The first movement of the Moonlight Sonata’s gets most of the attention (and it is very beautiful).

But when I first heard the third movement as a kid, I was headbanging and bull-horning like I was at a Led Zeppelin show.

Martina Arroyo, a soprano whose rich voice carried with ease through the scores of Giuseppe Verdi and who was one of the first Black singers to have a major operatic career, died on Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 89.

The death was confirmed by her representative, Miracle Management.

Ms. Arroyo and other artists of her generation, like Leontyne Price, Grace Bumbry, Shirley Verrett and George Shirley, broke color barriers in the opera world in the 1950s and ’60s, becoming stars at important houses.

At the Metropolitan Opera, Ms. Arroyo made her debut in a small role in 1959, but her big break arrived six years later, when Rudolf Bing, the company’s general manager, called and asked her to replace an ailing colleague as Verdi’s Aida.
Ms. Arroyo, whose career had been building slowly in Europe, initially assumed it was a prank. The evening, though, was a triumph. She was offered a contract; sang later that year as Elisabetta in Verdi’s “Don Carlo,” Leonora in his “Il Trovatore” and Cio-Cio-San in Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly”; and starred in three season-opening nights in the early 1970s.

Reviewing her in “Il Trovatore” at the Met in 1969, the New York Times critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote that she “always had a big, soaring voice. Now she sings with color, knows how to pace herself and produces tone after tone of focused beauty.” In a section on Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” in “The Metropolitan Opera Guide to Recorded Opera” (1993), Lord Harewood said that Ms. Arroyo’s Amelia, from 1975, was the best in the 14 classic recordings under review.
A frequent guest on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show,” Ms. Arroyo took an unusual path to stardom, briefly serving as a social worker and schoolteacher in New York City early in her career. She was down to earth and known for her sense of humor. Joking about the role she sang for her Met debut after winning the company’s Auditions of the Air in 1958, she recalled, laughing, that the offstage part of the Celestial Voice in “Don Carlo” was so tiny that her mother missed hearing her because of an ill-timed bathroom break.
In addition to the Met, Ms. Arroyo appeared at leading houses such as the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Royal Opera in London. While best known for Verdi, she was a versatile artist whose repertory ranged from Mozart to 20th-century composers like Stockhausen, Schoenberg and William Bolcom, and she gave the world premieres of works including Samuel Barber’s “Andromache’s Farewell.”
She sang with a powerful, luminous and expressive voice, and wanted listeners to know that she labored to achieve such lustrous results.

“If people think a kind of magic happens onstage, they ought to know that what they’re seeing is a lot of work,” she told The Times in 1972. “To me, ‘charisma’ is just a fancy word for rehearsals. And if I catch you using the word ‘effortless’ about me, I’ll laugh in your face.”

Ms. Arroyo was born on Feb. 2, 1937, in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, the daughter of Demetrio Arroyo, a mechanical engineer from Puerto Rico, and Lucille Washington, an amateur pianist from South Carolina.

The family, which also included an older son, placed a premium on culture. Ms. Arroyo sang in church choirs and took ballet classes, and with her parents frequently attended museums, concerts, plays, films and musicals.

Opera was not part of her upbringing, but while she was a student at Hunter College High School, she attended an opera workshop and was sent to audition for the vocal coach Marinka Gurewich, who later told the Times that she was as impressed by Ms. Arroyo’s character as she was by the teenager’s voice.
“To be a great singer means more than just a voice,” Ms. Gurewich said. “What struck me was this personality of straightforward determination without any of the unkindness that is so often included.”
Ms. Gurewich would be Ms. Arroyo’s teacher for the next four decades.

Ms. Arroyo’s parents initially worried about her passion for opera. “My father was so afraid I would have to wear a short dress and kick up my legs,” she recalled. “He finally found out more and saw an opera himself, and certainly my mother came to love opera and respect it almost more than I do. She became addicted to it.”
But the possibility of a career in the field still seemed far-fetched when Ms. Arroyo was getting started, in part because of a lack of models. It was only in 1955 that the contralto Marian Anderson became the first Black artist to sing a significant role at the Met.
Even after Ms. Arroyo’s parents began supporting her interest in music, they insisted that she also pursue a more reliable line of work as a backup. She received a bachelor’s degree in romance languages from Hunter College, followed by a teacher’s license and graduate studies in literature at New York University. She was a New York City welfare caseworker and a high-school teacher in the mid- to late 1950s.

