The waves of nationalism that had surged throughout Europe during the years of the Belle Époque, and reached a peak of ferocity in World War I, came to a pivotal point with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919. The division of Eastern Europe was one of the major topics of the treaty negotiations, as the three empires…

The outbreak of World War I in August 1914 brought the years of the Belle Époque to a violent and abrupt end. Once the fighting started, it was only a matter of weeks before Parisians found the war at their doorstep in September’s battle of the Marne…

During the years of the Belle Époque in Paris, artmaking wasn’t happening in any royal court – it was happening in people’s living rooms. Paris’s patrons of the arts and artists alike, such as the heiress and royal-by-marriage Winnaretta Singer, the symbolist poet Stephane Mallarmé, and the soprano Emma Bardac…

The second foreign language I studied as a child, after Modern Greek, was French. As a result, when I began studying voice in earnest, the first non-English songs my teacher assigned me were songs in French by Reynaldo Hahn and Gabriel Fauré. It was through these songs that I discovered my love of singing classical music…

In the summer of 2003, I had the honor of representing the United States of America at the BBC Singer of the World competition in Cardiff, Wales. The competition is a sort of operatic Olympics, with singers coming from 20-25 nations to compete in the final rounds for a handful of prizes…

Wishing everyone (who celebrates it) all the best for a very happy Thanksgiving holiday with a bit of Copland. Here’s to more opportunities for fellowship and to finding more and more common ground on which we can gather together…

…Blake’s poem, The Piper, is about inspiration and where it comes from. Singing it here this week in Maine has had me thinking about creative inspiration in my own life, which is something I (like any artist) have grappled with over the years. While I have heavily relied on the tools of Julia Cameron’s Artist Way books over the years…