January 27th 1756, Salzburg – † December 5th 1791, Prague

“Edlinger Mozart“, painted presumably 1790 in Munich by Johann Georg Edlinger (1741-1819). Today: Berliner Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is rightly considered the sun in the constellation of music. Mozart is the most enduringly popular of classical composers and his works have become part of the standard concert and opera repertoirs.

Mozart had a complex and serious personality, but was at the same time, by all accounts of an easy-going and humours nature. Brought up as the super-star child genius, [which he no doubt was!] playing for all the weathly patrons and nobility of Europe, Mozart himself found this literally and figuratively a hard act to follow! Recently much has been made of the idea that most of his adult life was spent in reversing the influence of his well-meaning, but over-bearing father.

However this social problem was never a <muscial> problem, Mozart being the versatile and dynamic master composer that he was, wrote in almost every major genre, including symphony, opera, the solo concerto, chamber music including string quartet and string quintet, and the piano sonata. While none of these genres were new, the piano concerto was almost single-handedly developed and popularized by Mozart. However it was in opera that Mozart found his true love and one could say that his creative life centured around it.

Mozart’s last years were lived mostly in difficult financial circumstances, but they also produced some of his finest works. During this time Mozart wrote a great deal of music, including some of his most admired works: the opera The Magic Flute, the final piano concerto (K. 595 in B flat), the Clarinet Concerto K. 622, and the unfinished Requiem K. 626.

Mozart died at 1 on the morning on December 5 and was buried in an unmarked grave – as was custom for those without the means to afford a proper burial.

In the usual Hollywood obuscation of history style and to aid the intellectually challenged American public appreciate the phenomenon of Mozart, his death has been presented as being directly linked to the Italian composer Antonio Salieri which is anything but true. Put very simply Mozart died fom the effects of poverty.

Salieri was a 2^nd or even 3^rd rate composer, and it is true was a scheming, jealous and devious Vienna court favorite. He recognized Mozart’s genius early on and actively sought to stymie and frustrate him and used his considerable influence at the royal court to become an irritant to Mozart’s success.

This then is the shameful legacy of Salieri,- along with most of the other double-dealing and decietful Austrian court gentry and Catholic church hierarchy to whom Mozart was forced to sell his services – to have abeted in thwarting the greatest muscial mind the world has yet produced.

However in spite of his tribulations and general neglegt in his native Austria, the Czechs of Prague knew a muscial genius when they heard one! The citizens of Prague provided Mozart with his greatest succeses in his life-time where tunes of his opera’s were sung on the streets and rewarded with great acclaim and recognition.

Along with humanity in general -who rightly consider him a musical treasure- many composers consider Mozart as the greatest example of their art. These include Richard Strauss, Maurice Ravel and Pyotr Tchaicovsky.

Source: http://web.telia.com/~u57013916/Edlinger%20Mozart.htm

* May 22^nd 1813, Leipzig – † February 13th 1883, Vienna

Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, music theorist, and essayist, primarily known for his operas (or “music dramas” as they were later called). Unlike most other great opera composers, Wagner always wrote the scenario and libretto for his works himself.

Wagner’s compositions, particularly those of his later period, are notable for their contrapuntal texture, rich chromaticism, harmonies and orchestration, and elaborate use of leitmotifs: musical themes associated with specific characters, locales, or plot elements. Wagner pioneered advances in musical language, such as extreme chromaticism and quickly shifting tonal centres, which greatly influenced the development of European classical music.

He transformed musical thought through his idea of Gesamtkunstwerk (“total artwork”), the synthesis of all the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, epitomized by his monumental four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876). Wagner even went so far as to build his own opera-house to try to stage these works as he had imagined them.

* January 1st 1898, Teschen – † October 18^th 1944, Auschwitz

Viktor Ullmann was born on the first of January 1898 in Teschen, the modern Cieszyn. His mentor was Alexander von Zemlinsky, under whose direction he was conductor at the New German Theatre of Prague until 1927. In the following season, 1927-28, he was appointed head of the opera company in Aussig an der Elbel. In 1923 he began a series of successful performances of his works, and his “Schönberg Variations” a piano composition on a theme written by his former Vienna teacher, were highly appraised and caused something of a stir. Five years later, for the orchestral arrangement of this work, he was awarded the Hertzka Prize.

On 8 September 1942 he was deported to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt, then on 16 October 1944 he was deported to the camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where on October 18^th 1944 he was killed in the gas chambers.

The work he left in Theresienstadt was almost entirely preserved, and comprises such significant works as the last three piano sonatas, the Third String Quartet, the melodrama based on Rilke‘s Cornet poem and the chamber opera The Emperor of Atlantis, or The Refusal of Death, first produced in 1975. It was written on the back of scrap concentration camp records, which were used in the first performance.

Robert Schumann - www.foto-face.com

Robert Schumann – www.foto-face.com

* June 8th 1810, Zwickau – † July 29th 1856, Endenich

Robert Schumann besides being an influential German composer was also an aesthete and influential music critic. He is one of the most famous Romantic composers of the 19th century.

A hand injury prevented him from pursuing a career as a virtuoso pianist. His early compositions were written almost exclusively for the piano. He composed works for piano and orchestra, including his popular Piano Concerto, as well as many Lieder (songs for voice and piano), four symphonies, an opera, and other orchestral, choral and chamber works. His analyses of music appeared mostly in Die neue Zeitschrift für Musik (“The New Journal for Music”), a Leipzig-based publication that he jointly founded.

In 1839 he married pianist Clara Wieck, a considerable figure of the romantic period in her own right. Both Clara and Robert Schumann were close friends of Johannes Brahms. For the last two years of his life, ill health, both physical and mental confined Schumann to a mental institution where he was duly cared for by his family and many friends.

