Life I
Johann Sebastian Bach 1685–1750
Eisenach · Leipzig · Baroque. Cantor of St Thomas; the foundation under everything.
Bach spent twenty-seven years as Cantor of St Thomas’s, Leipzig, supplying cantatas, Passions, and keyboard works of a craft no successor has exhausted. Neglected after his death, he was revived in 1829 and has not been mislaid since.
The Thuringian orphan who walked two hundred miles to hear Buxtehude became the most industrious musician in Europe: organist, court musician at Köthen, and finally Cantor, teaching Latin, rehearsing choirs, and burying ten of his twenty children — all while writing, week after week, music of unanswerable order. The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080, was left unfinished at his death.
Begin with. Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007 (c.1720) — a single line that fills a room · Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 (1741) — an aria, thirty variations, and the aria restored · St Matthew Passion, BWV 244 (1727) — three hours that pass like one.
Life II
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1756–1791
Salzburg · Vienna · Classical. Prodigy, dramatist, melodist without peer.
Mozart wrote as others breathe: symphonies, operas, concertos, chamber music, sacred music — all of it finished to a standard most composers reach once. He died at thirty-five, leaving the Requiem unfinished on his desk.
Exhibited across Europe as a child — Munich, Vienna, Paris, and London in 1764–65, then three Italian journeys between 1769 and 1773 — he outgrew the prodigy trade and settled in Vienna as a freelance composer, a profession that barely existed. The Requiem in D minor, K.626 (1791), was completed after his death by his pupil Süssmayr.
Begin with. Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K.550 (1788) — urgency without heaviness · Eine kleine Nachtmusik, K.525 (1787) — daylight made audible · The Magic Flute, K.620 (1791) — a fairy tale that turns serious.
Life III
Ludwig van Beethoven 1770–1827
Bonn · Vienna · Classical to Romantic. Deaf from his thirties; undeterred entirely.
Beethoven took the forms Mozart perfected and forced them to carry struggle, triumph, and silence. His late works — composed in near-total deafness — remain the strongest argument that hearing is not the same as listening.
Noticing his hearing fail from about 1798, he confessed his despair in the Heiligenstadt Testament of October 1802 — and then refused to stop. The middle-period heroics and the remote, searching late quartets were all written against deepening silence, dictated from a deaf man’s desk to an unready century.
Begin with. Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 (1808) — four notes that conquered the world · Piano Sonata No. 14 “Moonlight”, Op. 27 No. 2 (1801) — the quiet before the storm · Symphony No. 9, Op. 125 (1824) — the “Ode to Joy” finale.
Life IV
Felix Mendelssohn 1809–1847
Hamburg · Leipzig · Early Romantic. Prodigy, conductor, reviver of Bach.
Mendelssohn was the responsible genius: he conducted, founded the Leipzig Conservatory, and at twenty revived Bach’s St Matthew Passion after a century’s neglect. His own music is luminous, fleet, and impeccably made.
On 11 March 1829, aged twenty, he conducted the St Matthew Passion at the Berlin Sing-Akademie — Bach’s first hearing in nearly a century — and thereby restarted the nineteenth century’s musical memory. In 1843 he founded the Leipzig Conservatory, the first of its kind in Germany, and directed the Gewandhaus concerts until his death at thirty-eight.
Begin with. Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Op. 21 (1826, aged seventeen) — including the Wedding March · Symphony No. 4 “Italian”, Op. 90 (1833) — sunshine with salt air · Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64 (1844) — the concerto that abolished the wait for the soloist.
Life V
Frédéric Chopin 1810–1849
Żelazowa Wola · Paris · Romantic. Almost exclusively piano; entirely himself.
Chopin wrote almost nothing but piano music, and made the piano say everything: Polish dance rhythms, operatic song, storms, and whispers that require the room to fall silent. Frail, exacting, and — at the keyboard — fearless.
After 1831 he made Paris his home, preferring the salon to the concert hall and teaching the daughters of the fashionable for his living. From 1838 to 1847 his summers belonged to Nohant with the novelist George Sand — the productive years of the Ballades, the Scherzi, and the Polonaise-Fantaisie — before illness and the parting of 1847 closed the account.
Begin with. Nocturne in E-flat major, Op. 9 No. 2 (1832) — the famous one, deservedly · Étude in C minor “Revolutionary”, Op. 10 No. 12 (1831) — fury disciplined · Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23 (1835) — a novel in nine minutes.
Life VI
Clara Schumann 1819–1896
Leipzig · Romantic. Pianist-composer; the century’s most exacting interpreter.
Clara Schumann played in public for sixty-one years, carried the music of Robert Schumann, Chopin, Brahms, and Mendelssohn across Europe, and composed works of a distinction long filed under her husband’s name. She toured, taught, raised eight children, and never once played carelessly.
A prodigy under her father Friedrich Wieck, she premièred her own Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 7, at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in November 1835, aged sixteen. Marriage to Robert in 1840 divided her between the keyboard and the household; widowhood in 1856 returned her to the platform, where for four decades she taught Europe how the Romantics should sound.
Begin with. Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 7 (1835) — brilliance with a slow movement by Mendelssohn’s counsel · Romance Op. 11 No. 1 (1839) — three minutes of unforced song · Piano Trio in G minor, Op. 17 (1846) — chamber music of the first rank, long overdue an audience.
Life VII
Joseph Haydn 1732–1809
Rohrau · Esterháza · Vienna · Classical. Kapellmeister; the symphony's patient inventor.
Haydn spent twenty-nine years in service to the Esterházy family, and in that useful isolation standardised the symphony and the string quartet. Cheerful, pious, and methodical, he composed upwards of one hundred symphonies without repeating himself.
