Born on 14 November 1805, Fanny Hensel Mendelssohn came from a well-to-do German-Jewish family and was raised in a highly educated and cultured household in Berlin. Felix Mendelssohn, the renowned composer, was her brother, and they had two other siblings, Paul and Rebecka. Whil…
For nearly three months in 1859, John Everett Millais' paintings The Vale of Rest and Spring ( Apple Blossoms ) were displayed at the prestigious Royal Academy Exhibition, receiving often negative reviews. Especially The Vale of Rest — depicting two nuns in a cemetery, one…
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was an avid reader, devouring novels, poetry and plays from a young age. Not only did he admire Russian authors like Leo Tolstoy, Alexander Pushkin, Anton Chekhov and Nikolai Gogol, but he also loved Western writers such as William Shakespeare, William M…
British authors Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins met in March 1851, introduced by their mutual friend, the painter Augustus Egg. By that time, Dickens (then 39) was already a literary star, whereas Collins (then 27) was still an aspiring writer. Both men shared a fondness for …
In the summer of 1885, American painter John Singer Sargent visited the English seaside town of Bournemouth where Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson was temporarily living with his wife Fanny. The two men had been friends since they met in Paris in the mid-1870s. At the time…
Following the death of his brother Kaspar ('Karl') in 1815, German composer Ludwig van Beethoven became entangled in a bitter and lengthy custody battle over his nephew Karl (then nine years old), which was to dominate the last decade of his life. Appointed co-guardian b…
In April 1870, two years after the successful publication of her novel Little Women, 37-year-old Louisa May Alcott travelled to Europe with her younger sister Abigail May ("May"), 29 at the time, for a well-earned, extended holiday. Louisa highly enjoyed their trip, w…
In an earlier post , I talked about the connection between the authors Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson, who were literary and personal friends for years until Stevenson's death in 1894. In 1884, Stevenson moved to the South English seaside town of Bournemouth for hea…
Premiering on 17 February 1904 at La Scala in Milan, Giacomo Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly was a great fiasco, often described as "one of the most terrible flops in Italian opera history". Despite the celebrated cast, including the 32-year-old Italian soprano R…
In the spring of 1890, Russian doctor and writer Anton Chekhov travelled from Moscow to Sakhalin Island (located north of Japan), where he was to study and document the living conditions of convicts at the penal colony. He ultimately spent three months on the island, interviewin…
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