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* November 16th 1895, Hanau – † December 28^th 1963, Frankfurt

Hindemith was a German composer, violist, violinist, teacher, music theorist and conductor. Born in Hanau, Germany, Hindemith was taught the violin as a child. He entered the Hochsche Konservatorium in Frankfurt am Main where he studied conducting, composition and violin under Arnold Mendelssohn and Bernhard Sekles, supporting himself by playing in dance bands and musical-comedy outfits. He led the Frankfurt Opera orchestra from 1915 to 1923 and played in the Rebner string quartet from 1914 in which he played second violin, and later the viola. In 1921 he founded the Amar Quartet, playing viola, and extensively toured Europe.

In 1940 Hindemith immigrated to the United States. Once in the States he taught primarily at Yale University where he had such notable pupils as Lukas Foss, Norman Dello Joio, Mel Powell, Harold Shapero, Hans Otte, Ruth Schonthal, and Oscar-winning film director George Roy Hill. During this time he also gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, from which the book A Composer’s World was extracted. He became an American citizen in 1946, but returned to Europe in 1953, living in Zurich and teaching at the university there. Towards the end of his life he began to conduct more, and made numerous recordings, mostly of his own music. He was awarded the Balzan Prize in 1962.

* December 16th 1770, Bonn – † March 26th 1827, Vienna

Beethoven was a German composer and virtuoso pianist. He was an important figure in the transitional period between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western classical music, and remains one of the most famous and influential musicians of all time.

Ludwig gave his first public performance as a pianist when he was eight years old. At the age of eleven he received the necessary systematic training in piano performance and composition from Christian Gottlob Neefe, organist and court musician in Bonn. In 1792 he chose Vienna as his new residence and took lessons from Mozart, Haydn, Albrechtsberger, Schenck and Salieri. Beethoven was acutely interested in the development of the piano. He kept close contact with the leading piano building firms in Vienna and London and thus helped pave the way for the modern concert grand piano. Around the year 1798 Beethoven noticed that he was suffering from a hearing disorder. He withdrew into increasing seclusion for the public and from his few friends and was eventually left completely deaf. When the most famous composer of the age died, about thirty thousand mourners and curious onlookers were present at the funeral procession on March 26, 1827.

Hector Berlioz - www.foto-face.com

Hector Berlioz – www.foto-face.com

* December 11^th 1803, La Côte-Saint-André † March 8^th 1869, Paris

Berlioz was a French Romantic composer, best known for his compositions Symphonie fantastique and Grande Messe des morts (Requiem). Berlioz made great contributions to the modern orchestra with his Treatise on Instrumentation and by utilizing huge orchestral forces for his works, sometimes calling for over 1,000 performers. At the other extreme, he also composed around 50 songs for voice and piano.

Although neglected in France for much of the 19th century, the music of Berlioz has often been cited as extremely influential in the development of the symphonic form, instrumentation, and the depiction in music of programmatic and literary ideas, features central to musical Romanticism. He was considered extremely progressive for his day, and he, Wagner, and Liszt have been called the “Great Trinity of Progress” of 19th century Romanticism.

In 2003, the bicentenary of Berlioz’s birth, his achievements and status are much more widely recognized, and his music is viewed as both serious and original, rather than an eccentric novelty. Newspaper articles reported his colorful life with zeal, and many festivals dedicated to the composer were held, readings of his books and a French dramatized television biography all helped to create a lot of exposure to the composer’s life and music.

Leoš Janáček - www.foto-face.com

Leoš Janáček – www.foto-face.com

* July 3^rd 1854, Hoshwald – † August 12^th 1928, Moravska

Leos Janacek was a Czech composer, who is remembered mainly for his operas and his orchestral piece: Sinfonietta. As a young man Janáček became friends with Antonín Dvořák, and began composing in a relatively traditional romantic style, but after his opera Šárka (1881), his style began to change. He made a study of Moravian and Slovak folk music and used elements of it in his own music. He especially focused on studying and reproducing the rhythm and the pitch contour and inflections of normal Czech speech, which helped in creating the very distinctive vocal melodies in his opera Jenůfa. Going much farther than Modest Mussorgsky and anticipating the later work of Béla Bartók in such styles, Janáček made this a distinguishing feature of his vocal writing. When Jenůfa was given in Prague in 1916 it was a great success, and brought Janáček real acclaim for the first time. A year later he met Kamila Stösslová, a young married woman who was a profound inspiration to him for the remaining years of his life, and with whom he conducted an obsessive correspondence – passionate on his side at least.

He is best-known for the music he wrote from this point to the end of his life. Although many consider his output from this period to mark his mature style, he had been writing in this fashion for quite a number of years but had simply not received wide public acclaim earlier. He is generally recognized as one of his country’s foremost composers.

Maurice Ravel - www.foto-face.com

Maurice Ravel – www.foto-face.com

* March 7th 1875, Ciboure – † December 28th 1937, Paris

Ravel was a French composer and pianist of the impressionistic period, known especially for the subtlety, richness and poignancy of his music. His piano music, chamber music, vocal music and orchestral music have become staples of the concert repertoire.

Ravel’s piano compositions, such as Jeux d’eau, Miroirs and Gaspard de la Nuit, demand considerable virtuosity from the performer, and his orchestral music, including Daphnis et Chloé and his arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky‘s Pictures at an Exhibition, uses tonal color and variety of sound and instrumentation very effectively.

To the general public, Ravel is probably best known for his orchestral work, Boléro, which he considered trivial and once described as “a piece for orchestra without music.”

According to SACEM, Ravel’s estate earns more royalties than that of any other French musician. Most of Ravel’s works will not enter the public domain until 2015.