouse cultural phenomenon.Visionary director Yuval...

Laura Turnbridge Ludwig van Beethoven: to some, simply the greatest ever composer of Western classical music. Yet his life remains shrouded in myths, and the image persists of him as...

Daniel R Melamed Of all the things we can know about J. S. Bach's Mass in B Minor and Christmas Oratorio, the most profound come from things we can hear. Listening to Bach explores musical...

Stephen Johnson The Eighth Symphony was going to be different from anything Mahler had ever done before. The intensely personal dramas of his earlier symphonies were a thing of the...

William Kinderman ”We do not understand music—it understands us.” This aphorism by Theodor W. Adorno expresses the quandary and the fascination many listeners have felt in approaching Beethoven's late quartets....

Pauline Fairclough Dmitry Shostakovich was one of the most successful composers of the twentieth century—a musician who adapted as no other to the unique pressures of his age. By turns...

Stephen Johnson Music broadcaster and composer Stephen Johnson explores how Shostakovich's music took shape under Stalin's reign of terror, and how it gave form to the hopes of an oppressed...