Of the many musical terms that have made their way into general usage, one of the most colorful—and useful—is Prima donna. These days the term gets applied to anyone with an oversized ego—man or woman—but in Italian it simply means “first lady,” and it’s been in use since the 1600s as the title for the singer of an opera’s principal female role. By the 1700s the term was already associated with the artistic and commercial cult of the glamorous leading lady—a cult that met with little protest

I’d like to read you part of an interesting job application letter. It was originally in French: “My Lord, As I had the honor of playing before Your Royal Highness… and as I observed that You took some pleasure in the small talent that heaven has given me for music, and [as] You honoured me with a command to send You some pieces of my composition, I now…take the liberty of presenting [you] with the present concertos… humbly praying You not to judge their imperfections by the severity of the fine

A master class is a public lesson. A distinguished teacher—that would be the master—works with a student on a piece of music, but the teacher isn’t the student’s regular teacher, and instead of the lesson taking place in a private studio, it takes place in front of an audience. It’s a kind of double performance—the student is performing for the audience, but so is the teacher. And the idea is that whatever the teacher has to offer will be of value to both the student and the observers. My own

Gabriel Fauré is often referred to as one of the greatest French composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But I wonder if that description goes far enough. It’s certainly true that his contributions to French music, especially in the areas of chamber music, piano music, and music for the voice -- are remarkable. But they’re remarkable because they’re wonderful music , not because they’re French. It’s all very well to be aware of a composer’s nationality and of the specific

J.S. Bach composed his St. Matthew Passion in 1727. But for the better part of a century after that, the piece essentially disappeared, unknown to all but a few specialists. One of those specialists was the composer Carl Friedrich Zelter, who was the music teacher of a boy named Felix Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn was only about fourteen when his grandmother gave him a copy of the full score of the St. Matthew Passion – a score she had borrowed from Zelter…. The teenager immediately recognized the

I find it fascinating that many of the greatest composers of the 19 th century—composers such as Berlioz, Schumann, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Brahms, Dvorák, and Tchaikovsky—knew one another, and in many cases had very friendly personal and musical relationships. Schumann, for example, wrote his piano quintet for his wife, Clara, a great piano virtuoso …and Clara played the first public performance of the piece. But the very first performance of the piece was at a party for friends, and the

In 1950 a musicologist named Wolfgang Schmieder published an enormous catalogue of J.S. Bach’s works, but Schmieder organized it by category, that is, by type of composition, not by date of composition. The catalogue is known in German as the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, or BWV, and that’s why you often see Bach’s works listed in programs with their BWV numbers. Mozart’s works have “K” numbers, for Ludwig Köchel, who published a chronological Mozart catalogue in 1862, and Schubert’s compositions are

Musicians, like actors, have to deal with something a drama teacher once called the “paradox of integrity.” On the one hand, you have to be completely “in character” when you’re performing—moved yourself by the music in order to make it moving for others, and merged with the music, in a way… almost submerged in it. On the other hand, you have to remember where to put your fingers, and not to make the same mistake tonight you made at the rehearsal yesterday morning, and not to rush in the third

Classical music lovers tend to worry about correct pronunciation, so here are a few refreshers that I hope will be helpful. In America, people who play the flute call themselves flutists, not flautists, and we who play the viola, which looks like vie-ola, are called violists. Handel’s Messiah was written by Handel, not "Hondle", and though you can say Haendel if you’re feeling German, Handel himself changed it to Handel, so I’d stick with that. Mozart is "Motzart," not "Moe-zart," but before we

If you’re allergic to highly technical program notes for classical music concerts, you’re not alone. Most musicians I know find such notes boring and irrelevant, and most non-musicians find them useless, not to mention seriously off-putting. Well, it turns out it’s an old problem, as I discovered when I read a wonderful essay by George Bernard Shaw from 1896. “[Thirty years ago],” Shaw wrote, “the average programmist would unblushingly write, ‘Here the composer, by one of those licenses [which