Classics For Kids

On this week’s Classics for Kids show, music for the harvest – and for fall.

Robert and Clara Schumann were a husband and wife musician/composer team. But theirs was not the only family in which musician were linked by marriage. Others include Dvorak/Suk, Wagner/Liszt, Mozart/Weber, […]

Clara Wieck was born in 1819 in the German city of Leipzig. Her father, Friedrich Wieck, was a piano teacher who decided even before his daughter was born that she […]

From the time he was young, Schumann knew that he wanted to write. The only question was, should he write words, or music? Eventually, Schumann became known as a famous […]

Incidental music creates a mood, or illustrates the action for what is going on in a play, movie or television show.

Even though classical music is sometimes referred to as “serious music,” a lot of times it just isn’t. Serious, that is — classical composers wrote some very funny music.

The kind of galop that Dmitri Kabalevsky put his suite The Comedians has nothing to do with horses. In fact, it’s not even spelled the same as a horse's gallop. […]

After Dmitri Kabalevsky wrote music for a play called The Inventor and the Comedians, he put selections from that music into a concert suite called The Comedians. Listen to what’s […]

By the time Dmitri Kabalevsky was 14, the Russian Revolution had turned his country into a communist state. In spite of the Soviet Union’s control over artists of all kinds, […]

Many operas feature music that is has become so famous all by itself, you might just forget that it’s part of an opera!

Before television, radio, and the movies, it used to be a very big deal when the circus came to town. Circus parades and performances were always accompanied by marches called […]

Jonathan Larson, the composer of the musical “Rent,” used the same plot for this musical as Puccini did for La Bohème. Other composers also used classical music when they wrote […]

Giacomo Puccini’s opera La Bohème is about struggling artists in Paris. Its title means “the bohemian lifestyle.” But Bohemia isn't in France; it's in the Czech Republic. Other composers such […]

Around the year 1600, Italian composers started writing theater pieces that use music all the way through them. Instead of speaking, characters in operas sing their lines. From Claudio Monteverdi, […]

By the time Italian composer Giacomo Puccini was born in 1858, there had already been four generations of musicians in his hometown of Lucca. Most were church musicians, but Giacomo […]

A collection of musical firsts, including the first string quartet, the first use of trombones in a symphony, and the first professional musician to make a recording.