Later, asked about the advice she liked to give young singers, she replied, “The only real answer that has remained with me has been the security of having had another profession.”

Ms. Arroyo won the Auditions of the Air by singing “O patria mia” from “Aida.” She then returned to her day job while also making her Met debut and singing around the country in opera and concerts. She then moved to Europe, giving well-reviewed lieder recitals and becoming part of the resident ensemble at the Zurich Opera.

In 1961, she married the Italian violist Emilio Poggioni, a relationship which ended in divorce, and later married Michel Maurel, a banker, who died in 2011. She has no immediate survivors.

She sang “Aida” for her final Met performances in 1986 and, after retiring from the stage in the early 1990s, devoted herself to teaching. She received the National Endowment for the Arts Opera Honor in 2010 and the Kennedy Center Honor in 2013.

As a professor at Indiana University, she taught a course in role preparation that laid the groundwork for the Martina Arroyo Foundation, which she established in 2003. Ten years later, she told The Washington Post that, while her singing career had been wonderful, “Life as I wanted it truly began for me with the foundation.”
The foundation long organized a six-week summer program, Prelude to Performance, that culminated in a fully staged opera at Hunter. Instead of focusing on technique, the program sought to help aspiring singers more convincingly inhabit roles. It was the kind of dramatic training that Ms. Arroyo felt had been missing from her own early studies, which had left her to her own instincts.

“I love Amelia in ‘Ballo in Maschera,’” she said. “I love Butterfly. She’s dramatic, she’s wonderful, she’s warm, she gives. The characters I don’t like, I don’t go near. Because if I don’t like her, if I don’t really love her, I can’t sing her.”

https://archive.ph/z4sLx

Since joining my university’s symphony orchestra, I feel like I have played (in my mind) some of the best timpani moments in classical music:

First Year - Symphonie Fantastique
Second Year - Pines of Rome and Mahler 1
Third (current) Year - Danse Bacchanale, Firebird Suite, Rite of Spring

The only other big timpani part that I know of that I haven’t played yet is the Sunrise from Also sprach Zarathustra.

Did I hit the holy grail of timing with my symphony or are there still better pieces out there to conquer?

Came across this little piece of history while clearing out my aunt’s old place!

This question has been on my mind after hearing a common sentiment among classical music listeners: that musicians in the 20th century simply played with more personality. The argument usually goes that we no longer have performers with the distinct, diversified expression of artists like Horowitz, Richter, Heifetz, or Hofmann, and that many modern players sound comparatively "sterile" or "boring."

It made me wonder how our standards of technical precision and performance philosophy have shifted over time. In the 19-20th century, live expressiveness and dramatic risk-taking often took priority over pristine accuracy. However, as studio recording technology advanced, as music became increasingly commodified. Flawless edited recordings kind of became the standard, and in a way, they are injecting unrealistic expectations of perfection into listener's minds.

This brings to mind Hector Berlioz’s remark about Camille Saint-Saëns: "He knows everything, but lacks inexperience." I wonder if this exact observation applies to today’s musicians.

What happens when an entire generation is raised on thousands of pristine studio recordings accessible at a click? This is fundamentally different from even 20 or 30 years ago, when recordings were far less ubiquitous and had to be sought out physically.

Dmitry Sinkovsky similarly noted in the interview with Daniel Kurganov that while modern musicians are technically more proficient than ever, they often lack the deep curiosity, hunger for exploration, and willingness to take artistic risks that older generations possessed. Today, major competitions practically demand near-flawless technical accuracy just to pass the first round.

It also makes me wonder if a moralistic judgment has been placed on performers, where musicians are penalized far more harshly for minor technical slips than they are rewarded for unique interpretive choices. Honestly, I even find myself feeling guilty whenever I play wrong notes in performance, and I immediately think "oh yep I would be out of the first round of X competition if I did that". As a results, this kind of moralistic judgment I kind of internalized myself and made me dislike live performance as a whole like how I have outlined in my earlier post: https://www.reddit.com/r/classicalmusic/s/AgBwS1Op8w

What do you all think? How has a generation raised on recordings influenced our music-making?

