13 Of The Greatest Classical Composers Of All Time

Start with: “Brandenburg Concerto No. 3”Over 1,000 works

Bach came from a huge musical family. His father, Johann Ambrosius, directed the town musicians in Eisenach, and after being orphaned at 10, Bach went to live with his older brother Johann Christoph, an organist. Several of his own sons, including Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian, became well-known composers.

He wrote more than 1,000 works, from church cantatas to keyboard music, and his counterpoint and harmony are still taught to music students today. The six Brandenburg Concertos and the Cello Suite No. 1 in G major are two of the easiest ways in.

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Start with: “Symphony No. 40 in G minor”Over 600 works

Mozart was writing short keyboard pieces by the age of five, and by eight he had played for royalty and nobility across Europe on tour with his father Leopold and his sister Nannerl. He died at just 35, yet left more than 600 works.

His operas The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni are among the most performed in the world, and his 41 numbered symphonies include some of the best-loved orchestral music ever written. The stormy Symphony No. 40 in G minor is a good place to start.

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Start with: “Symphony No. 5”9 symphonies

Beethoven bridges the Classical and Romantic eras. He learned his craft in the tradition of Haydn and Mozart, then pushed the symphony, the piano sonata and the string quartet into bigger, more dramatic and more personal territory than anyone had before.

His hearing began to fail in his late twenties, and he was almost completely deaf by the time he wrote the Ninth Symphony. One well-known story says he held a rod between his teeth against the piano to feel its vibrations. Start with the Fifth Symphony, then try Für Elise and the Moonlight Sonata.

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Start with: “Cello Concerto No. 1 in C major”Father of the Symphony

Haydn is often called the Father of the Symphony and the Father of the String Quartet. He wrote over 100 symphonies, many of them during nearly 30 years in the service of the wealthy Esterházy family, where he had an orchestra to experiment with.

As a boy he was sent to train with a relative, Johann Matthias Franck, a schoolmaster and choirmaster in Hainburg. Later, in Vienna, he worked as an accompanist for the Italian composer Nicola Porpora, who taught him the fundamentals of composition. Try the Cello Concerto No. 1, the London Symphonies and the Op. 64 string quartets.

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Start with: “Clair de lune”Prix de Rome 1884

Debussy is usually called the first Impressionist composer, though he disliked the label. He entered the Paris Conservatoire at 10, studied piano with Antoine François Marmontel, and won the Prix de Rome in 1884 with his cantata L’enfant prodigue.

He broke with tradition, using whole-tone and pentatonic scales and floating harmonies that don’t always resolve. He was drawn to the Symbolist poets and attended Stéphane Mallarmé’s gatherings, and Mallarmé’s poem inspired his Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. Clair de lune and the orchestral Images are other favorites.

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Start with: “Messiah: Hallelujah Chorus”

Handel was born in Halle in the same year as Bach. He studied with the organist Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow, played in the Hamburg opera orchestra, and spent 1706 to 1710 in Italy, where he soaked up the Italian opera style. He later settled in London and became a British subject.

Operas such as Giulio Cesare and Alcina made his name in London. When Italian opera fell out of fashion, he turned to English oratorios. Messiah, written in 1741 and first performed in Dublin in 1742, is the best known, and its Hallelujah Chorus is one of the most famous pieces of choral music ever written.

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Start with: “Fantaisie-Impromptu”

Chopin was born in the village of Żelazowa Wola, near Warsaw, and grew up in the city. A child prodigy, he was giving public concerts and publishing his first pieces before he was a teenager. In 1831 he settled in Paris, where he became one of the most admired pianists of the Romantic era.

Almost everything he wrote is for solo piano: mazurkas, études, nocturnes, waltzes, ballades and sonatas, often shaped by Polish folk dance. He suffered from poor health for years and died in 1849 at 39. Some works, including the Fantaisie-Impromptu, were only published after his death.

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Start with: “The Nutcracker: Waltz of the Flowers”

Tchaikovsky trained as a civil servant before joining the first intake of the new St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1862. He went on to write six symphonies, concertos and operas, but ballet is where he changed the art form, giving dance music a symphonic depth and color it rarely had before.

Swan Lake premiered in 1877, The Sleeping Beauty in 1890 and The Nutcracker in 1892, which became a Christmas favorite around the world. He died in St. Petersburg in 1893, officially of cholera, just days after conducting the premiere of his Sixth Symphony.

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Start with: “The Blue Danube”The Waltz King

His father, Johann Strauss the elder, was a famous dance composer himself and did not want his son to follow him into the hard life of a musician. The boy studied the violin in secret with Franz Amon, a violinist in his father’s orchestra, and gave his first concert with his own orchestra in 1844.

He went on to write more than 500 waltzes, polkas, quadrilles and other dances, along with operettas such as Die Fledermaus, and outshone his father to become known as the Waltz King. The Blue Danube is his most famous piece and a fixture of Vienna’s New Year’s concerts.

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Start with: “The Four Seasons: Spring”The Red Priest

Vivaldi learned the violin from his father and was ordained a priest in 1703, earning the nickname the Red Priest for his red hair. Within a year he was excused from saying Mass because of his poor health, and he spent much of his career teaching music at the Ospedale della Pietà, a Venice orphanage famous for its all-female orchestra.

He wrote around 500 concertos, helping make the fast-slow-fast three-movement form standard, plus operas and sacred music. After his death he was largely forgotten until the 20th century, when a large collection of his manuscripts surfaced in the 1920s. The Four Seasons is now among the most recorded works in classical music.

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Start with: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture”

Mendelssohn was often compared to Mozart as a child prodigy. He wrote his String Octet at 16 and the overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream at 17, and in 1829 he conducted a famous revival of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion that helped spark new interest in Bach’s music.

The Italian Symphony and the Violin Concerto in E minor are among his best-loved works. The tune of the carol Hark the Herald Angels Sing comes from his Festgesang of 1840, adapted to the words in 1855. His sister Fanny, also a gifted composer, died in May 1847, and he died that November.

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Start with: “Ride of the Valkyries”

Wagner’s musical training was patchy until he was 18, when he spent a year studying counterpoint and composition with Christian Theodor Weinlig, the cantor of St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. He went on to reinvent opera as music drama, writing his own librettos and weaving leitmotifs through his scores.

His four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen lasts around 15 hours, and he built his own theater in Bayreuth to stage it. He is also a troubling figure: he published antisemitic writings, and decades after his death he became a favorite composer of Adolf Hitler. Start with The Flying Dutchman or the Ride of the Valkyries.

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Start with: “Orfeo ed Euridice: Dance of the Blessed Spirits”Opera reformer

Gluck led the reform of opera in the 18th century. Working with the librettist Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, he set out to strip away the showy vocal display and tangled plots of Italian opera seria and put the story and the drama first.

The first of these reform operas, Orfeo ed Euridice, premiered at the Burgtheater in Vienna in 1762. The preface to Alceste (1767) set out the ideas behind it, and both shaped the work of later opera composers from Mozart to Wagner. The Dance of the Blessed Spirits from Orfeo is the piece most people know.

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