Music, film, literature, painting, theater, the cultural works that define modern artistic life.
In Earwitness: Fifty Characters (1974), Elias Canetti revived the ancient art of the character sketch with fifty brief, comic portraits of human types.
Read the full story →In Kafka's Other Trial (1969), Elias Canetti used Franz Kafka's letters to Felice Bauer to illuminate the inner life behind The Trial.
Read the full story →Elias Canetti's later memoirs, The Torch in My Ear (1980) and The Play of the Eyes (1985), portray the intellectual life of Vienna and Frankfurt before the Second World War.
Read the full story →Elias Canetti's The Voices of Marrakesh, a short book of impressions from a 1954 journey to Morocco, became a classic of travel writing.
Read the full story →After ten years of refusing to speak of the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel wrote Night, which has since been translated into 30 languages and sold millions of copies in the United States.
Read the full story →In June 1898 Emile Berliner and his brother Joseph founded Deutsche Grammophon in Hanover, now the world's oldest surviving established record company.
Read the full story →Emma Lazarus's "By the Waters of Babylon", about the exile of the Jews from Spain, is credited by the Jewish Women's Archive as the first prose poem in English.
Read the full story →Emma Lazarus's 1881 book Poems and Ballads of Heinrich Heine contains renderings considered among the best English translations of the German Jewish poet.
Read the full story →In 1883 Emma Lazarus wrote 'The New Colossus', the sonnet that turned the Statue of Liberty into a symbol of welcome for the world's refugees and immigrants.
Read the full story →In 1935, needing work, Gombrich wrote A Little History of the World for young readers in about a month; it was translated into 18 languages and became a bestseller again in English 70 years later.
Read the full story →Gombrich's The Story of Art (1950), written in plain language for young readers, has sold more than eight million copies in over 30 languages and taught generations how to look at art.
Read the full story →Felix Mendelssohn's oratorio Elijah, on the story of the Hebrew prophet, was commissioned by the Birmingham Festival and premiered at the city's Town Hall on 26 August 1846.
Read the full story →In 1833 Felix Mendelssohn opened the Lower Rhenish Music Festival in Düsseldorf with Handel's Israel in Egypt, prepared from the original score, sparking a Handel revival in Germany.
Read the full story →Visiting Scotland in 1829, Felix Mendelssohn wrote down the opening theme of his Hebrides Overture on the spot after seeing Fingal's Cave, sending it home in a letter that evening.
Read the full story →In 1843 Felix Mendelssohn founded the Leipzig Conservatory, recruiting Robert Schumann and Ignaz Moscheles; it still exists today and bears his name.
Read the full story →On 21 March 1839 Felix Mendelssohn conducted the premiere of Franz Schubert's Ninth Symphony in Leipzig, more than a decade after Schubert's death, after Robert Schumann found the manuscript.
Read the full story →In 1829, aged 20, Felix Mendelssohn conducted Bach's all-but-forgotten St Matthew Passion in Berlin, the central event in the revival of Bach's music across Europe.
Read the full story →Felix Mendelssohn wrote his Violin Concerto in E minor in 1844 for his friend Ferdinand David; Joseph Joachim ranked it among the four great violin concertos.
Read the full story →Felix Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, from his music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the tune of Hark! The Herald Angels Sing both come from his music.
Read the full story →In Against Apion, written around the year 97, Flavius Josephus answered the false charges circulating about the Jews, including an early version of the blood libel, with evidence and argument.
Read the full story →Flavius Josephus's histories, The Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews, are, next to the Bible, the chief written source for Judea in the Second Temple period, and historians and archaeologists still rely on them today.
Read the full story →Dying of tuberculosis of the throat in 1924, Franz Kafka was still editing his final story collection, A Hunger Artist, which appeared soon after his death.
Read the full story →The word Kafkaesque entered languages around the world to describe nightmarish bureaucracy, and W. H. Auden called Franz Kafka the Dante of the twentieth century.
Read the full story →Franz Kafka's novella The Metamorphosis, published in 1915, about a salesman who wakes up as a giant insect, is regarded as one of the seminal works of 20th-century fiction.
Read the full story →George Gershwin wrote his tone poem An American in Paris in 1928 after a stay in Paris, where Nadia Boulanger and Maurice Ravel declined to teach him for fear of spoiling his style.
Read the full story →George Gershwin followed Rhapsody in Blue with his Piano Concerto in F in 1925, a work that has become an established part of the classical repertoire.
Read the full story →George Gershwin's 1935 opera Porgy and Bess, written for a cast of classically trained African American singers, is now staged by opera houses around the world.
Read the full story →Written in about five weeks, George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue premiered in New York on 12 February 1924 and brought jazz into the concert hall.
Read the full story →Gustav Mahler's first production as director of the Vienna Court Opera in 1897 was Smetana's Czech national opera Dalibor, defying German nationalists in the city.
Read the full story →Although he did not write atonal music himself, Gustav Mahler fiercely defended the young Arnold Schoenberg, whose circle became the Second Viennese School.
