Composers

This section profiles 105 composers, from the 12th-century abbess Hildegard von Bingen to living composers such as Philip Glass and John Williams, listed below in order of birth. Each page covers their life, their musical style, their key works, their legacy, and - most usefully - where to start listening.

Not sure where to begin? Start with one of the giants - Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, or Debussy - or pick someone whose music you already know. Once you have a favorite, the composer recommender suggests who to try next, and the composer quiz is a fun way to test what you've learned. Many more composers are introduced on the era pages, including those who don't have a page here yet.

Every image is public-domain or freely licensed, sourced from Wikimedia Commons - period paintings, engravings, and woodcuts for the earlier composers, photographs for the rest. Some early images were made after the composer's lifetime, and where no portrait survives at all - as with Pachelbel - the page uses another period image and says so. Where an image's license requires attribution, the credit appears on that composer's own page.

• Hildegard von Bingen1098 – 1179

  A Benedictine abbess whose chant is among the earliest music we can still attribute to a named composer.

• Guillaume de Machautc. 1300 – 1377

  Poet, priest, and the greatest composer of the 14th century.

• Guillaume Du Fayc. 1397 – 1474

  The most famous composer of the 15th century, and a founder of the Renaissance sound.

• Josquin des Prezc. 1450 – 1521

  The most celebrated composer of the Renaissance - "the master of the notes."

• Thomas Tallisc. 1505 – 1585

  The Tudor composer who served four monarchs - and wrote a motet for forty voices.

• Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrinac. 1525 – 1594

  The Roman master whose serene polyphony became the model of sacred music.

• William Byrdc. 1540 – 1623

  Elizabethan England's greatest composer - and a Catholic writing in secret.

• Claudio Monteverdi1567 – 1643

  The composer who bridged the Renaissance and Baroque - and wrote the first great opera.

• Barbara Strozzi1619 – 1677

  The Venetian singer who published more secular vocal music than almost anyone of her time.

• Jean-Baptiste Lully1632 – 1687

  The Italian-born dancer who ruled music at the court of Louis XIV.

• Johann Pachelbel1653 – 1706

  The organist behind the most famous canon in the world - and a link in the Bach family story.

• Arcangelo Corelli1653 – 1713

  The violinist whose six slim collections shaped Baroque music across Europe.

• Henry Purcell1659 – 1695

  England's greatest Baroque composer, whose "Dido's Lament" is one of music's great farewells.

• François Couperin1668 – 1733

  "Couperin the Great," the poet of the French harpsichord.

• Antonio Vivaldi1678 – 1741

  The Baroque violinist-composer who made the concerto tell a story.

• Georg Philipp Telemann1681 – 1767

  The most famous German composer of his day - and one of the most prolific in history.

• Jean-Philippe Rameau1683 – 1764

  The great music theorist who wrote his first opera at fifty - and changed French music.

• Johann Sebastian Bach1685 – 1750

  The master of Baroque counterpoint, and the composer other composers study.

• George Frideric Handel1685 – 1759

  A German composer who became England's adopted musical celebrity.

• Domenico Scarlatti1685 – 1757

  The Italian who wrote 555 dazzling keyboard sonatas at the Spanish court.

• Christoph Willibald Gluck1714 – 1787

  The reformer who made opera serve the drama.

• C. P. E. Bach1714 – 1788

  Johann Sebastian's son - and the bridge between Bach and Haydn.

• Joseph Haydn1732 – 1809

  "The father of the symphony" and "the father of the string quartet."

• Luigi Boccherini1743 – 1805

  The cellist who wrote the world's most famous minuet - and found his voice in Spain.

• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart1756 – 1791

  A child prodigy who mastered every form of his era before dying at 35.

• Ludwig van Beethoven1770 – 1827

  The composer who pushed Classical-era forms until they became Romantic ones.

• Niccolò Paganini1782 – 1840

  The violinist so dazzling that people said he had sold his soul to the devil.

• Carl Maria von Weber1786 – 1826

  The father of German Romantic opera, from haunted forests to fairy kingdoms.

• Gioachino Rossini1792 – 1868

  The king of Italian comic opera - who stopped writing operas at 37.

