AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

(Fer-rooch’-yo Boo-zo’-ne) 1866–1924 Italian-German composer Busoni was a child prodigy, giving concerts from the age of seven and starting to compose soon after. His music was formed from the fruitful tensions between his Latin and Teutonic ancestries and between his reverence for the past – J. S. Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) above all – and his openness to ...

• Instruments
• Keyboards

In one form or another, the harpsichord ruled the domestic keyboard roost throughout Europe – and later in America – from the late-sixteenth to the early-nineteenth centuries. Apart from the organ, it was the grandest and most versatile of all keyboard instruments until the advent of the mature fortepiano in the mid- to late-eighteenth century. Rise and Fall of ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

1913–76 English composer The finest English composer of his generation, Britten reacted against the folksong-derived pastoralism of his elder compatriots, finding inspiration in Purcell and influences as various as Mahler and Stravinsky. The international success of his opera Peter Grimes (1945) brought financial security, but he continued to appear as a pianist, accompanying his partner and outstanding ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Late Romantic

(Zhan Se-bal-yoos) 1865–1957 Finnish composer When Jean (Johan) Sibelius, Finland’s greatest composer, was born on 8 December 1865 at Hämeenlinna, his homeland had been ruled by Russia since Napoleon snatched it from Sweden. As a child he composed and played the violin, but he was 14 before taking up the instrument seriously. He enrolled in 1886 at the ...

• Performance
• Classical
• Early Romantic

One of the most startling developments in instrumental music during the first half of the nineteenth century was the rise of the virtuoso performer, particularly the composer-performer who wrote very difficult works to demonstrate his own flamboyant skills. Virtuoso performers were nothing new, of course – Mozart and Clementi were both dazzling pianists who wrote works for their own ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Modern Era

Futurism was an artistic movement of the early twentieth century. Its influences spread to all areas of the arts, including literature and the visual arts as well as music. The main force behind the movement was the Italian writer Filippo Marinetti, who published the definitive manifesto of the Futurists in 1909. With declared enthusiasm for modernity and new inventions ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical
• Singer

b. 1944 English baritone Allen’s early career was spent with the Welsh National Opera, in works ranging from Mozart to Britten. He made his Covent Garden debut as Donald in Britten’s Billy Budd in 1971, and his Metropolitan Opera debut as Papageno (The Magic Flute) in 1981. He appeared at English National Opera as Busoni’s Faust in 1986 and ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

1918–70, German Attracted to the avant-garde, Zimmerman composed only one opera, yet it is one of the most powerful German-language works of recent years. The four-act Die Soldaten (‘The Soldiers’) premiered in Cologne in 1965. Zimmermann travelled outside Germany just once, when he was sent to France during the war. Here, he familiarized himself with the ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

1925–2012, German In great demand as an opera singer and recitalist, Fischer-Dieskau was the most recorded baritone of the twentieth century. His opera work is remembered for roles such as Berg’s Wozzeck, Busoni’s Faust and Reimann’s Lear, for which he gave the first performance. He was not well suited to the Romantic Italian repertoire, but had ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Late Baroque

(Yo’-han Sa-bäs’tyan Bakh) 1685–1750 German composer Johann Sebastian Bach was born into a closely knit musical family of which he was rightly proud. His father Johann Ambrosius Bach (1645–95) had an identical twin brother, Johann Christoph (1645–93), who was like a second father to the young Sebastian. Johann was such a common name that almost all boys called Johann were known ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

(Koort Vil) 1900–50 German/American composer Weill was influenced by his teacher Busoni, by Stravinsky and by the ideal of Zeitoper (opera on contemporary subjects and themes). In his early, successful stage pieces, including Der Protagonist (‘The Protagonist’, 1926) and Royal Palace (1927), he soon moved towards a style, related to jazz and cabaret, that made him ...

• Styles & Forms
• Classical
• Modern Era

Nineteenth-century music had developed with an unprecedented awareness of its own history, and by 1900 the European musical legacy seemed as permanent and unshakeable as the institutions – the opera houses, concert halls and conservatories – that nurtured it. Above all, classical tonality and its associated forms and genres, now the everyday stuff of textbooks, had ...