This inner torment has put paid to many careers.George Harrison, Barbra Streisand and concert pianist Claudio Arrau have been crippled by it.

MEXICO CITY(AP) — The first thing opera buff Marcelo Perez did when he retired eight years ago was take a bus to the U.S. border and then a train to New York, where he realized a lifelong dream by catching a performance at the Metropolitan Opera.

The Telegraph’s music critic Ivan Hewett sat with Stephen Fry on the winning side of a debate about whether classical music is irrelevant to today’s youth.

BEIJING – It says something about the brand-conscious culture here that classical music is also a slave to fashion. Only last season, “Turandot” was still threatening to become China’s national opera. Now, 2010-11 has become the season of “Tosca.”

JOHANN Sebastian Bach died 260 years ago, and the man and his music have been well-eulogised, swathed in a “fog of sanctity”, as Martin Jarvis puts it.

The English National Opera can hardly be accused of artistic stasis, having announced operas by four living composers as part of its 2011-12 season. Among them is John Adams and Alice Goodman’s 1991 work, “The Death of Klinghoffer,” about the hijacking in 1985 of the cruise ship Achille Lauro by the Palestine Liberation Front.

Harvard University’s Loeb Music Library is the recipient of a large part of Sir Georg Solti’s archive, including hundreds of marked scores, the University announced yesterday. The Library is already home to Solti’s recordings archive for British Decca from 1947-1997, a collection said to include collaborations with most of the major artists on the world’s stages during that time span. Solti holds the world record for the most Grammy awards – in any category.

HERE’S an often overlooked bit of music history: Gustav Mahler, who died in Vienna a century ago today, was a New Yorker for the last three years of his life and, for that brief time, arguably the most famous musician in town. It’s not a trivial point — as a conductor at the Metropolitan Opera and then at the New York Philharmonic, he set musical standards that resonate even today.

FIRST there was the Mozart Effect, a US-led theory that listening to the music of Wolfgang Amadeus improves mental performance. Now there is the Lang Lang Effect, a term coined by the US Today Show to explain the fact more than 40 million children in China are learning the piano, all of them inspired by one young Chinese pianist.

In a world of instant musical gratification, where tunes from any genre or artist are available at the click of a mouse, can classical music remain relevant to the digital generation?