• Franz Schubert1797 – 1828

  Over 600 songs and a life cut short at 31, standing right at the Classical-Romantic hinge.

• Gaetano Donizetti1797 – 1848

  The astonishingly prolific master of bel canto comedy and tragedy.

• Vincenzo Bellini1801 – 1835

  The master of long, flowing melody, and a giant of bel canto opera.

• Hector Berlioz1803 – 1869

  The wildest Romantic of them all, and the great pioneer of the modern orchestra.

• Mikhail Glinka1804 – 1857

  The father of Russian classical music.

• Fanny Mendelssohn1805 – 1847

  Felix's brilliant older sister, whose 460 works are finally being heard.

• Felix Mendelssohn1809 – 1847

  A prodigy as gifted as Mozart, who revived Bach and wrote the Wedding March.

• Frédéric Chopin1810 – 1849

  A pianist-composer who wrote almost exclusively for his own instrument.

• Robert Schumann1810 – 1856

  A composer and influential critic, married to one of the era's great pianists.

• Franz Liszt1811 – 1886

  The piano's first touring superstar, and the composer who invented the symphonic poem.

• Giuseppe Verdi1813 – 1901

  Italian opera's dominant Romantic-era voice, for nearly sixty years.

• Richard Wagner1813 – 1883

  Opera stretched to its most ambitious, continuous, and influential extreme.

• Clara Schumann1819 – 1896

  One of the greatest pianists of the 19th century - and a composer to rediscover.

• Jacques Offenbach1819 – 1880

  The king of operetta - and the man behind the can-can.

• César Franck1822 – 1890

  The modest Paris organist whose late masterpieces inspired a generation.

• Anton Bruckner1824 – 1896

  The humble church organist who built symphonies like cathedrals.

• Bedřich Smetana1824 – 1884

  The father of Czech music, who wrote his greatest works after going deaf.

• Johann Strauss II1825 – 1899

  The Waltz King, whose Blue Danube became the sound of Vienna.

• Johannes Brahms1833 – 1897

  A Romantic who built his symphonies on Classical-era discipline.

• Alexander Borodin1833 – 1887

  The chemist who composed on Sundays - and wrote some of Russia's most beautiful tunes.

• Camille Saint-Saëns1835 – 1921

  A child prodigy who lived to 86 - and wrote The Carnival of the Animals as a joke.

• Georges Bizet1838 – 1875

  The composer of Carmen, who died believing it had failed.

• Modest Mussorgsky1839 – 1881

  The self-taught rebel who gave Russian music its rawest, most original voice.

• Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky1840 – 1893

  Russia's most internationally beloved Romantic-era composer.

• Antonín Dvořák1841 – 1904

  A Czech nationalist voice who found fresh inspiration during three years in America.

• Jules Massenet1842 – 1912

  The most successful French opera composer of his age, and the creator of the Méditation.

• Edvard Grieg1843 – 1907

  Norway's national voice, master of the miniature, and the composer of the Mountain King.

• Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov1844 – 1908

  The naval officer who became the great master of the orchestra.

• Gabriel Fauré1845 – 1924

  The master of French song, whose Requiem is a lullaby of peace.

• Leoš Janáček1854 – 1928

  The late bloomer whose greatest music came in his sixties and seventies.

• Edward Elgar1857 – 1934

  The self-taught outsider who became the voice of Edwardian England.

• Ruggero Leoncavallo1857 – 1919

  The composer of Pagliacci and the clown who laughs through his tears.

• Giacomo Puccini1858 – 1924

  Italian opera's last great Romantic melodist, writing straight through the turn of the century.

• Gustav Mahler1860 – 1911

  The Romantic symphony expanded to its largest possible scale.

• Isaac Albéniz1860 – 1909

  The pianist who captured the sounds of Spain - and whose music guitarists made their own.

• Claude Debussy1862 – 1918

  The composer who traded harmonic narrative for color and atmosphere.

• Frederick Delius1862 – 1934

  The dreamy painter of landscapes in sound, from Florida orange groves to English springs.

• Pietro Mascagni1863 – 1945

  The overnight sensation whose one-act opera launched the age of verismo.

• Richard Strauss1864 – 1949

  A master orchestrator who pushed the symphonic poem to its most vivid extreme.

