7 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
British composer who is the most important English composer of the 20th century — whose operas (Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, Death in Venice) explore outsidership, persecution, and the tension between the individual and society — and whose War Requiem juxtaposes Wilfred Owen's WWI poetry with the Latin Mass.
German Baroque composer — Cantor of St. Thomas Church, Leipzig — composer of the Mass in B Minor, the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Brandenburg Concertos, the St. Matthew Passion, and the Art of Fugue — widely considered the greatest composer in Western music history.
American composer — who scored Star Wars, Jaws, Indiana Jones, E.T., Schindler's List, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, and dozens more — five Academy Awards, 53 Oscar nominations — the most successful film composer in history.
German composer who wrote the 9 symphonies, the late string quartets, and the piano sonatas — becoming deaf before completing his greatest works — making him the archetypal example of the artist whose suffering is inseparable from the transcendence of their art.
Austrian composer who composed over 800 works in his 35 years of life — symphonies, operas, concertos, chamber music, sacred music — with a fluency, variety, and structural perfection that has made him the paradigmatic example of musical genius.
German composer who created the music drama — the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) combining music, poetry, and visual spectacle — in operas including Tristan und Isolde, the Ring cycle, Parsifal, and Die Meistersinger — and who was Nietzsche's model of genius before becoming his symbol of decadence.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was an Austrian composer of the Classical period whose prodigious output across opera, symphony, and chamber music is widely considered the pinnacle of Western musical achievement.