Antonio Maria Bononcini

 by Georg Predota  July 8th, 2026

In the Shadow of a Famous Brother

The Italian cellist and composer Antonio Maria Bononcini (1677-1726) was part of a distinguished musical family based in Modena, Italy. He worked closely with his older brother in Vienna, and crowned his career as maestro di cappella in his hometown.

To commemorate the 300th anniversary of his death on 8 July 1726, let us briefly explore the life of a musician who spent much of his career serving aristocratic and court patrons.   

The House of Bononcini

Giovanni Maria Bononcini

The Bononcini family was one of the great musical dynasties of late 17th- and early 18th-century Italy. In particular, the family’s musical reputation rests primarily on the father and his two sons.

The father, Giovanni Maria Bononcini (1642-1678), was a violinist, composer, and theorist. He was active in Modena, where he became court violinist and later maestro di cappella at the cathedral.

He was particularly important in helping to refine instrumental music in church and chamber sonatas before the emergence of Corelli. He also authored an influential handbook on counterpoint and composition, the Musico prattico of 1673.   

The Famous Brother

Portrait of the composer Giovanni Bononcini

His eldest son, Giovanni Bononcini (1670-1747), was by far the most famous. He was a cellist, singer, and prolific opera composer who enjoyed spectacular success in Rome, Vienna, and especially London.

His operas, particularly Il trionfo di Camilla, helped spread Italian opera seria across Europe, and he was admired for his lyrical melody and graceful vocal writing.

He achieved international and lasting historical fame as a rival to Handel in London, where he produced eight operas, including the successful Astarto, Crispo, and Griselda. His simple and fluent melodic style was particularly popular with London audiences.  

A Gifted Younger Brother

Antonio Maria Bononcini

And that brings us to Antonio Maria Bononcini (1677-1726), the gifted younger brother. The famous Padre Martini judged his style to be “so elevated, lively, artful and delightful, that he is distinguished above most early 18th-century composers.”

Together with his brother Giovanni, Antonio Maria was considered by contemporaries to be one of the most outstanding cello virtuosi of his time. Today, both are best known as exceptional composers of vocal music and important representatives of the elegant and melodically driven “galant” style.

After receiving musical instructions from their father, the brothers furthered their studies in Bologna. Between 1690 and 1693, both played in the orchestra of Cardinal Pamphili, the papal legate in the city.  

“Sig. Bononcini”

Since Giovanni and Antonio Maria worked alongside in Bologna, in Rome, and later in Vienna, it is often difficult to distinguish the true author of compositions attributed to “Sig. Bononcini.”

By 1694, Bononcini was active as a cellist in Rome, and during that period, he or his elder brother performed at six events sponsored by Cardinal Ottoboni. Scholars suggest that Antonio Maria’s music is generally more virtuosic and elaborate in style than his elder brother’s.

In his collection of twelve sonatas dating to around 1693, Antonio Maria makes frequent use of tremolos, double-stopping, and repeated notes. His use of chords, rapid ornamentations, and treacherously difficult echo effects is characteristic and common to practically all the movements of this collection.  

Imperial Patronage

Around 1700, Antonio joined his brother in Vienna, and Telemann heard them perform in Berlin in 1702. The Bononcini brothers were part of a new generation of Italian composers who brought the latest musical styles to Vienna.

Antonio Maria was first commissioned to compose for the Viennese court in 1705. When he began his service to the Habsburg emperor, he was still a young and little-known composer. Emperor Joseph I held Giovanni Bononcini in high esteem, and he extended the same honour to Antonio.

Between 1705 and 1711, Antonio composed 13 cantatas, six festive serenatas, four two-part oratorios, and a three-act opera. The cellist Antonio distinguished himself as one of the generation’s most gifted composers of dramatic vocal music.  

The Viennese Cantatas

Antonio Bononcini: Chamber Cantatas

The cantatas by Antonio Maria represent the new Italian style flourishing at the Viennese court. Scholars identify innovation in form, design features, affective harmony, melody, and rhythm. For some, Antonio’s compositional style reveals a composer of superior craftsmanship and imagination compared to the more famous Giovanni.

