Composers
Béla Bartók (1881–1945) is, after Franz Liszt, the most important composer from Hungary. Among Bartók’s best-known works is his Concerto for Orchestra (1944). Unlike what its title might suggest, the work does not feature a single soloist; rather, Bartók chose the name because of his virtuosic treatment of every orchestral family. Notable sections of the piece include its second movement, a “Game of Pairs.“ Bartók wrote six string quartets, which are arguably the most influential works in that genre after Beethoven’s. Bartók’s quartets contain many examples of his “night music,“ music that is intended to evoke quiet, moonlit natural scenes. Bartók’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle, based on a folk tale, follows a new bride as she opens a series of doors. In addition to his work as a composer, Bartók was a pioneer in the field of ethnomusicology, the study of folk music, and was among the first to use a phonograph to record folk music as performed by rural peoples.
Claude Debussy (1862–1918) was a French composer who developed a modernist style of composition as a reaction against the work of Richard Wagner. Debussy is often described as an Impressionist composer, though he despised being labeled as such. Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (1894) is an orchestral work that begins with a solo flute playing a descending and ascending partial chromatic scale; the work was later choreographed as a solo ballet by Vaslav Nijinsky. Debussy’s work often used non-traditional scales and harmonic progression—his two books of Preludes for solo piano include “Voiles“ (“Sails“), which utilizes the whole-tone scale; and “The Engulfed Cathedral,“ a musical depiction of the legend of Ys that features chords moving up and down in parallel planing, as opposed to traditional progression. Debussy’s only opera was 1902’s Pelléas et Mélisande, based on the play of the same name by Maurice Maeterlinck; rather than use a prepared libretto, Debussy set the text of the play as Maeterlinck originally wrote it.
Paul Hindemith (1895–1965) was a German composer who moved to the United States to escape Nazi persecution. Hindemith’s music is often cited as an early example of new tonality—music that has a clear tonic pitch, but which does not follow traditional rules of harmony. Among Hindemith’s best-known works is his opera Mathis der Maler (Matthias the Painter), based on the life of the 16th-century artist Matthias Grünewald, who created the Isenheim Altarpiece. Much of Hindemith’s music fit into his ideal of Gebrauchsmusik, or “music for use“—works written for a specific purpose, time, or ensemble. During Hindemith’s time in America, he taught at Yale University, where his students included many of the most notable American composers of the later 20th century; his pedagogical texts are still used in the teaching of music today. Hindemith was a virtuoso violist, and premiered the solo part in his viola concerto Der Schwanendreher.
Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) is often cited as the most important symphonist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During his life, Mahler’s composing time was very limited—he was a renowned conductor, leading at various times the Vienna State Opera, as well as the New York Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera. Mahler’s best known works are his nine completed symphonies; many of his early symphonies incorporate his settings of poems from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. His Fifth Symphony (1902) includes an oft-excerpted Adagietto for strings and harp generally considered a love song for his wife, Alma. Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, whose enormous performing forces led it to being nicknamed the “Symphony of a Thousand,“ sets both the hymn “Veni, Creator Spiritus“ and the concluding section of Goethe’s Faust. Mahler’s life was marked by tragedy, including the death of his daughter Maria and his discovery he had a heart defect that would eventually kill him; his Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), a vocal symphony that sets translated Chinese poetry, was a major expression of his despair.
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) was a Russian composer who moved to the United States following the Russian Revolution. Rachmaninoff, in addition to being a composer, was a virtuoso pianist, renowned for his massive hands that allowed him to play extremely wide chords. Rachmaninoff suffered a major setback early in his career when his First Symphony was criticized by Russian composer Cesar Cui as being a product of a “conservatory in Hell;“ Rachmaninoff subsequently fell into a deep depression and did not write for nearly three years, until intense hypnotherapy helped him overcome his demons and write his Second Piano Concerto. Rachmaninoff wrote a total of four piano concertos, which have become some of the most popular and oft-performed works in the entire genre. His Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, a concerto-like work for piano and orchestra, consists of a set of 24 variations on the 24th and final of composer Niccolò Paganini’s caprices for solo violin.
Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) was a French composer who, along with Debussy, was commonly described as Impressionist; like Debussy, he hated being labeled as such. Ravel’s best-known work is Bolero (1928), an orchestral work based on a single repeating melody over a snare drum ostinato (a constantly-repeated rhythm), to which is gradually added more and more of the orchestra; Ravel conceived the work as an attempt to write “one very long, gradual crescendo.“ Ravel—like nearly all Europeans—was deeply affected by World War I; his 1917 piano suite Le tombeau de Couperin modernizes the form of a Baroque dance suite, and contains six movements that each memorialize a friend who died in the war. Ravel was a master of orchestration; his orchestral version of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition is still the version most commonly performed today.
Erik Satie (1866–1925) was a modernist French composer whose work is often cited as an early type of minimalism. His Gymnopédies, for solo piano, employ alternating chords that rarely change underneath a melody that floats above the repetitive harmony. Satie’s Gnossiennes—also for solo piano—were written without bar lines, implying a freedom from any regular sense of meter. Due to a note Satie left on his short keyboard fragment “Vexations”, the common modern performance practice is to repeat the fragment 840 times. Satie’s longer works include the ballet Parade, based on a scenario conceived by Jean Cocteau about a preview of a circus performance; the work also included a backdrop and cubist costumes designed by Pablo Picasso. Satie was a major influence on a young group of modernist French composers known as Les Six, who included Francis Poulenc and Darius Milhaud.
Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) was an Austrian composer instrumental in many of the most important developments in post-tonal music. Around 1910, Schoenberg began writing music that was atonal, meaning that it had no traditional tonic pitch. His 1912 work Pierrot lunaire utilized the technique of sprechstimme, a type of half-sung, half-spoken recitation on approximate pitch. In the early 1920s Scoenberg developed the twelve-tone method of composition, a technique in which each of the twelve chromatic pitches is ordered in a twelve-tone row, and each pitch is used before one is repeated; his first fully twelve-tone work was his Suite for Piano, opus 25, which he finished in 1923. The use of musical elements (including pitch) in a predetermined order would eventually become known as serialism. In addition to composing, Schoenberg was also an influential teacher: he and his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern are together known as the Second Viennese School.
Jean Sibelius (1865–1957) was a Finnish composer who often drew upon his homeland for inspiration. Sibelius’s best-known work is Finlandia, an intensely patriotic work written during Finland’s occupation by Russia, and which had to be presented under alternate titles due to censorship; the work’s final section, “Finland Awakes,“ is a hymn-like tune that has been adapted into many songs. Sibelius further drew on his homeland for his Lemminkäinen Suite, which is based on the Finnish folk epic the Kalevala; the suite’s movement “The Swan of Tuonela” is often performed as an excerpt. Sibelius was a prolific symphonist, writing seven works in the genre; his Seventh Symphony, in C major, is innovatively in only a single movement. Sibelius stopped composing during the last three decades of his life; he reportedly burned many of his works, including a draft of an Eighth Symphony that he never finished.
Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) was a Russian composer and one of the most towering figures in 20th-century music. Stravinsky’s output is generally divided into three main periods: his Russian period, his neoclassical period, and his serial period. Stravinsky was first catapulted to fame via three Russian period ballets he wrote for the Ballets Russe, headed by Serge Diaghilev, in the 1910s: The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913), the latter of which caused a riot at its premiere due to the shocking modernistic aspects of the production. His neoclassical period (which lasted from about 1920 into the early 1950s) was sparked in part by his work on Pulcinella, a ballet (also commissioned by Diaghilev) based on older music (incorrectly) attributed to Giovanni Pergolesi. Stravinsky’s other major neoclassical works include his Symphony of Psalms and his “Dumbarton Oaks“ chamber concerto. In the 1950s, Stravinsky turned to serialism, though he used it less rigorously than many other composers. His major serial works include Agon, a plotless 1957 ballet choreographed by George Balanchine.
George Gershwin’s (1898–1937) music blended classical traditions and genres with jazz and popular idioms. His “Rhapsody in Blue” (1924) and “Concerto in F” (1925) both feature solo piano and orchestra, while “An American in Paris” (1928) and “Cuban Overture” (1932) were inspired by his trips abroad. The lyrics for his vocal works were often written by his brother Ira; two of his best-known songs, “Embraceable You” and “I Got Rhythm,” appeared in his Broadway musical Girl Crazy (1930). His opera Porgy and Bess (1935), which included the song standards “Summertime” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” featured an entirely African-American cast.
