Dmitri Shostakovich is known as one of the most important Russian composers of the 20th century and the last great symphonist. Born on September 25, 1906, Shostakovich was given piano lessons by his mother, a professional musician. After showing potential, he was sent to the St. Petersburg Conservatory to study with the distinguished composer...
Gustav Mahler, born on July 7, 1860, in Bohemia, lived a difficult childhood. He was in a constant miserable state as a result of his parents' unhappy and often violent marriage along with the death of five siblings, another committing suicide, and two being mentally disturbed.
Maurice Ravel was born in Ciboure, France, on March 7, 1875. A superlative and perfectionist orchestrator, Ravel composed one of the finest French ballets ever written, Daphnis et Chloe. However, his most composition may be Bolero, which was his experimental 17-minute "piece of orchestration without music" and never liked.
While George Gershwin was healthy for most of his youth, he began to experience olfactory hallucinations, headaches, and dizziness in his 30s. George Gershwin was born on September 26, 1898, in Brooklyn, New York. His music, unmistakably American, joins classical and popular styles to create an entirely new musical form. His most popular works...
Meet my favorite composer of all time, Frédéric François Chopin. Chopin was born in Żelazowa Wola in the Duchy of Warsaw in 1810 and grew up in Warsaw. In the summer of 2019, I had the wonderful opportunity to perform at Zelazowa Wola. The house was so little that the piano was set inside of the little house and the...
As I welcome you to the new year, I would like to introduce Ignacy Jan Paderewski who reminds us of superhuman powers beyond our brain's ability. He was a pianist, composer, activist, polyglot, orator, politician, statesman, humanitarian, businessman, patron of art and architecture, winegrower, and film actor. He was born on November 6, 1860, in...
George Frideric Handel's music is known as the culmination of the Baroque style. Unlike many composers, Handel was enormously popular in his own life despite the fact of his reputation to eat and look like "the Great Bear" (one of his nicknames). He was born on February 23, 1685 (the same year as Bach) in Halle, Germany. By the age...
Like Mozart, the German musician Felix Mendelssohn was recognized early as a child prodigy and became popular as a young man. He was born in Hamburg, Germany on February 3, 1809. He grew up unusually privileged in a wealthy Jewish family, surrounded by books and music, and made to wake up at 5 am each morning to study. Because many...
Robert Schumann was a German composer and critic, born in Zwickau, Germany on June 8, 1810. Although he was no child prodigy, Schumann went on to become one of the most important composers of the Romantic movement in the 19th century and is recognized as such 200 years after his birth. One of music's supreme fantasists, Schumann brought a new...
Friedrich Burgmüller was born in Ratisbon, Germany in 1806. He was a pianist and composer and the son of the composer, pianist, and music teacher Johann August Franz Burgmüller.