To be sure, the cantatas feature intricate textures, finely woven counterpoint, and extensive sequential development. Many of the arias are in minor keys, frequently featuring dotted rhythms, chromatic harmonies, and angular melodic lines.

Antonio was named a “composer to the emperor” in 1710, but when Joseph died of smallpox, his older brother, Charles VI, did not retain the Bononcinis. The brothers returned to Italy, and Antonio married Eleonora Suterin, who bore him four sons and a daughter.  

Final Years and Legacy

Antonio Bononcini: Cello Sonatas

Antonio continued to write operas for Venice, Rome, and cities ruled by the Austrian emperor. It has been observed that these works resemble Vivaldi in style. Although he incorporated some “galant” features, none of his dramatic works received subsequent productions.

For the last five years of his life, Bononcini was appointed maestro di cappella at the court in Modena, and he composed an extant mass setting and the Stabat mater. He ended his career in relative stability and died in his hometown of Modena on 8 July 1726.

While Antonio Maria was highly respected in his own time, he eventually slipped into the shadow of his more famous brother. However, more recent scholarship increasingly regards him as a gifted composer in his own right.

Three hundred years after his death, we remember a virtuoso cellist and composer who made significant contributions to the musical life of northern Italy, Rome, and Vienna during a period of stylistic transition in European music.

Cho-Panic Attack!

Credit: NPR Classical on Facebook

When the Obstacle Becomes the Music

 by Tunacan Tuna  June 28th, 2026

How physical and psychological adversity shaped some of classical music’s most radical voices

There is a persistent myth in the telling of great artistic lives: that genius triumphs despite its hardships. The more honest — and more interesting — story is often that genius triumphs through them. Across the history of classical music, some of the most radical and enduring works were not produced in comfortable studios by comfortable people. They were wrested from silence, from pain, from confinement, from a single remaining hand.

What follows is not a catalogue of suffering. It is something closer to the opposite: a record of transformation.

The Composer Who Could No Longer Hear the World

Beethoven conducting

The story of Beethoven‘s deafness has been told so many times that it risks becoming a kind of motivational poster — something to be invoked and moved past. But its implications for music history deserve more careful attention.

Beethoven began losing his hearing in his late twenties. By the final decade of his life, the silence was almost complete. He reportedly pressed a wooden stick against the piano and held it between his teeth, feeling the vibrations through bone rather than air. He could no longer perform publicly as a pianist.

What deafness took from him — the ambient noise of fashionable Viennese musical life, the pressure of trends, the approval or disapproval of audiences — it replaced with something more demanding and more free: total inwardness. The late string quartets and the Ninth Symphony were not composed for listeners he could hear react. They were composed for a musical logic that existed entirely within him. The result was music so strange, so structurally bold, that his contemporaries were baffled. We now call it the birth of musical Romanticism.  

The Eyes That Heard Everything

Joaquín Rodrigo

Joaquín Rodrigo lost his sight to diphtheria at the age of three. He would go on to write one of the most performed guitar concertos in history — despite never having mastered the guitar.

He composed in Braille, working through scores with his fingers before they reached any instrument. His wife, the pianist Victoria Kamhi, transcribed his work. The Concierto de Aranjuez — its famous Adagio in particular — conjures light, shadow, memory, and imagined landscape with a vividness that seems almost paradoxical from a composer who had lost his sight in earliest childhood.  

Perhaps that is precisely the point. Rodrigo had little visual memory to constrain him. He had sound, and what he had made sound mean. His relationship to the guitar was analytic and exterior rather than habitual and physical — and it produced something that every guitarist since has had to reckon with.

The Mind That Played Differently

Glenn Gould at the piano

Glenn Gould has often been discussed in relation to the autistic spectrum, although no formal diagnosis was made during his lifetime. His hypochondria was legendary; his posture at the piano — hunched over a specially built low chair constructed by his father — was singular; his habit of humming audibly throughout his performances drove recording engineers to distraction and has haunted every recording he ever made.

Whatever the source of his unusual cognitive style, it gave him something that conventional pianists rarely possess: the ability to hold multiple contrapuntal voices in simultaneous, independent focus. He did not experience polyphony as a blur to be navigated but as a kind of architecture to be inhabited room by room. His 1955 recording of Bach‘s Goldberg Variations remains, for many, the most radical and clarifying interpretation the piano has ever produced.