• Jean Sibelius1865 – 1957

  Finland's national composer, master of the symphony - and of a thirty-year silence.

• Carl Nielsen1865 – 1931

  Denmark's great symphonist, whose music celebrates the unstoppable force of life.

• Erik Satie1866 – 1925

  The eccentric of Montmartre whose spare, dreamy piano music was decades ahead of its time.

• Enrique Granados1867 – 1916

  The poet of the Spanish piano, inspired by the paintings of Goya.

• Ralph Vaughan Williams1872 – 1958

  The folk-song collector who gave English music its pastoral voice - and its symphonies.

• Alexander Scriabin1872 – 1915

  The mystic who dreamed of music, color, and light that would transform the world.

• Sergei Rachmaninoff1873 – 1943

  A late-blooming Romantic, writing lush, virtuosic piano music well into the 20th century.

• Arnold Schoenberg1874 – 1951

  The composer who broke music free from its home key entirely.

• Gustav Holst1874 – 1934

  The composer of The Planets - a teacher, a trombonist, and a mystic.

• Maurice Ravel1875 – 1937

  A meticulous orchestrator, often grouped with Debussy but far more precisely structured.

• Manuel de Falla1876 – 1946

  The greatest Spanish composer of the 20th century, from flamenco fire to austere modernism.

• Ottorino Respighi1879 – 1936

  The orchestral painter of Rome, who brought ancient music back to life.

• Béla Bartók1881 – 1945

  The Hungarian modernist who found his voice in the folk music of the villages.

• Igor Stravinsky1882 – 1971

  The composer whose ballet score reportedly caused a riot.

• Florence Price1887 – 1953

  The first Black woman to have a symphony played by a major American orchestra.

• Sergei Prokofiev1891 – 1953

  A modernist edge softened by a genuine gift for melody and storytelling.

• Lili Boulanger1893 – 1918

  The first woman to win the Prix de Rome, who packed a lifetime into twenty-four years.

• Erich Wolfgang Korngold1897 – 1957

  The Viennese child prodigy who invented the sound of the Hollywood film score.

• George Gershwin1898 – 1937

  The songwriter who brought jazz into the concert hall.

• Francis Poulenc1899 – 1963

  Part monk, part rascal: the Parisian wit who wrote some of the century's most moving sacred music.

• Aaron Copland1900 – 1990

  The composer who gave American concert music its own distinct sound.

• William Walton1902 – 1983

  The Oldham choirboy who became the voice of British ceremony - and wrote some of its most vivid modern music.

• Aram Khachaturian1903 – 1978

  The Armenian composer of the Sabre Dance and Spartacus.

• Dmitri Shostakovich1906 – 1975

  A composer whose music carried coded meaning under constant political pressure.

• Olivier Messiaen1908 – 1992

  The composer of birdsong, color, and faith - who wrote a masterpiece in a prison camp.

• Samuel Barber1910 – 1981

  The American lyricist whose Adagio for Strings became an anthem of mourning.

• Benjamin Britten1913 – 1976

  A 20th-century modernist best known for a piece written to teach children the orchestra.

• Leonard Bernstein1918 – 1990

  Composer of West Side Story, star conductor, and America's great music teacher.

• György Ligeti1923 – 2006

  The survivor whose shimmering clouds of sound reached millions through 2001.

• John Williamsb. 1932

  The composer who brought the Late Romantic orchestral sound to the multiplex.

• Henryk Górecki1933 – 2010

  The Polish modernist whose slow, sorrowful symphony sold over a million records.

• Arvo Pärtb. 1935

  The Estonian composer whose bell-like "tintinnabuli" style brought stillness back to music.

• Steve Reichb. 1936

  A founder of minimalism, who built new music from tape loops, pulses, and patterns.

• Philip Glassb. 1937

  The composer whose name became shorthand for minimalism itself.

• John Adamsb. 1947

  The American who turned minimalism into opera, history, and headlines.

• Kaija Saariaho1952 – 2023

  The Finnish composer of luminous, shimmering sound, and of a landmark opera.

• Caroline Shawb. 1982

  The singer, violinist, and composer who became the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music.