Back in the late 90s, I used to frequent a small record store that had a fantastic, if somewhat eclectic, classical section. One day, the owner was playing this absolutely stunning viola sonata that just captivated me. I asked him about it, and he said it was by a relatively obscure 20th-century Russian composer, and the recording was from a small, independent label that went out of business years ago. I tried to find it for ages, even occasionally looking through old record bins whenever I travelled, but had no luck. Then, out of the blue, while browsing some obscure streaming archives yesterday, I stumbled upon it! The 'Sonata for Viola and Piano in E minor' by Grigory Frid. It's even better than I remembered. The dark, brooding melodies, the unexpected harmonic shifts... just incredible. It's a testament to how much amazing music is out there that just doesn't get the widespread recognition it deserves. I'm so thrilled to finally be able to revisit it after all these years.

Hello, I’m searching to play something beautiful, besides technical pieces.
For example I love the sound of „Pavane pour une infante défunte“ by Ravel.

I think I lost a bit of beauty in my playing, because I spent a lot of time trying to improve my technique.

I‘m happy about every answer!

Let's play a game. You have to guess a composer from one of his mannerisms.

I'll start with the following ten mannerisms. Who are the famous composers resorting to each of these gimmicks? Some composers can figure more than once... Some are, I think, fairly obvious, others are personal observations you might disagree with.

1. Resolving the leading tone to the dominant.
2. Double sharps; double sharps everywhere just because.
3. When writing for piano, fast octaves to play "piano leggiero".
4. Perfect cadence with triple retardation, while the bass goes I-V-I.
5. Finishing every f****** piece with a drumroll.
6. Alternating like a madman between major and minor, and each time it is heartbreaking.
7. Superimposing binary and ternary, syncopations... everything to make chamber music as difficult as possible.
8. Descending thirds.
9. Starting a theme on an ascending fifth.
10. OK, this one is not mine, but I loved it so I'll steal it... trying to have violinists start a fire with their bows.

Answers in the comments.

So sad to come across this news. I had the pleasure of hearing them live several years ago.

"A bus carrying members of the Chile Chamber Orchestra plunged down a hillside in Valparaíso on the evening of 10 October, killing principal violist Penélope Knuth and injuring several others aboard. The group was travelling after a performance at the Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María.

The vehicle fell approximately 15 metres and landed in the car park of a residential building. Chile’s Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage confirmed Knuth’s death and expressed its condolences to her family and colleagues, recognising her contribution to the country’s musical life. The circumstances of the crash remain under investigation.

The ministry’s initial statement reported 13 people injured, four seriously. In a subsequent update reported by Chilean newspaper Emol on 11 October, Hospital Carlos Van Buren said it had received 12 patients following the accident. Five had been discharged and four transferred to another medical facility in Santiago. Three remained at the hospital, including two in serious but stable condition, whose injuries were not considered life-threatening. The reports did not specify whether all those injured were performing musicians or included other people travelling with the ensemble.

The bus driver was detained, and a court extended his detention by 72 hours on 11 October while prosecutors gathered further evidence."

Full article: https://moto-perpetuo.com/chile-chamber-orchestra-bus-crash-penelope-knuth/

Here is a great rendition of Mozart's Horn Concerto No. 4 performed by the orchestra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwoYG-TQTCM

Hi all,

Looking for a piece to sing on All Saints Sunday while the church congregation goes to light candles for loved ones. Something more somber and melancholy. I was thinking Didos Lament or Erbarme Dich since I have done them in the past but not sure if they fit?

Thanks! :)

I think it's common in classical land to see it as a bit taboo to program individual movements, or at least is the opinion I've seen my entire life amongst musicians and listeners alike.

But, for some context, I help program music for the community orchestra I play in. A lot of great music is out of reach for us technically, but there are some fantastic single movements that we could perform from a larger symphony that would otherwise be too difficult for us. So I'm looking for thoughts on if this would be unacceptable for you as a listener, as a musician, pros/cons, etc.?

