Curated playlist
Catholic liturgical composers
- Ludwig van BeethovenLudwig van Beethoven could no longer hear the applause his own music had earned. At the premiere on the 7th of May 1824, the contralto Caroline Unger had to turn him around so he could see the audience cheering behind his back. He had…
- Wolfgang Amadeus MozartWolfgang Amadeus Mozart was four years old when his father began teaching him minuets at the clavier, treating it as a game. The boy played them faultlessly, in perfect time, with delicacy. By five he was composing little pieces and…
- Gioachino RossiniGioachino Rossini wrote his last opera while still in his thirties, then stopped composing operas for the remaining 40 years of his life. He was born on the 29th of February 1792, a leap day, in Pesaro, a town on the Adriatic coast that…
- Franz SchubertFranz Peter Schubert was born in the Himmelpfortgrund suburb of Vienna on the 31st of January 1797, the twelfth child of a parish schoolmaster and a housemaid's daughter. He was dead by the age of 31. In those three decades, he produced…
- Claudio MonteverdiClaudio Monteverdi was baptised on the 15th of May 1567 in Cremona, and by the time he died in Venice on the 29th of November 1643, he had spent more than half a century reshaping what music could do. He stood at the hinge between two…
- Edward ElgarEdward Elgar told a friend that he had a tune that would "knock 'em - will knock 'em flat." The tune became the trio of his first Pomp and Circumstance March. When it was played at a London Promenade Concert in 1901, the audience rose and…
- Antonín DvořákAntonín Dvořák composed the String Quartet in F major in just three days during a summer holiday in Spillville, Iowa, in 1893. Three days. That single fact captures something essential about the man: a prodigious outpouring of music rooted…
- Joseph HaydnJoseph Haydn once described himself as a man with no escape from his own mind. "Usually musical ideas are pursuing me, to the point of torture," he told his biographer Dies in 1806. "I cannot escape them, they stand like walls before me."…
- Antonio SalieriAntonio Salieri died in Vienna on the 7th of May 1825, and at his memorial service six weeks later, the music played was his own Requiem in C minor, a piece he had composed two decades earlier but never heard performed. He was 74, had…
- Johann Christian BachJohann Christian Bach was born on the 5th of September 1735 in Leipzig, Germany, the youngest son of one of the most towering figures in Western music. His father, Johann Sebastian, personally guided his early musical training. By the time…