Composers

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina is the supreme master of Renaissance polyphony and the composer whose music became the universal model for strict counterpoint. Born near Rome around 1525, he served the great churches of…

Claudio Monteverdi stands at the threshold between the Renaissance and Baroque eras, credited as the father of opera and a revolutionary force in Western music. Born in Cremona, he served as maestro di cappella in Mantua…

Arcangelo Corelli was the most celebrated violinist-composer of the seventeenth century, whose fastidiously refined output — just six published collections — established the models for the sonata and the concerto grosso …

Henry Purcell is the greatest English composer before the twentieth century, and one of the most original voices in all of Baroque music. Born in London and raised in the Chapel Royal, he became organist of Westminster A…

Antonio Vivaldi, the "Red Priest" of Venice, was the most prolific composer of the Baroque era and the man who, more than any other, defined and popularized the solo concerto. Born in Venice to a barber-violinist father,…

Jean-Philippe Rameau was simultaneously the greatest French composer of the eighteenth century and the most important music theorist of the Baroque era. He spent most of his career as a church organist in the provinces, …

Johann Sebastian Bach is the culminating figure of the Baroque era and, in the judgment of most musicians and scholars since, the greatest composer who ever lived. Born in Eisenach into a dynasty of musicians, he served …

George Frideric Handel was born in the same year as Bach, in a town forty miles away, and the two men never met — yet together they define the apogee of the Baroque. Where Bach was parochial and deeply rooted in a German…

Gottfried Kirchhoff was a German Baroque organist and composer who served as organist at the Marktkirche Unser Lieben Frauen in Halle — the same city where Handel grew up. A contemporary of J.S. Bach, Kirchhoff is rememb…

Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg was a German music theorist, critic, and composer whose Abhandlung von der Fuge (Treatise on Fugue, 1753–1754) became one of the most comprehensive and influential studies of fugal composition e…

François-Joseph Fétis was a Belgian music theorist, historian, critic, and composer whose extraordinary breadth of activity made him one of the most influential musical figures of the nineteenth century. As director of t…

Johann Joseph Fux was an Austrian composer and music theorist whose treatise Gradus ad Parnassum (1725) became the most influential counterpoint manual in the history of Western music — and the work from which this schoo…

Knud Jeppesen was a Danish musicologist and composer whose rigorous analytical studies of Renaissance counterpoint — particularly the music of Palestrina — transformed how the twentieth century understood and taught poly…

Franz Joseph Haydn spent almost thirty years in the service of the Esterházy princes at their remote Hungarian estate, producing music on demand for a superb private orchestra — an arrangement that might have been artist…

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is the central figure of the Classical era and, for most listeners and musicians, the most naturally gifted composer who has ever lived. Born in Salzburg to a musician father who was also his teac…

Ludwig van Beethoven is the hinge on which Western musical history turns. Born in Bonn and trained under Haydn in Vienna, he dominated European musical life for three decades — the only composer of his era who was acknow…

Franz Schubert was born in Vienna in 1797 and died there in 1828 at just thirty-one years old, leaving behind a body of work astonishing in both quantity and quality. The son of a schoolmaster, he studied under Salieri a…

Robert Schumann was born in Zwickau, Saxony in 1810 and died in an asylum near Bonn in 1856, following a mental breakdown that had incapacitated him for the last two years of his life. He trained as a pianist but a self-…

Frédéric Chopin was born near Warsaw in 1810 and died in Paris in 1849 at thirty-nine years old, almost certainly of tuberculosis. He left Poland at twenty and spent nearly all his creative life in Paris, where he became…

Felix Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg in 1809 into one of the wealthiest and most cultured families in Germany — grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn — and died in Leipzig in 1847 at thirty-eight years old. A ch…

Hector Berlioz was born near Grenoble in 1803 and died in Paris in 1869. He came to music from literature — his first passion — and his approach to composition was always fundamentally poetic: music had to mean something…

Franz Liszt was born in the Austro-Hungarian village of Doborján in 1811 and died in Bayreuth in 1886. He was the most celebrated pianist of the nineteenth century — his concert tours of the 1840s generated a fan hysteri…

Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg in 1833 to a working-class family and died in Vienna in 1897, having spent the last thirty years of his life as the most admired composer of absolute music in the German-speaking world…

Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig in 1813 and died in Venice in 1883, having transformed opera so completely that everything before him now sounds different and everything after him was written in his shadow. His life w…

Anton Bruckner was born in Ansfelden, Upper Austria in 1824 and died in Vienna in 1896, leaving his Ninth Symphony unfinished — he asked that his Te Deum be performed in place of the missing finale. The son of a village …

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Votkinsk, Russia in 1840 and died in St. Petersburg in 1893, four days after conducting the premiere of his Sixth Symphony — probably of cholera, though the circumstances have generat…

Antonín Dvořák was born in Nelahozeves, Bohemia in 1841, the son of an innkeeper, and died in Prague in 1904 as the most celebrated Czech composer of the nineteenth century. He worked as an orchestral viola player before…

Gustav Mahler was born in Kalischt, Bohemia in 1860 into a Jewish family and died in Vienna in 1911 at fifty years old, leaving his Tenth Symphony unfinished. He was the greatest conductor of his generation — director of…