Aaron Copland (1900–1990) was one of a litany of American composers who studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, for whom Copland wrote the solo keyboard part in his Symphony for Organ and Orchestra (1924; revised as Symphony No. 1 in 1928). “El Salón México” (1936) was the first of his highly successful “Populist” works based on folk or folk-like themes, which also included his three major ballets: Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942), and Appalachian Spring (1944). His opera The Tender Land (1954) included the chorus “The Promise of Living.” Copland utilized modified serial techniques in his later works; he composed very little in his last 25 years.
Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) was a prolific composer and conductor who gave numerous televised “Young People’s Concerts” during his eleven-year tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic (1958–1969). His concert works include his Symphony No. 1, “Jeremiah” (1942), and a jazz clarinet concerto premiered by Benny Goodman: “Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs” (1949). Bernstein is best known for his works for the stage, which include the musical West Side Story (1957), the ballet Fancy Free (1944), and the operetta Candide (1956; revised 1989). He also composed the score for the 1954 film On the Waterfront.
Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) was an Austrian composer who emigrated to the U.S. in 1934. Schoenberg was the leading figure and mentor of the “Second Viennese School,” which also included Alban Berg and Anton Webern, who were Schoenberg’s students. In 1908, Schoenberg began composing atonal music, which has no tonic pitch or key center. He also developed the twelve-tone method of composition, one of the most influential musical styles of the 20th century and first fully realized in his Suite for Piano, Op. 25 (1923). His other musical innovations include the technique of klangfarbenmelodie (“tone-color melody”), which was used in the third movement of his Five Pieces for Orchestra (1909).
Philip Glass (1937–present) was a minimalist composer who is best known for his trilogy of “Portrait Operas,” which include Einstein on the Beach (1976), Satyagraha (1979), and Akhnaten (1983). Einstein on the Beach is particularly notable for its use of solfege syllables and numbers in place of a standard libretto. Glass’s style is heavily influenced by Indian musical traditions, and focuses on additive processes; this focus can be seen in his early minimal works “Strung Out” (1967) and “Music in Fifths” (1969). Glass is a prolific composer of film scores; his most prominent include his scores for The Truman Show, The Hours, and Notes on a Scandal.
Samuel Barber (1910–1981) was a classicist composer best known for his “Adagio for Strings” (1936), which he adapted from his String Quartet, and which was premiered under the baton of the legendary conductor Arturo Toscanini. Other major orchestral works include his Piano Concerto (1962), his ballet score Cave of the Heart (1947) based on the Greek tale of Medea, and his single-movement “First Symphony” (1936, revised 1943). His vocal works include “Dover Beach” (1931) and “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” (1947). For much of Barber’s life, he maintained a romantic relationship with the opera composer Gian-Carlo Menotti. His first opera, Vanessa (1958), won the Pulitzer Prize; his second major opera, Antony and Cleopatra (1966), was a flop.
Charles Ives (1874–1954) was a modernist, experimental composer whose programmatic works often utilize polytonality (more than one active key center at a time), quote extensively from folk songs and earlier classical works, and have distinctly “American” themes. Ives, who worked in the insurance industry, was not widely-recognized as a composer until late in his life. His Piano Sonata No. 2 (1915), the “Concord” sonata, depicts four leading figures of the transcendentalist movement. His Symphony No. 3, “The Camp Meeting” (1947), was awarded the 1947 Pulitzer Prize. Other notable works include the suite Three Places in New England (1914) and “The Unanswered Question” (1906).
John Cage (1912–1992) was an experimentalist composer whose works are known for aleatoric (chance-based) composition and other forms of indeterminacy. His best-known piece, 4′33″ (1952), is created from the ambient sounds of the concert space while the performer(s) sits silently on stage. His Music of Changes (1951), as well as numerous other works, were written utilizing the Chinese I Ching to determine musical content. Cage’s other innovations include works for “prepared piano,” a piano which has had various objects inserted into its strings. A 639-year-long organ performance of his “As Slow As Possible” (1987) is currently underway in Germany, having begun in 2001.
John (Coolidge) Adams (1947–present) was a minimalist composer whose music, like that of Charles Ives, often features an “American” program. Adams may be best known for his opera Nixon in China (1987), which dramatizes the 1972 presidential visit and meeting with Mao. His other operas include Doctor Atomic (2005), which is about the Manhattan Project. He composed “On the Transmigration of Souls” (2002) to memorialize the September 11th attacks; that work received the Pulitzer Prize. Other major works for orchestra include Harmonium (1980), Harmonielehre (1985), Shaker Loops (1978), and his Violin Concerto (1993).
