In January of 2010, the MFAH Archives received a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to study and plan the implementation of a trustworthy electronic records archive over a two-year period. The objective of the grant is to extend the archival function of preserving the museum’s permanent records into the electronic realm, since, after all, that is how records are created these days. Two years seemed a luxurious amount of time back...

On Sunday afternoon, four members of the Houston Grand Opera Orchestra- Timothy Hester,(Fortepiano), Oleg Sulyga (Violin), Rene Salazar (Viola), and Barrett Sills (Cello)- will perform Mozart’s Piano Quartets in Rienzi’s Gallery Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is probably one of the most well known Classical music composers. Born in 1856 to Leopold and Anna Maria Pertl Mozart, young Wolfgang was taught violin and keyboard by his father, a composer and music teacher. An...

On Sunday, October 16th, Early Music Southwest, an international collaboration of baroque musicians, will open their Rienzi recital series with “Schubertiade.” This performance will highlight the Austrian composer Franz Schubert’s famous song cycle Die schöne Müllerin. Die schöne Müllerin is based on Shöne Müllerin, a lyric sequence written by one of Schubert’s contemporaries, the German poet Wilhlem Müller. In 1820, the 23 poems that form Shöne Müllerin were published in Müller’s Sixty-Seven Poems from the Papers...

 Dear Readers, We would like to say thank you to all who came to the Punch Party last night! We hope you had a jolly evening and will come back and visit Rienzi for a tour, or for any of our many other public programs. We also want to give a special thanks to CultureMap, 13 celsius, and Divisi Strings’ AMP’D for helping to make the evening a success! Check out the slide show for...

The abundance at our dining table might never have come together, if not for guidance from the omniscient hands of Mrs. Elizabeth Raffald. The Experienced English Housekeeper, written in 1769 by Mrs. Raffald, was used as a model for the dining table in Rienzi’s exhibition. I am delighted that we are able to honor Mrs. Raffald, by laying out one more dinner course to her keen specifications. What the housekeeper-turned-author would have thought, if she...