Richard Strauss was born in Munich in 1864 and died in Garmisch in 1949 at eighty-five years old — a lifespan that stretched from the premiere of Brahms's Third Symphony to the premiere of Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphoni…

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was born in Tikhvin, Novgorod Province in 1844 and died near St. Petersburg in 1908. A naval officer by training, he was a largely self-taught composer who became one of the most accomplished orch…

Modest Mussorgsky was born in Karevo, Pskov Province in 1839 and died in St. Petersburg in 1881 at forty-two years old, a victim of alcoholism. He came from a provincial gentry family and was trained as a military office…

Alexander Borodin was a Russian composer and chemist who, despite composing only in his spare time from a distinguished scientific career, produced some of the most vivid and original music of the nineteenth century. A m…

Ottorino Respighi was born in Bologna in 1879 and died in Rome in 1936. He studied in St. Petersburg with Rimsky-Korsakov, whose orchestral brilliance and coloristic method left a permanent mark on his own approach, and …

Edward Elgar was the first major English composer since Purcell to achieve international recognition, and his music single-handedly revived the reputation of English orchestral composition after two centuries of continen…

Edvard Grieg was the foremost composer of Norwegian Romantic nationalism and the musician who placed Scandinavian music on the international map. Trained at the Leipzig Conservatory but inspired by the folk music of his …

Gustav Holst was a British composer whose orchestral suite The Planets (1914–1916) is one of the most spectacular and influential works of the twentieth century. A lifelong student of Sanskrit literature, English folk so…

Sergei Rachmaninoff was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor whose music represents the final flowering of the Russian Romantic tradition. One of the greatest pianists in history, he composed works of sweeping emot…

Camille Saint-Saëns was a French composer, organist, and pianist of prodigious gifts whose vast output spans virtually every genre of nineteenth-century music. A child prodigy compared to Mozart, he became the most techn…

Jean Sibelius was a Finnish composer whose seven symphonies represent one of the most original and compelling contributions to the symphonic tradition since Beethoven. In a period when Mahler was expanding the symphony t…

Claude Debussy was born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1862 and died in Paris in 1918, during a German bombardment of the city, of rectal cancer. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire from the age of ten, won the Prix de Ro…

Maurice Ravel was born in Ciboure in the Basque region in 1875 and died in Paris in 1937 following brain surgery for a neurological condition — possibly frontotemporal dementia — that had silenced him as a composer for t…

Igor Stravinsky was born in Oranienbaum near St. Petersburg in 1882 and died in New York in 1971, the most celebrated and adaptable composer of the twentieth century. He studied privately with Rimsky-Korsakov, whose deat…

Samuel Barber was an American composer whose lyrical, emotionally direct music made him one of the most performed and beloved American composers of the twentieth century. In an era dominated by avant-garde experimentatio…

Béla Bartók was born in Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary (now Romania) in 1881 and died in New York in 1945, weeks before completing his Viola Concerto. He was simultaneously one of the twentieth century's greatest composers and…

Sergei Prokofiev was born in Sontsovka in eastern Ukraine in 1891 and died in Moscow in 1953 — on the same day as Stalin, a coincidence that meant his death went largely unnoticed, as all public attention was absorbed by…

Dmitri Shostakovich was born in St. Petersburg in 1906 and died in Moscow in 1975. He was the most gifted musician of the Soviet era and also its most politically compromised — condemned by Stalin's cultural apparatus in…

Arnold Schoenberg was born in Vienna in 1874 and died in Los Angeles in 1951. He invented the twelve-tone technique, the most systematic and influential formal innovation in Western music since the establishment of tonal…

Alban Berg was born in Vienna in 1885 and died in Vienna on Christmas Eve 1935 from blood poisoning following an insect sting, at the age of fifty. He was Schoenberg's most gifted pupil and the most humanly accessible co…

Anton Webern was born in Vienna in 1883 and died in Mittersill, Austria, in 1945, shot by an American soldier in an accidental confrontation during the post-war occupation. He was Schoenberg's other great pupil and the o…

Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1900 to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents and died in North Tarrytown, New York, in 1990. He studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger from 1921 to 1924, absorbing both the neo…

Benjamin Britten was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, in 1913 and died in Aldeburgh in 1976, having spent the final years of his life in increasing cardiac decline but continuing to compose. He was the pre-eminent British com…

Nadia Boulanger was the most influential composition teacher of the twentieth century — arguably the most influential in Western music history after Fux. From her apartment on the Rue Ballu in Paris and later at the Amer…

Olivier Messiaen was born in Avignon in 1908 and died in Paris in 1992. He was the most profoundly religious composer of the twentieth century and one of its most systematically innovative theorists. His Catholicism — sp…

Ralph Vaughan Williams was the central figure of the English musical renaissance of the twentieth century, a composer who forged a distinctive national voice by fusing English folk song, Tudor church music, and the modal…

John Williams was born in Floral Park, New York, in 1932. He studied piano at Juilliard, worked as a jazz pianist, and then entered film music as a session musician and orchestrator in the 1950s and 1960s. His first majo…

Leonard Bernstein was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1918 to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents and died in New York in 1990. He was simultaneously the most charismatic conductor of his generation, a distinguished com…