Gould withdrew from the concert stage entirely in 1964, at thirty-one. He found live performance anxious, wasteful, and socially exhausting. He spent the remaining eighteen years of his life in recording studios, treating microphone placement and tape editing as compositional tools in their own right — becoming one of the first pianists to treat the studio not as a documentary space, but as an instrument.   

The Composer Who Could No Longer Play

Robert Schumann

According to a long-repeated account, Robert Schumann damaged his right hand while using a mechanical device intended to strengthen his fingers — a story that remains debated, but has become inseparable from the mythology of his abandoned career as a virtuoso pianist.

What followed was a compositional life of extraordinary psychological richness. Schumann invented two alter egos — the impetuous, extroverted Florestan and the introspective, melancholy Eusebius — as vessels for emotional extremes that many modern scholars have associated with bipolar disorder. These were not merely literary conceits. They structured his music, giving it a dialectical tension, an inner argument, that animates the piano works and the symphonies alike. His injury did not make him a composer; but it removed the alternative, and in doing so, gave music a voice it would not otherwise have had.  

One Hand, a New Literature

Paul Wittgenstein

And then there is the case that is perhaps the most extraordinary of all — not because it involved a single person overcoming a limitation, but because one person’s refusal to accept that limitation changed what classical music itself contained.

Paul Wittgenstein — brother of the philosopher Ludwig — was a promising pianist when he was called up in the First World War. On the Russian front, he was shot in the right arm. The arm was amputated. He was taken prisoner, and when he returned to Vienna, he returned without the limb that his entire musical life had depended upon.

He did not stop playing. He rebuilt his technique from the ground up, developing a left-hand method that used pedal, arpeggio, and register-leaping to create the illusion of two-handed texture. Listeners heard what sounded like a full piano; they were hearing one hand, moving with extraordinary speed and deliberate intelligence across the keyboard.

But Wittgenstein’s most lasting contribution was not technical — it was his role as a commissioner. He used his family’s considerable wealth to approach the greatest composers of the age and ask them, explicitly, to write for him: for one left hand, against orchestra.

The result was a body of work that might not exist otherwise. Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand — premiered in 1932 — is now considered one of the masterworks of the concerto form, its single-line piano part emerging from the orchestral mass with a dramatic concentration that two hands might have diffused. Prokofiev wrote his Fourth Piano Concerto for Wittgenstein. So did Richard Strauss, Benjamin Britten, and Paul Hindemith.  

Wittgenstein did not always perform these works as written — he was reportedly not above altering passages he found unidiomatic, to the fury of composers — but his existence as a patron and performer forced some of the most brilliant musical minds of the century to ask what they had previously never needed to ask: what can one hand do that two cannot?

The answer, it turned out, was to make the listener lean in. To make absence audible. To discover that constraint, properly inhabited, is not the opposite of expression — but one of its most demanding forms.

What these musicians share is not the triumphalist arc of the inspirational story — adversity overcome, normal life resumed. Their limitations did not disappear. They became, instead, the very condition of their originality: the pressure under which something new was forced into being.

Tunacan Tuna is a cultural journalist and researcher based in Istanbul, writing on music, heritage, and cultural memory across Europe and the Mediterranean.

Fashion Icons in the Classical Music World

 

Fashion Icons in the Classical Music World

 by Donna Elise Maurer  February 19th, 2024

Classical music and fashion don’t seem like a pair that goes together. Opera performers and music conductors are usually associated with their well-pressed suits or tuxedos in most areas of the classical music industry.

There are some classical music icons that stuck out not just for their talents but for their style. They bring attention to things like color, boldness, and just plain “wow” in their fashion choices. What they wear represents themselves, speaking a language to others that coexists with their musicianship.

So, who are these classical music icons? Here are some of the stand-out fashion icons in the classical music world and how they inspire some fashion movements while in the midst of a successful musical career.

Classical Music Fashion Icons

Dalia Stasevska

Dalia Stasevska © Veikko Kähkönen

Born in Ukraine and settled in Finland, Dalia Stasevska is such a classical music icon for always looking good on stage. Her style consists mainly of oversized, flowy kimonos with colorful, stand-out prints.

