Wagner’s music deeply resonated with me in a spiritual way, with its forward-looking harmonies that ushered in the radical transformation of early 20th-century music, in a abstract expressionist way.

One hundred years ago, on his death bed, Ludwig van Beethoven whispered: “Applaud, friends, the comedy is finished.” An immortal, it has been said, knows nothing of his immortality. One century is ...

The first modern German empire was announced by Otto von Bismarck at Versailles in 1871; it died on the Western Front in 1918. The second German empire was forged in a swift march of annexations and ...

9 B.C.: Pagan Germanic tribes check advancing Romans in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, ending northward spread of Roman civilization, bounding the Roman Empire by the Danube and Rhine. c.700 A.D.