A trouvère poet and composer, Adam de la Halle—sometimes known as Adam le Bossu (‘Adam the Hunchback’), although he disclaimed such a sobriquet, was a native of Arras but educated in Paris. He was in the service of Charles of Anjou and visited Italy on several occasions. The suggested later date for his death is derived from the mention of an ‘Adam le Boscu’ in accounts of the coronation of the English King Edward II in 1307.

Voca ...

Johann Sebastian Bach belonged to a dynasty of musicians. In following inevitable family tradition, he excelled his forebears and contemporaries, although he did not always receive in his own lifetime the respect he deserved. He spent his earlier career principally as an organist, latterly at the court of one of the two ruling Grand Dukes of Weimar. In 1717 he moved to Cöthen as Court Kapellmeister to the young Prince Leopold and in 1723 made his final move to Leipzig, where he was emplo ...

The Paraguayan guitarist Agustín Barrios established himself as a performer throughout Latin America. His performances in Europe in the 1930s were followed by a final period spent teaching at the San Salvador Conservatory.

Guitar Music

Barrios was a prolific composer for the guitar, sometimes, like the violinist Fritz Kreisler, attributing his compositions to earlier European composers. A virtuoso performer, inviting comparison with Segovia, he wa ...

Born in Bonn in 1770, the eldest son of a singer in the Kapelle of the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne and grandson of the Archbishop’s Kapellmeister, Beethoven moved in 1792 to Vienna. There he had some lessons from Haydn and others, quickly establishing himself as a remarkable keyboard player and original composer. By 1815 increasing deafness had made public performance impossible and accentuated existing eccentricities of character, patiently tolerated by a series of rich patrons and h ...

Born in Hamburg, the son of a double bass player and his older seamstress wife, Brahms attracted the attention of Schumann, to whom he was introduced by the violinist Joachim. After Schumann’s death he maintained a long friendship with the latter’s widow, the pianist Clara Schumann, whose advice he always valued. Brahms eventually settled in Vienna, where to some he seemed the awaited successor to Beethoven. His blend of Classicism in form with a Romantic harmonic idiom made him t ...

The piano music of Muzio Clementi, or at least his pedagogical Gradus ad Parnassum, has been quite well known to generations of ambitious keyboard players. Clementi himself, born in Rome in 1752, was taken as a boy to England by Peter Beckford, cousin of the eccentric William Beckford. There he developed his abilities as a performer. His subsequent career brought success as a composer, teacher and pianist, and later as a manufacturer of pianos, an enterprise in which he employ ...

The youngest child and only surviving son of Leopold Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus was born in Salzburg in 1756, the publication year of his father’s influential treatise on violin playing. He showed early precocity both as a keyboard player and violinist, and soon turned his hand to composition. His obvious gifts were developed, along with those of his elder sister, under his father’s tutelage, and the family, through the indulgence of their then patron, the Archbishop of Salzburg, wa ...

Claude Debussy has exercised widespread influence over later generations of composers, both in his native France and elsewhere. He was trained at the Paris Conservatoire, and decided there on a career as a composer rather than as a pianist (his original intention). His highly characteristic musical language, thoroughly French in inspiration, extended the contemporary limits of harmony and form, and he had a remarkably delicate command of nuance, whether in piano writing or in the handling of ...

In the rigid official musical establishment of Paris in the second half of the 19th century Gabriel Fauré won acceptance with difficulty. He was a pupil of Camille Saint-Saëns at the École Niedermeyer and served as organist at various Paris churches, including finally the Madeleine, but had no teaching position until 1897, at the Conservatoire, where his pupils included Ravel and Enescu. In 1905 he became director of the Conservatoire in the aftermath of the scandal o ...

Born in the German town of Halle in 1685, Handel studied briefly at the University of Halle before moving to Hamburg in 1703, where he served as a violinist in the opera orchestra and subsequently as harpsichordist and composer. From 1706 to 1710 he was in Italy, where he further developed his mastery of Italian musical style. Appointed Kapellmeister to the Elector of Hanover, the future George I of England, he visited London, where he composed the first London Italian opera, Rinaldo ...