Stephen Sondheim (1930–2021) was one of the most celebrated lyricists and composers in musical theater. Sondheim’s career included eight Tony Awards. He was mentored by Oscar Hammerstein II (of Rodgers and Hammerstein), and was the lyricist for West Side Story, working alongside composer Leonard Bernstein. Musicals for which he was both lyricist and composer include Company (1970), a series of scenes about an unmarried bachelor and his married friends; Sweeney Todd (1979), about a barber’s murderous quest for revenge; Into the Woods (1987), a dark mash-up of several fairy tales; and Sunday in the Park with George (1984), which portrays a fictionalized version of the painter Georges Seurat and won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Franz Schubert (1797–1828) was an early Romantic composer from Vienna whose relatively short life largely overlapped with that of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827). Schubert wrote over 600 lieder, or German art songs. These lieder include works notable on their own, such as his Op. 1 “Die Erlkönig”; the two song cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise; and lieder which he used as the basis for theme and variations movements in other namesake works, such as the “Trout” Quintet (for piano and string quartet, based on his lied “The Trout,” or “Die Forelle”). Schubert’s orchestral output included numerous symphonies, the most well-known of which are No. 8 in B minor, the “Unfinished” (so named because Schubert only ever completed two movements), and No. 9 in C major, known as the “Great C Major” (in part to distinguish it from No. 6, the “Little C Major”).
Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) was the most prominent French composer of the early Romantic. His best-known work, the programmatic Symphonie fantastique (subtitled “An Episode in the Life of an Artist”), was inspired by his obsession with the actress Harriet Smithson, whom Berlioz would later marry (and divorce). The work, whose movements include vivid depictions of a “March to the Scaffold” and a “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath,” uses a recurring melody known as an idée fixe. Berlioz’s Harold in Italy is a work for solo viola and orchestra, which the composer claimed was inspired in part by Lord Byron’s poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Harold in Italy was commissioned by Niccolò Paganini, who subsequently abandoned the project because he felt that the viola was not sufficiently showcased, and who never performed the work. Berlioz’s opera Les Troyens (based on the Aeneid), is a massive production that—while never completely performed while Berlioz was alive—is now often listed among the greatest operas ever written.
Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) was a German musical prodigy who completed his first symphony when he was only 15 years old. Mendelssohn’s five completed, published symphonies are numbered for the order in which they were published, not the order in which they were written. His “Italian” (No. 4 in A major) and “Scottish” (No. 3 in A minor) symphonies were inspired by his travels in the namesake countries. Mendelssohn’s journey through Scotland included a trip to Fingal’s Cave, which inspired his “Hebrides” Overture, whose theme he sketched on a postcard to his sister Fanny (who was also a composer). When Mendelssohn was 17 years old, he wrote a concert overture inspired by Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream; many years later, he wrote a complete set of incidental music for the play, including his famous “Wedding March.” Mendelssohn’s non-orchestral music includes eight books of Songs Without Words for solo piano.
Robert Schumann (1810–1854) was a German composer and music critic who identified and promoted many of the other best-known composers of the 19th century. Schumann edited Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (“New Journal for Music”) and lauded the music of Frederic Chopin and Johannes Brahms while both were relatively unknown. Schumann’s early music mainly consisted of works for solo piano, such as Carnaval, which features a musical cryptogram. In 1841, he began to write orchestral music; his four completed symphonies include No. 1 in B-flat major, “Spring,” and No. 3 in E-flat major, the “Rhenish.” Schumann married Clara Wieck, the daughter of Friedrich Wieck, Schumann’s piano teacher, and a virtuoso pianist and composer in her own right. Schumann battled mental illness throughout much of his life; he spent the last two years of his life in a mental asylum after attempting and failing to commit suicide.
Franz Liszt (1811–1886) was a Hungarian virtuoso pianist and composer who created a sensation with his performance tours across Europe, spawning a phenomenon that was given the nickname “Lisztomania.” Among Liszt’s innovations in the performance space, he was the first pianist to give solo concert-length recitals, playing entirely from memory. As a composer, Liszt was seen as the head of a more progressive “New German School” of music. His music for the piano includes the notoriously-difficult Transcendental Études and the Hungarian Rhapsodies, which are based on Hungarian folk music. Liszt wrote numerous works inspired by the tale of Faust, including a Faust Symphony and a set of Mephisto Waltzes. Liszt is also generally credited with inventing the orchestral genre of the symphonic poem or tone poem, a form later taken up by Richard Strauss; Liszt’s own works in this genre include Les préludes.
Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) was one of the most prolific and successful Italian opera composers of the Romantic period, and his operas include some of the most performed works in the repertoire. Aida is the tale of a captive Ethiopian princess (who longs for her homeland in the aria “O patria mia”) who falls in love with the Egyptian general Radamès. Rigoletto tells the story of a hunchbacked jester who seeks revenge on the womanizing Duke of Mantua (who sings “La donna è mobile”), but instead ends up causing the death of his own daughter, Gilda. Verdi’s late operas include two masterpieces based on the works of Shakespeare: Otello and Falstaff, the latter of which was both Verdi’s last opera and his only successful comedy. Verdi’s most successful non-operatic work is his Requiem, whose “Dies irae” movement has seen wide use in popular culture.
Richard Wagner (1813—1883) was the most influential German opera composer of the 19th century. Wagner’s four-opera Ring Cycle—consisting of Das Rheingold, Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods)—tells the story of a magical ring forged by the Nibelung (dwarf) Alberich, which Alberich curses after it is stolen by Odin; the second of these operas includes the orchestral excerpt “Ride of the Valkyries.” Wagner’s other operas include Lohengrin, the tale of a knight who arrives in a boat pulled by a swan, and which includes a “Bridal Chorus” popularly known as “Here Comes the Bride”; and Tristan and Isolde, whose prelude begins with an iconic chord (which has become known as the “Tristan chord”) that is often cited as a break with common practice-era harmony. The annual Bayreuth Festival (in Bayreuth, Germany) showcases performances of Wagner’s works. Wagner was a virulent antisemite; many critics have interpreted Alberich, the villain of the Ring Cycle, as an offensive stereotype of a Jewish person.
Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) is often described as one of the “Three B’s” of classical music, along with J. S. Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven, and his output covered the entire gamut of genres. Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 in C minor is nicknamed “Beethoven’s Tenth” due to the final movement’s resemblance to the “Ode to Joy” in Beethoven’s Ninth. Brahms’s Symphony No. 3 in F major is based on a three-note F–A–F motto, representing the phrase “Frei aber froh,” or “Free but happy.” His Ein deutsches Requiem, or A German Requiem, is a non-liturgical concert work for chorus and orchestra. Brahms was also a prolific composer of chamber music, writing numerous sonatas and trios. His Op. 49 No. 4 “Wiegenlied” is commonly known as “Brahms’ Lullaby.” During his lifetime, Brahms was often viewed as the head of a more conservative school of music relative to composers like Wagner and Liszt.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) was a Russian composer of the Romantic era whose ballets The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, and Sleeping Beauty are all among the most performed works in the standard repertoire. Tchaikovsky completed six numbered symphonies and an unnumbered symphony based on Lord Byron’s poem Manfred. Although he was not a part of the group of nationalistic Russian composers known as “The Mighty Five,” it was Tchaikovsky’s correspondence with the Five’s leader Mily Balakirev that led to Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, an “overture-fantasy” whose love theme has become ubiquitous in popular culture. His 1812 Overture, a programmatic work depicting Napoleon’s army being driven out of Russia, quotes the melodies of “God Save the Tsar” and “La Marseillaise,” and calls for cannons to be fired in the score. Tchaikovsky was gay, and many have speculated that his death shortly after the premiere of his Sixth Symphony, the “Pathétique,” was effectively suicide.
Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) was a Czech composer who, ironically, wrote his two best-known works while living in America. From 1892 to 1895, Dvořák was the director of New York’s National Conservatory of Music; while living in the U.S., he wrote his Symphony No. 9 (“From the New World”) and his “American” String Quartet (No. 12). The “New World” symphony is among the most popular and oft-performed works in the standard repertoire; its Largo second movement begins with an iconic English horn solo that was later adapted into the song “Goin’ Home.” Dvořák claimed that the material of the symphony was inspired by the styles of both African-American and Native American melodies, though all of the actual music is Dvořák’s own. Dvořák’s other works include two sets of Slavonic Dances, which are based on various styles of folk music—but no actual folk melodies—from Dvořák’s native Bohemia, including the dumka and the furiant.