Curated playlist
Classical composers of church music
- 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…
- 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…
- Pyotr Ilyich TchaikovskyPyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky once listened to a playback of his own voice on an Edison recording device and said: "This trill could be better." That was January 1890, in Moscow, and the remark captures something essential about the man: even…
- 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…
- Hector BerliozHector Berlioz was born on the 11th of December 1803 in the commune of La Cote-Saint-Andre, in south-eastern France, the son of a physician who had never heard of him becoming a composer. His father was a progressive, agnostic doctor…
- 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."…
- Sergei RachmaninoffSergei Rachmaninoff stepped onto the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre in May 1892 knowing, he later admitted, that his one-act opera was "sure to fail." He was nineteen years old. The audience disagreed so completely that the theatre agreed on…
- Tomás Luis de VictoriaTomás Luis de Victoria arrived in Rome around 1565 with a royal grant from Philip II in his pocket and an entire sacred world still unwritten. He would go on to be ranked alongside Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Orlande de Lassus as…
- Josef MyslivečekJosef Mysliveček approached Wolfgang Mozart at a hospital in Munich. Mozart recorded the scene in a letter to his father Leopold, written on the 11th of October 1777. "When he came up to me," Mozart wrote, "I took him by his hand and he…
- Johann Nepomuk HummelJohann Nepomuk Hummel was taught piano by Mozart at the age of eight, housed and tutored free of charge for two years by the most celebrated composer in Europe. That single fact tells you something about what Hummel's contemporaries…