The discovery of a love letter revealed the depths of Beethoven’s yearning for his "immortal beloved." Scholars have been piecing together clues to her identity ever since. Ludwig van Beethoven wasn’t ...

A fire destroyed a southern Arizona workshop containing about 80 antique pianos, including one reportedly played by Beethoven. The piano restorer, Jens Witter, had collected the instruments over ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. In 1994, an orthopaedic surgeon using a payphone in upstate New York noticed a thunderstorm in the distance. He ...

Did you know that this Classic 100 had the most entries composed by women ever: 11 works by seven different composers! ABC Classic's Ria Andriani took at look into this wonderful stat and the ...

Classical concert lore is full of great pinch-hitting stories. For example, stardom found a young Leonard Bernstein when he stepped in for conductor Bruno Walter on short notice, and teenage pianist ...

This performance, preceded by an illuminating, engaging and amusing 45-minute “musical and dramatic exploration”, was a reminder of quite how far Aurora has grown in confidence and stature, and has ...

Chuck Berry’s low-slung guitar as he duck-walked across the stage is an iconic image, but the engine that drove his earliest recordings was Johnnie Johnson’s piano. Berry tapped into the teenager’s ...

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Last year, researchers sequenced the genome of famed composer Ludwig van Beethoven for the first time, based on authenticated locks of hair. The same team has now analyzed two of the locks for toxic ...

Scientists have confirmed that Ludwig van Beethoven had lead poisoning, but it did not contribute to his untimely death. To this day, nobody knows for certain what caused the liver and kidney disease ...

Analysis of Beethoven’s DNA has revealed that he had a low genetic predisposition for beat synchronization, an ability that’s closely related to musicality. This is according to researchers who set ...