Released from livery in 1790, he travelled to London for the impresario Salomon and premiered the Symphony No. 94 in G major at the Hanover Square Rooms on 23 March 1792 — the audience jumping, as instructed, at the second-movement crash. He answered the new century with the oratorio The Creation, Hob. XXI:2, first performed at the Schwarzenberg Palace on 30 April 1798.
Begin with. Symphony No. 94 in G major “Surprise”, Hob. I:94 (1791) — the joke explained in the slow movement · String Quartet in C major “Emperor”, Op. 76 No. 3 (1797) — the slow movement later borrowed for an anthem · The Creation, Hob. XXI:2 (1798) — chaos, then light, on schedule.
Life VIII
Franz Schubert 1797–1828
Vienna · Early Romantic. Melodist of unguarded abundance; six hundred songs.
Schubert wrote some thousand works in fifteen years — symphonies, quartets, piano sonatas, and songs at a rate that suggests dictation rather than composition. He died at thirty-one, unknown to the concert hall and already indispensable to the song recital.
He never held a post of consequence, preferring the company of the Schubertiades — evenings of music among friends in Vienna flats. In October 1822 he laid aside the Symphony No. 8 in B minor, D. 759, after two movements; it was not performed until the Vienna Musikverein on 17 December 1865, thirty-seven years after his death.
Begin with. Piano Quintet in A major “Trout”, D. 667 (1819) — variations on his own song, cheerfully done · Symphony No. 8 in B minor “Unfinished”, D. 759 (1822) — two movements where others manage four · Winterreise, D. 911 (1827) — twenty-four songs; bring a coat.
Life IX
Robert Schumann 1810–1856
Zwickau · Leipzig · Düsseldorf · Romantic. Critic, pianist thwarted, inventor of inner voices.
Schumann began as a piano virtuoso in prospect, became instead the century's most literary composer, and founded the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik to say so in print. His music proceeds by confession and cipher — Florestan and Eusebius, his two invented selves, conduct the argument.
A hand injury having closed the keyboard career in 1832, he married Clara Wieck at Leipzig on 12 September 1840 after years of litigation with her father, and marked the wedding year with one hundred and thirty-eight songs. In 1841 he completed the Symphony No. 1 in B-flat major, Op. 38, premiered by Mendelssohn at the Leipzig Gewandhaus on 31 March 1841.
Begin with. Carnaval, Op. 9 (1834–35) — twenty-one masked miniatures on four notes · Dichterliebe, Op. 48 (1840) — sixteen Heine songs; the piano has the last word · Symphony No. 1 in B-flat major “Spring”, Op. 38 (1841) — April weather, accurately scored.
Life X
Johannes Brahms 1833–1897
Hamburg · Vienna · Late Romantic. Classicist among Romantics; bachelor of the North German school.
Brahms took twenty years over his First Symphony, unwilling to be heard following Beethoven until he could do so upright. The delay was well spent: four symphonies, two piano concertos, chamber music of granite finish, and choral works that require no opera house.
Presented to the Schumanns at Düsseldorf in October 1853 as a youth of twenty, he was announced by Robert as a coming master — an endorsement that cost him a decade of nerves. On 10 April 1868 he conducted Ein deutsches Requiem, Op. 45, in its six-movement form at Bremen Cathedral, and was thereafter permitted to be called Master without irony.
Begin with. Ein deutsches Requiem, Op. 45 (1868) — consolation in German, for the living · Wiegenlied “Guten Abend, gute Nacht”, Op. 49 No. 4 (1868) — the lullaby everybody knows, correctly attributed · Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 (1876) — Beethoven's Tenth, as the nervous wits called it.
Life XI
Giuseppe Verdi 1813–1901
Busseto · Milan · Sant'Agata · Romantic. Farmer, deputy, and master of the opera house.
Verdi wrote twenty-eight operas and in doing so kept the Italian theatre solvent for half a century. Suspicious of fashion, exacting with librettists, he retired repeatedly to his farm at Sant'Agata and was repeatedly recalled by his own standards.
On 11 March 1851 Rigoletto was premiered at La Fenice, Venice, the tenor having been forbidden to whistle “La donna è mobile” in the streets lest the tune escape before the night. Twenty years later, on 24 December 1871, Aida was first performed at the Cairo Opera House for the Khedive's festivities — spectacle delivered, at full fee, without indulgence.
Begin with. Rigoletto (1851) — a jester, a curse, and a quartet of perfect construction · Aida (1871) — triumph and tomb, in that order · Messa da Requiem (1874) — an opera in church dress, written for Manzoni.
Life XII
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky 1840–1893
Votkinsk · Moscow · Klin · Romantic. Civil servant turned melodist; Russia's most posted composer.
Tchaikovsky resigned a clerkship in the Ministry of Justice to enter the St Petersburg Conservatory, and thereafter supplied symphonies, concertos, operas, and ballets with a fluency his critics mistook for ease. His tunes travel; his orchestrations arrive first.
On 4 March 1877 Swan Lake, Op. 20, was premiered at the Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow, to indifferent notices and a thin house — the revival had to wait for St Petersburg in 1895. Nine days before his death, on 28 October 1893, he conducted the Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 74, “Pathétique”, at St Petersburg.
Begin with. Swan Lake, Op. 20 (1876) — the ballet the dancers caught up with later · 1812 Overture, Op. 49 (1880) — bells, hymns, and artillery, in due proportion · Symphony No. 6 in B minor “Pathétique”, Op. 74 (1893) — a finale that fades instead of bowing.