Composers

All thirty portraits are public-domain or freely-licensed images sourced from Wikimedia Commons — period paintings and engravings for the earlier composers, photographs for the rest. Full credit and source details are on each 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.

• Antonio Vivaldi1678 – 1741

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

• 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.

• Joseph Haydn1732 – 1809

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

• 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.

• Franz Schubert1797 – 1828

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

• Frederic 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.

• Richard Wagner1813 – 1883

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

• Giuseppe Verdi1813 – 1901

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

• Johannes Brahms1833 – 1897

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

• Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky1840 – 1893

  Russia's most internationally beloved Romantic-era composer.

• Antonin Dvorak1841 – 1904

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

• 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.

• Claude Debussy1862 – 1918

  The composer who traded harmonic narrative for color and atmosphere.

• Richard Strauss1864 – 1949

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

• 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.

• Maurice Ravel1875 – 1937

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

• Igor Stravinsky1882 – 1971

  The composer whose ballet score reportedly caused a riot.

• Sergei Prokofiev1891 – 1953

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

• Aaron Copland1900 – 1990

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

• Dmitri Shostakovich1906 – 1975

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

• Benjamin Britten1913 – 1976

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

• John Williamsb. 1932

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

• Philip Glassb. 1937

  The composer whose name became shorthand for minimalism itself.