Composer

Born 200 years ago on Oct. 22, Franz Liszt changed music history. Even if the Hungarian-born pianist/composer had not done so, people would probably still remember him, if only for his romances. There was the dancer, Lola, who got so mad when Liszt tired of her that she followed him from city to city, finally crashing a banquet given in his honor and boogieing on a table in front of a startled crowd. And Olga, who, likewise faced with Liszt's waning affections, disguised herself as a gardener and burst into his villa ready to stab him. She settled for one more bout of lovemaking that night, but soon hounded him again, this time with a revolver and poison.

Robert Schumann heard so much music in his head, he felt compelled to compose. "I cannot help it," he wrote to his wife, Clara, "and should like to sing myself to death, like a nightingale. " When he died at the age of 46 in an asylum, the only sounds he made were unintelligible to Clara and the doctors. It was a pathetic end to one of the greatest figures of 19th-century German Romanticism. This weekend, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra will examine Schumann's troubled mind in an "Off the Cuff" presentation led by music director Marin Alsop.

Live Arts Maryland's season-closing production of "The Music Man" at Maryland Hall brought a pre-World War I small town to life with skilled musical direction and several memorable vocal performances. Music director J. Ernest Green led the Annapolis Chorale, Annapolis Chamber Orchestra and cast members in the April 29-30 weekend performances of the musical, set in 1912, which sees a traveling salesman/con man change his ways. Composer-lyricist Meredith Willson's musical tale won the 1958 Tony Award for best musical, somehow besting Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story" that year to place Willson at the top of Broadway composers.

Robert F. Twynham, the long-serving organist and music director at the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Mary Our Queen who created a popular Sunday musical series, died of a gastric obstruction March 23 at his Reservoir Hill home. He was 80. Though deaf in one ear and blind in one eye, he led the musical program at the cathedral for 37 years. News articles said he served under six rectors and three archbishops, two of them cardinals. He established a much-praised choral department, composed several major sacred works and a library of music for weekly worship, presented a long-running weekly concert series and oversaw sacred music-dramas.

Baltimore's opera scene takes an intriguing turn this weekend when The Figaro Project presents the premieres this weekend of three one-act works by local composers. "The goal was to give a sampling of contemporary opera, but I didn't want to overwhelm anyone," said Caitlin Vincent, a Peabody Conservatory-trained soprano who founded The Figaro Project in 2009. "I contacted composers I was interested in working with and asked for works under 40 minutes and in English. Each composer wrote his own libretto.

The boy was 11, already well along in his process of discovering music, when he found himself alone at home one day, listening to a piece by one of history's great romantics. He couldn't explain it, but something in the sounds of Frederic Chopin's Ballade No. 1 in G Minor, Opus 23 — as played by Polish musician Witold Malcuzynsky — struck Brian Ganz like a bolt from stormy skies. "It was mysterious, sort of soulful, and I actually, literally, doubled over in pain," says Ganz, an internationally celebrated concert pianist who lives in Annapolis.

Francis Ford Coppola must be listening to Baltimore electronic music at his California vineyard. The Academy Award-winning filmmaker of the "Godfather" movies tapped local musician Dan Deacon to score his upcoming movie, "Twixt Now and Sunrise," which stars Val Kilmer and Elle Fanning. Deacon, who was classically trained at the State University of New York at Purchase, is now better known for founding the artists' collective Wham City in Baltimore and making hyperkinetic dance music.

As a child, Lorraine Whittlesey was a member of TV's Peanut Gallery, helping make a star of an excitable, squeaky-voiced marionette named Howdy Doody. Next weekend, she'll be sitting in the audience at the Theatre Project , watching the world premiere of her musical based on a contentedly clueless comic-strip Pinhead named Zippy. The symmetry of such a creative continuum isn't lost on Whittlesey. She laughs heartily at the notion that there's a straight line connecting Howdy, the loose-limbed child's puppet that played sidekick to Buffalo Bob Smith for decades, to Zippy, an often befuddling, if not befuddled, observer of modern society whose non-sequiturs have become unwitting pop-culture catchphrases.