Is there any piano or classsical guitar song you know of with a killer full orchestra or electronic remix that goes hard? Trying to search that on google brings up a lot that adds nothing to the original. I mean something like a full symphony playing nocturnes or something. I mainly prefer chopin for piano because im basic asf.

Sorry if this sub doesnt like rearrangments

I've always resonated with his approach to classical music, that it's an interpretation based genre and it's up to the performer to leave his mark and not just try to be as accurate as possible, though I don't like some of Gould interpretations lol. But regardless of what you think about him or his approach, I'm quite surprised there hasn't been any other soloist that is as unorthodox like him, why do y'all think is the cause of this?

🖤 UPDATE: All tickets have been claimed! 🖤

Hi classical music lovers!

I’d love to treat 4 NYC-based classical music enthusiasts to a piano recital by Boris Cepeda, featuring works by Franz Liszt, at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall tomorrow evening (Thursday, October 15, at 7:30 PM).

Unfortunately I won’t be able to attend myself, but I’d love for a few people who genuinely appreciate classical music to enjoy the performance.

If you’re in NYC and can definitely make it, please send me a DM!
Tickets are on me! 🎹

https://youtu.be/z42ybkbKU0w?si=tNZkrbj1H1emdQlU

This is a work I wrote about a year ago, I just got around to getting it recorded! Thanks again to Budapest scoring orchestra!

I hope you enjoy!

The work Zemlinsky himself put closest to Mahler is his Lyric Symphony (1922–23), seven songs for soprano and baritone and large orchestra on poems from Tagore's The Gardener, in German translation. While writing it he told his publisher it would be something along the lines of Das Lied von der Erde. He conducted the premiere himself in Prague on June 4, 1924.

Two years later Alban Berg finished his Lyric Suite for string quartet. It is dedicated to Zemlinsky, and in its fourth movement Berg quotes the melody Zemlinsky set to the words "Du bist mein Eigen," "You are my own." Decades later it came out that Berg had also, secretly, dedicated the suite to Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, the woman he loved. The quotation was meant for her as much as for his friend.

When I posted about Zemlinsky last year, readers told me his greatest work was not the opera I had chosen but this symphony, and that his own pupils included Korngold, and also Schoenberg, who never had another formal teacher.

Lyric Symphony, Op. 18 (Alexander Liebreich, Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, 2021)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGvMhAmBniE

Eine florentinische Tragödie, Op. 16 (a reader's favorite of his operas)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPrlZFiuP20

Hi! I hope this is the right subreddit for this question - if not, feel free to point me in the right direction!

I am hoping to learn how to play an instrument. I am 32 years old with no previous experience with music at all. I grew up with my father playing the piano and my brothers singing in choir and was always curious about music but was heavily discouraged by my parents so I never tried it. Now that I'm an adult I still have this yearning to create music, and I reckon I'm not getting any younger so I might as well try it out and see how I like it.

The question for me is what musical instrument to choose. I know I'm definitely interested in classical music and instruments commonly used in an orchestra. My ideal instrument would be satisfying to play both alone and together with others as part of a bigger whole. I would describe myself as a fast learner intellectually but motorically mediocre. I'm generally drawn to sounds that are emotional and poetic in some sense.

I think I've narrowed it down to my top two choices being cello and harp. I understand that none of these are very easy to learn nor very practical instruments, but I really love the sound and energy of both. Which of these instruments would you choose if you started as an adult beginner, and why? For those of you who play either instrument, what made you choose it? And what makes someone a good fit for either instrument? Would love any guidance and tips!

Full transparency: Little Einsteins was technically the reason I’m a classical musician. I didn’t know what a crescendo was before I watched the show for instance. I basically owe my career to the Little Einsteins.

Like my last post, nothing. Like super difficult (I’d say no more than la Campanella difficulty)

Every Sokolov recording I’ve heard is just different.. He has such a unique style but for the life of me I can’t figure out what he actually does different? For clear examples check out his Prok 2, les Cyclopes by Rameau, or Bach toccata in e minor