Stasevska herself has stated she likes having the platform of her music career to feel free in her expression. No formality in classical music says you have to wear something in particular. She credits her fashion sense to a Finnish designer friend who helps her to feel comfortable and look great.   

Anne-Sophie Mutter

Anne-Sophie Mutter © boston globe

German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter has been fashionable and eye-catching since she broke into the classical music scene from the time she was a teenager. Her endless fashionwear of off-the-shoulder, floor-length gowns has raised eyebrows, but she dismisses it. She feels her style is more like a uniform since her dresses are similar in style but vary in color.

Now that she’s older, the style hasn’t changed; she still displays many elegant gowns with simple patterns. It’s contemplative that having a style without neck or shoulder fabric makes it far easier to play, as well as being more comfortable.   

Cameron Carpenter

Cameron Carpenter © stanford live

What is style and music without flair, sparkles, and a bit of showmanship? Cameron Carpenter is a masterful classical musician on the organ but does so with a keen eye for fashion. He often adorns bright, vivid colors, sequins, and, yes – even a fashionable hairstyle when on stage.

His style has been seen as more unusual in the classical world, but he creates such a stage presence and has risen in popularity. His dress and unique clothing apparel have attracted designers and boutique owners who want to partner.

He attributes his style as a reflection of himself and that his initial attraction to playing classical music on the organ was a visual representation. He saw a picture in an encyclopedia of a person playing an organ who was well-dressed, and he viewed it as glamorous. So it’s safe to say that his outward appearance would reflect his love for the instrument!   

Yuja Wang

Yuja Wang © the Art’s Desk

Another icon that has inspired movements attributed to that “naked influence” with her tiny mini dresses is classical Chinese pianist Yuja Wang. Like Stasevska, she wants to be comfortable while she performs and has no problem showcasing it with her fashion choices.

She performed in 2011 for the Hollywood Bowl and was quoted by musical critic Mark Swed as “…it was Yuja Wang’s orange dress for which…. [she] is likely to be remembered.” The dress was short and tight and was paired with 4-inch heels.

Her bold choice later made her a target for those who might have considered it more on the risque side. It has gained her a reputation in the classical music world.

Wang herself has dismissed those opposed to her fashion sense. She has become famous for her style, and in her own words, describes it as “modern and edgy” but also pairs it with the word practical because, when traveling, who has time to iron?

She’s inspiring many young up-and-coming classical musicians who want to showcase their beauty. She puts an emphasis on the fact that she’s young and likes to experiment with her comfort while performing. She is quoted saying, “I can dress in long skirts when I am forty.” The short, clingy dresses draw more attention to her petite frame am body, making a bolder statement when she attacks the piano with big sounds and energy.  

Lang Lang

Lang Lang © langlangofficial

Another pianist icon from China, Lang Lang didn’t draw attention from his clothes exactly, but he gained a massive amount of admiration for his choice of footwear. Young people adore the fun that he finds in classical music, which is showcased by his sneaker choice.

It made such an impact that he became a spokesperson in a shoe deal with Adidas to create a style specifically in his name. He’s inspired millions of children to learn classical music and play the piano because his style and talent have brought life into the art, along with his shoes. His influence has been dubbed “The Lang Lang Effect” due to his megastardom.  

Fashion in Classical Venues

Fashion when attending classical music events has also evolved. In the 1700s and 1800s, wearing your best and most expensive dresses and clothing was necessary. Nowadays, you can get away with going to a classical performance in just a pair of nice jeans and a button-up shirt. While it doesn’t scream sophistication, times have certainly changed and become less strict with their fashion dress codes.

The change in fashion also goes for the performers in classical venues, which hasn’t evolved too much. Back in the 18th century, an orchestra or ensemble was required to perform in uniform, usually a black-tie tuxedo. Black and white dresses have been considered the classic and intelligent choice for performing.

Playing in an orchestra is a group effort, and that black or black-and-white style continues for the performers to this day in an attempt to showcase the group effort. The team of musicians plays classical masterpieces, working in harmony toward the same goal. Starting with effortless guitar songs to learn or violin pieces and piano melodies, and eventually – going forth to put on an incredibly moving and fantastic performance.

