Johannes Brahms

(7 May 1833 – 3 April 1897),
Starting with number 10 and also one of the hardest number on the list with a lot of competition from other famous composers like Tchaikovsky, Joseph Haydn and George Frederic Handel which were all very close on becoming number 10.

Most popular on the internet are his symphonies which he wrote 4 and off course his Hungarian dances which were also his most profitable compositions.

While being number 6 on most ‘famous … Continue Reading

Albert Schweitzer

Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), one of the exemplary inspirational figures of the early and middle decades of the 20thcentury, founded in 1913 and (with brief interruptions) for decades thereafter managed, a hospital in Lambaréné in the Central African rainforest, in the territory of what in 1960 became the independent nation of Gabon.

Yet Schweitzer was more than a humanitarian and physician. He was a distinguished scholar in both philosophy and theology. He coined the phrase “reverence for life” as his central philosophical … Continue Reading

Fishing in the Depths of Benjamin Britten

This year is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Britten, a great English composer and conductor who created several outstanding operas: Peter Grimes (1945), Billy Budd (1951), and The Turn of the Screw (1954) among them. [The Queen had made him a peer in 1976, and Britten died of congestive heart failure later that year.]

… Continue Reading

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Alain Gheerbrant, a Frenchman who explored the Amazon and wrote about his experiences there in The Impossible Adventure (1955), told an incidental story that bears on Mozart’s appeal.

Gheerbrant says that when he and his companions entered a certain village inhabited by Maquiritare Indians in northern Brazil, they had a lot of difficulty encouraging the locals to trust and interact with them. So the Frenchmen stayed in the village clearing, and began to play various records on their gramophone. Most of their … Continue Reading

Emperor Napoleon

Napoleon made himself “Emperor” in 1804, losing the admiration of a generation of Europe’s intellectuals and artists.

In the last entry, I discussed romanticism from a bird’s-eye view, using some sweeping definitions. But I did my best at the same time to suggest the nature of the achievement of the early years of a flesh-and-blood composer, Ludwig van Beethoven, in the late eighteenth century and at the very beginning of the nineteenth.

Heroism and Its Disappointments

In this entry, I will … Continue Reading

Johann Sebastian Bach (21 March 1685 - 28 July 1750)

Born in Eisenach, Saxe-Eisenach, Germany in 1685, Johann Sebastian Bach was the youngest of eight children. He came from a family of musicians in which all of his uncles played professionally and his father was a director of the town’s musicians. Although he learned the violin and harpsichord from his father, Johann Ambrosius Bach, it was his uncle Johann Christoph Bach who taught him to play the organ, the instrument for which … Continue Reading