Various musical paternity charges have been levelled at the composer Franz Joseph Haydn. His career coincided with the development of Classical style and forms (the symphony, sonata, string quartet and other instrumental forms), in the moulding of which he played an important part. Born in Rohrau in 1732, the son of a wheelwright, he was trained as a chorister at St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, where he made his early living before his appointment to the small musical establishment of ...

Liszt was the son of a steward in the service of the Esterházy family, patrons of Haydn. He was born in 1811 at Raiding in Hungary and moved as a child to Vienna, where he took piano lessons from Czerny and composition lessons from Salieri. Two years later, in 1823, he moved with his family to Paris, from where he toured as a pianist. Influenced by the phenomenal violinist Paganini, he turned his attention to the development of a similar technique as a pianist and in 1835 left Paris wi ...

Felix Mendelssohn, grandson of the distinguished Jewish thinker Moses Mendelssohn, was born in Hamburg, the son of a banker (the additional surname Bartholdy was added to the family name when his parents converted to Christianity). The family moved to Berlin, where Mendelssohn was brought up and able to associate with a cultured circle of family friends. He was associated with the revival of public interest in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and in the early 1830s travelled abroad for his ...

Henry Purcell was one of the greatest English composers, flourishing in the period that followed the restoration of the monarchy after the Puritan Commonwealth period. He spent much of his short life in the service of the Chapel Royal as a composer, organist and singer. With considerable gifts as a composer, he wrote extensively for the stage (particularly in a hybrid musico-dramatic form of the time), for the church, and for popular entertainment. He was a master of English word-setting and ...

Born in Cremona in 1567, Claudio Monteverdi served at the court of the Dukes of Mantua from the early 1590s until 1612, when he moved to Venice as maestro di cappella at the basilica of St Mark, a position he retained until his death in 1643. His importance as a proponent of the so-called seconda prattica, the new concerted music characteristic of the early Baroque, is unquestioned, as is his pre-eminence in the development of the new form of opera that sprang from the combinati ...

The Italian composer and violinist Antonio Vivaldi was born in Venice in 1678 and after his ordination in 1703 embarked on an intermittent career in the service of the Ospedale della Pietà, an institution for the education of orphan, illegitimate or indigent girls. It was an establishment with a formidable musical reputation. His later career brought involvement in opera. As a composer Vivaldi was prolific, with some 500 concertos to his credit in addition to a quantity of works for th ...

Sixth of the ten children of Alessandro Scarlatti, Domenico Scarlatti was born in Naples in 1685, sharing his year of birth with Handel and J.S. Bach. After an earlier period in Italy he moved to Portugal, and thence to Madrid in the service of the Infanta Maria Barbara, after her marriage to the Spanish Infante. He remained in the service of Maria Barbara after her husband’s accession to the throne and died in Madrid in 1757. He is chiefly known for the large number of short sonatas ...

The son of a schoolmaster who had settled in Vienna, Franz Schubert was educated as a chorister of the imperial court chapel. He later qualified as a schoolteacher, briefly and thereafter intermittently joining his father in the classroom. He spent his life largely in Vienna, enjoying the company of friends but never holding any position in the musical establishment or attracting the kind of patronage that Beethoven had 20 years earlier. His final years were clouded by illness as the result o ...

The eldest son of Johann Strauss, and not intended by his father for a career in music, Johann Strauss the younger nevertheless established an unrivalled reputation throughout the second half of the 19th century as a composer and purveyor of light Viennese music. He involved his two younger brothers in the management and direction of dance orchestras that performed both in Vienna and abroad.

Stage Works

The younger Johann Strauss wrote some 16 operettas between 1871 ...

Tchaikovsky was one of the earlier students of the St Petersburg Conservatory established by Anton Rubinstein, completing his studies there to become a member of the teaching staff at the similar institution established in Moscow by Anton Rubinstein’s brother, Nikolay. He was able to withdraw from teaching when a rich widow, Nadezhda von Meck, offered him financial support; this support continued for much of his life, although, according to the original conditions of the pension, they n ...