In today’s classical music, prestigious events such as opera galas can work to set fashion trends. The Met Gala for Arts, which includes the Metropolitan Opera, is considered one of the world’s most prestigious fashion events.

The red carpet is drawn out, and fashion and style are at the forefront, with multiple news anchors and celebrity followers commenting on the evening. Some famous icons tend to go very bold for this event and wear outrageous and eye-catching dresses, tops, and bottoms to catch the eyes of many admirers. 

Glitz, glamour, and many paths of fashion style are presented. It’s easy to see how there can be an artistic collaboration between classical music and fashion.

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Donna Elise Maurer is a multifaceted artist and educator with a devotion to music and an insatiable curiosity for the arts. Music has been Donna’s lifelong companion, and her expertise spans both piano and guitar. With a career spanning five enriching years in various music schools across New York, Donna has been a guiding light for budding musicians. Her teaching philosophy extends beyond the technicalities, instilling a deep understanding of music theory and a genuine appreciation for the art form itself.

Why Writing a First Symphony Terrified Even the Greatest Composers

 by Emily E. Hogstad  

Writing a first symphony has never been a casual undertaking.

Throughout the history of classical music, the symphony has stood as the ultimate achievement: a genre tied to ambition, talent, and legitimacy, leading to inevitable comparisons to the past. A failed symphony wasn’t just a private disappointment; it unfolded in front of critics, patrons, and rivals.

To compose a symphony is to step directly into the shadow of giants – and for many of history’s greatest composers, that shadow proved terrifying.

From Johannes Brahms wrestling for two decades with the burden of Beethoven’s legacy, to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky suffering physical collapse while finishing his Symphony No. 1, the “first symphony crisis” is a surprisingly common chapter in music history.

Some composers feared they wouldn’t – or couldn’t – measure up. Others feared national humiliation. One nearly lost his career entirely after a disastrous premiere.

Today, we’re looking at six composers who were deeply stressed about writing their first symphony – and what their struggles reveal about the pressure of entering the symphonic tradition.

Ludwig van Beethoven – Symphony No. 1   

Ironically, given the sway that his symphonies would have over future generations, Ludwig van Beethoven himself waited until he was nearly thirty to publish his first symphony.

He had already established himself in Vienna’s music world with piano sonatas and chamber works. But he also understood the heights that his predecessors, Mozart and Haydn, had brought the symphony to. Therefore, even Beethoven felt the weight of the composers who came before him.

Julius Schmid: Beethoven’s Walk in Nature

Beethoven’s first symphony had several striking elements. Its slow introduction and its opening dissonances grab a listener’s ear from the start.

From there, the work’s unexpected accents and sudden dynamic changes reveal him to be a composer willing to innovate and part with the traditions of the past.

Johannes Brahms – Symphony No. 1   

No one had a more infamous struggle while writing his first symphony than Johannes Brahms.

After his mentor, Robert Schumann, declared Brahms the future of music in 1853, when he was only twenty years old, Brahms felt crushed by expectations.

Johannes Brahms

He began sketching his first symphony soon after but, intimidated, abandoned several early attempts.

In 1872, he went so far as to tell a conductor friend, “I shall never write a symphony! You can’t have any idea what it’s like always to hear such a giant [i.e. Beethoven] marching behind you!”

However, after years of growth and artistic maturation, he finally finished his first symphony in 1876. The work’s gestation took over two decades.

Although Brahms’s symphony is recognised as a masterpiece today, it also never escaped that Beethovenian shadow. In fact, similarities between Beethoven’s final symphony and Brahms’s first garnered it the nickname “Beethoven’s Tenth.”

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky – Symphony No. 1   

While writing his first symphony, nicknamed “Winter Dreams”, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky struggled with poor health, dealing with insomnia, headaches, anxiety, and depression. The symptoms got so bad that he was afraid he was dying.

At one point, doctors told him to stop working entirely. He later wrote that he feared he would die before finishing it.

Unlike Brahms, his stress wasn’t only about living up to Beethoven’s legacy. It was also about proving that a Russian composer could master the Austro-Germanic tradition of symphonic writing, while still infusing the work with his Russian identity.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

At this time, a group of five nationalist composers, nicknamed the “Mighty Handful”, were rejecting European academic traditions and trying to establish a uniquely Russian school of music.

