Philip Clark

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By​ the time his first opera, The Midsummer Marriage, had its premiere at Covent Garden in 1955, Michael Tippett was considered, alongside Benjamin Britten, the most significant and original British composer of his generation. Yet he was also the natural outsider in a scene that as well as Britten (born 1913), included William Walton (1902) and Lennox Berkeley (1903), with the reassuring...

Having​ lost five children shortly after birth, Mozart’s parents had their new baby christened the morning after he was born on 27 January 1756. Leopold, Wolfgang’s father, was a composer and violinist who had recently self-published a violin primer which quickly became a standard text. His promotion to the position of deputy Kapellmeister in the court of Count Leopold Anton von...

By 1963​, John Cage had become an unlikely celebrity. Anyone who knew anything about music – who had perhaps followed the perplexed reviews in the New York Times – could tell you how he had managed to transform the piano into a one-man percussion ensemble by wedging nails, bolts and erasers between its strings; or how he had – ‘and you’re never gonna believe...