When it comes to heavyweight game-changers like Claude Debussy, super fans even celebrate death anniversaries. It was 100 years ago, March 25, 1918, that the visionary composer lost his battle with ...

Claude Debussy’s singular visit to Spain lasted only an hour or two, long enough to attend a bullfight. Even so, his contemporary Manuel de Falla declared Debussy’s Iberia to be more genuine than ...

It begins with one of the most famous flute lines in history… and played deftly by the Principle flute of the Philharmonia Orchestra, Samuel Coles. [Music sample of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun] ...

We think of Debussy as a master of the orchestra, but like so many composers he began life as a pianist, and continued to think in pianistic terms throughout his career. One of the many delights of ...

In the western suburbs of Paris 150 years ago today, a boy was born to an unassuming couple, proprietors of a china shop who had no great taste for music. But that little boy felt otherwise, and grew ...

SO MUCH has been said and written about Debussy that there would appear to be nothing to add that is not already known. There was a time, and it seems not so long ago, when this name aroused hot ...

Many people went to look at her nakedness in Thaïs, to watch her lascivious dancing in Salome. But Mary Garden drew as many operagoers with the emotion in her voice as she did with the perfection of ...

When Víkingur Ólafsson was about 5 years old, he already knew what he wanted to be. "It sounds crazy, but I always saw myself as a concert pianist," he says. "Even if I wasn't a good pianist." Over ...

IT HAS been said — and is, I fear, something of an aphorism — that two careers may run in a parallel direction; then suddenly, without premonition or intent, may swerve to meet each other, though the ...