“Winter Dreams” was ultimately overshadowed by Tchaikovsky’s later symphonies, but its Russian character encouraged the blossoming of nationalism in Russian – and later Soviet – orchestral music.

Sergei Rachmaninoff – Symphony No. 1  

The premiere of Rachmaninoff’s first symphony was an infamous disaster.

Storm clouds first appeared when elder composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov sat in on a rehearsal and told Rachmaninoff, “Forgive me, but I do not find this music at all agreeable.”

Conductor Alexander Glazunov under-rehearsed the orchestra and made a variety of cuts. He was also an alcoholic, and possibly drunk at the rehearsals and premiere.

Sergei Rachmaninoff

Not surprisingly, the premiere went off the rails so badly that Rachmaninoff fled the concert hall while it was still ongoing. Critics were vicious.

After the failed performance, Rachmaninoff fell into a three-year depression that required hypnotherapy before he could compose again.

For years, the symphony’s score was deemed lost, and it was only reconstructed in 1945, after Rachmaninoff’s death. Today, the work is often reassessed as bold and structurally ambitious.

A few years after the catastrophic failure, Rachmaninoff came back with his second piano concerto, one of the most famous pieces of classical music ever written.

But his first symphony nearly ended his career before it began.

Jean Sibelius – Symphony No. 1   

Jean Sibelius waited until his thirties to compose his first symphony, which was written between 1898 and 1899. It came after he heard Tchaikovsky’s final symphony performed in Helsinki in the mid-1890s.

He related to Tchaikovsky’s music, writing to his wife, “There is much in that man that I recognise in myself.”

Daniel Nyblin: Jean Sibelius, ca 1898–1900

Despite that, he was Finnish at a time of tension with Russia and rising nationalism, and he wanted his music to make statements about Finnish identity.

He was unsatisfied after the symphony’s premiere in the spring of 1899, and embarked on revisions in 1900.

Unfortunately for Sibelius, his mental block surrounding symphonies would surface again at the end of his career, after he’d written seven symphonies.

His eighth symphony was commissioned and even scheduled for performance, but he never finished the score. Before he died, he burned what he’d written.

The fate of that scrapped eighth symphony demonstrates how deeply Sibelius identified with the symphony as a measure of artistic legitimacy – and how reluctant he was to release a symphony he felt was less than perfect.

Gustav Mahler – Symphony No. 1   

Remarkably, Gustav Mahler – who would go on to become one of the foremost symphonists of his generation – was initially leery about presenting his first symphony as such.

In fact, at its 1889 premiere in Budapest, he didn’t even call it a symphony. Instead, he labelled it a “Symphonic Poem in Two Parts.”

Despite the hedging, critics were hostile. For years afterwards, Mahler dithered. He revised it repeatedly, cut a movement, rewrote the orchestration, and even provided a program to guide listeners through the work’s story (and then retracted it).

Gustav Mahler

Throughout his career, Mahler advocated for Beethoven’s music; he even arranged Beethoven’s symphonies for a larger, late-Romantic orchestra.

When it came to composition, Mahler metabolised Beethoven’s influence in his work, from using a choir in the final movement of his second symphony to employing an echo of the “fate theme” from Beethoven’s fifth in his own fifth symphony.

Mahler clearly understood the lineage behind the Austro-Germanic symphony and respected it. That was reflected in his work, from his first symphony – and beyond.

Conclusion

The first symphony is rarely just a beginning. It is a declaration to the musical world: I have something big and important to say.

For Brahms, that declaration took more than twenty years to make. For Tchaikovsky, the idea of doing so ruined his health. For Rachmaninoff, it triggered a crisis that nearly silenced him forever. Even Sibelius, Mahler, and Beethoven approached their first entries into the genre with caution, insecurity, and an acute awareness of the genre’s storied history.

The irony is striking: many of the composers who feared writing their first symphony ended up redefining the genre.

Maybe that’s the true test of a symphonist: the willingness to stand in the shadow of the past, be intimidated by it – and still write anyway.