Read the full story →On 12 September 1910 Gustav Mahler conducted the premiere of his choral Eighth Symphony in Munich, the greatest success of his lifetime as a composer.
Read the full story →Banned as degenerate by the Nazis, Gustav Mahler's symphonies were revived after the war and became among the most frequently performed and recorded in the world.
Read the full story →As director of the Vienna Court Opera from 1897 to 1907, Gustav Mahler staged 33 new operas and transformed performance standards, and his symphonies now rank among the most performed.
Read the full story →The co-creator of Curious George thought star maps were too hard for beginners, so in The Stars: A New Way to See Them (1952) he redrew the constellations as shapes people could actually see in the sky.
Read the full story →Harold Pinter’s “comedies of menace” taught theatre that ordinary, halting conversation, full of pauses and evasions, can reveal who holds power over whom, a way of writing so distinctive that “Pinteresque” entered the language.
Read the full story →In 1985 Harold Pinter and Arthur Miller travelled to Turkey on a mission for International PEN to investigate and protest the torture of imprisoned writers, and what Pinter saw there became the play Mountain Language.
Read the full story →Heinrich Heine's Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs), published in 1827, became one of the most popular books of German poetry ever published.
Read the full story →Heinrich Heine's Die Harzreise (The Harz Journey), published in 1826, created a new style of German travel writing, mixing Romantic nature description with satire.
Read the full story →Heinrich Heine's lyrics were set to music by Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Liszt, Wagner and many more, including Schumann's song cycle Dichterliebe.
Read the full story →From Paris, where he settled in 1831, Heinrich Heine saw himself as a mediator between Germany and France, explaining each nation to the other.
Read the full story →Inspired by the island of Norderney, Heinrich Heine wrote Die Nordsee (The North Sea), free verse poems that appeared in his Travel Pictures of 1826 and 1827.
Read the full story →Paralysed and bedridden from 1848 until his death in 1856, Heinrich Heine kept writing, producing the poetry collection Romanzero and the journalism of Lutezia.
Read the full story →In Laughter (1900), Henri Bergson argued that comedy arises from "something mechanical encrusted on the living" and that laughter helps make social life possible.
Read the full story →Imre Kertész wrote the screenplay for Fateless, the 2005 Hungarian film of his Holocaust novel, directed by Lajos Koltai.
Read the full story →Imre Kertész's novel Fatelessness, about a Jewish boy in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, was first rejected by Hungary's Communist regime but published in 1975.
Read the full story →Imre Kertész's novels Fatelessness (1975), Fiasco (1988) and Kaddish for an Unborn Child (1990) form a trilogy about surviving the Holocaust and its aftermath.
Read the full story →Imre Kertész supported himself for years as a translator, bringing Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein, Schnitzler and Canetti into Hungarian.
Read the full story →Irving Berlin's 1911 hit "Alexander's Ragtime Band" made him a star, revived ragtime and sparked a national dance craze.
Read the full story →After Jerome Kern's sudden death, Irving Berlin took over Annie Get Your Gun and wrote what is considered his finest Broadway score, including "There's No Business Like Show Business".
Read the full story →Irving Berlin's song "Blue Skies" was featured in The Jazz Singer (1927), the first feature-length talking picture, sung by Al Jolson.
Read the full story →Irving Berlin, a refugee with no formal musical training, wrote "White Christmas", the best-selling single ever, and gave all royalties from "God Bless America" to the Scouts.
Read the full story →In 2002 W. W. Norton published The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, translated by Peter Constantine, edited by his daughter Nathalie and introduced by Cynthia Ozick.
Read the full story →Isaac Babel's Odessa Stories, published in 1921–1924 and collected in 1931, brought Odessa's Jewish Moldavanka district to life through the gangster Benya Krik.
Read the full story →Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry stories, drawn from the Polish-Soviet War of 1920, showed readers the brutal realities of war, far from the propaganda of the time.
Read the full story →Isaac Babel's play Sunset, set in Odessa's Jewish Moldavanka, premiered in Baku in 1927 and was staged at the Moscow Art Theatre; Boris Pasternak called it remarkable.
Read the full story →Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote 14 children's books, including the acclaimed Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories, some illustrated by Maurice Sendak.
Read the full story →Isaac Bashevis Singer's first novel, Satan in Goray, serialised in 1933, explored a messianic movement in a Polish Jewish village after the 1648 massacres.
Read the full story →J. D. Salinger's 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye has been translated into 30 languages and, according to The Guardian, has sold more than 65 million copies.
Read the full story →With Fancy Free in 1944 and his touring company Ballets: U.S.A. from 1958, Jerome Robbins brought contemporary American life, jazz and humour into ballet and carried it to new audiences.
Read the full story →Jerome Robbins conceived, directed and choreographed West Side Story, a Broadway musical about ethnic hatred between rival gangs that put dance at the heart of the drama.
Read the full story →“A friend is devoted at all times; a brother is born to share adversity.”