The wonder of classical music: who are these famous composers?

What preceded

Until the late Middle Ages, almost all music was written by anonymous monks. In the Renaissance, composers became real celebrities and we immediately have a colourful figure on our hands: Carlo Gesualdo. Murdered his wife and her lover when he caught them and got away with it. Time heals all wounds, because today there is even an ensemble named after him. Also living in Gesualdo's time, around 1600, were Claudio Monteverdi and our own Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck from Amsterdam. In case you still have kept the old twenty-five guilder note somewhere: it shows Sweelinck on it!

Johann Sebastian Bach

But let's really start with Bach. Although his peer Handel was regarded as the greatest composer in the eighteenth century, Bach had a fine career and for many years was allowed to call himself musical director of Leipzig. He never composed an opera, but otherwise excelled in just about every kind of piece. With long pieces and daring harmonies, he was so far ahead of his time that only after his death did it become clear how brilliant he had been. If you look up a picture of Bach, one portrait comes up most often. In it, he looks like a strict man and he was. But on family evenings, the booze and cigars would come out and he would make bawdy jokes. With family we also immediately hit a sensitive point, as only 10 of his 20 children survived their father. Today, Bach's pieces are performed in all shapes and sizes, with the St Matthew Passion as his most famous work.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

However beautiful the music of Bach and Handel was, by the mid-eighteenth century many people preferred music that was easier on the ears. In technical terms: the baroque gave way to classicism. That certainly did not mean that the music was also easier to compose. Fortunately, there was perhaps the greatest child prodigy of all time: Mozart. Especially in his Viennese years, he wrote one masterpiece after another and, as one of the first independent composers, he also had to teach and perform to make ends meet. There were also the temptations of the big city: Mozart went to the parties and chased the money through quickly. His mood swings didn't help either, but he continued to compose with his wife Constanze as his support. Sick and exhausted, he died at the age of 35. Mozart was a true all-rounder: operas, symphonies, piano sonatas, solo concertos: it all flowed effortlessly from his pen.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Perhaps we would not have known Beethoven if he had not gone deaf. In fact, he was primarily a pianist until his hearing began to deteriorate around the age of 28 and he was forced to shift his focus to composing. His inner struggle as well as his revolutionary thoughts, inspired by the French Revolution, can be heard in many of his pieces. Meanwhile, he became isolated and frustrated by his deafness and behaved hot-tempered and unpredictable. He never had a wife, and as a guardian he drove his nephew to despair and almost to suicide. Yet his letters reveal a very different Beethoven: a loving man full of good intentions and vulnerability. That Beethoven did not often get to see the outside world. Love and music were inside. Add to that a huge portion of genius and you have a unique composer, who took the string quartet, the piano sonata and especially the symphony to great heights.

Franz Liszt

Composers without problems were there too: Liszt was the superstar of the nineteenth century. What the diabolical virtuoso Paganini can do on the violin, I can do on the piano, he thought. Spectacular and virtuoso in his playing, his appearance in dark clothes and with half-long hair, the requisite love affairs: Liszt was a walking definition of the term 'romanticism', as the nineteenth century is called. Not the public, but the individual composer was now the focus. But anyone who thinks Liszt was all glitz and glamour is wrong. He was one of classical music's greatest innovators and, among other things, invented the symphonic poem. This is a piece for orchestra that expresses something from outside the music, like a book. With some imagination, you could call it a soundtrack. A silent audience, the master class, playing by heart... Liszt was a pioneer at heart. At 54, he had himself ordained a priest in Rome. His music then became more subdued and modern. His piano pieces are still widely performed.

Johannes Brahms

Meanwhile, the wait remained for a composer who would compose symphonies as brilliant as Beethoven's. Hopes were pinned on the young Brahms, who was weighed down by sky-high expectations. Only after more than 20 years of scraping and tinkering did he dare to publish his First Symphony. The string quartet threshold was also particularly high after Beethoven: Brahms probably threw some twenty-five of them into the fireplace. In the end, his four symphonies and three string quartets were a success, and today they are still very much loved for their warm sound and compelling melodies. The same is true of almost all his other music. Like Beethoven, Brahms remained a bachelor, but where Beethoven wanted nothing more than a happy family, Brahms' motto was 'frei aber froh' ('free but happy'). He did have a close friendship with Clara Schumann, the wife and later widow of Robert Schumann.

Gustav Mahler

Complex, intelligent and brilliant - that is how Mahler could be briefly described. In the large family he grew up in, eight children died and so he developed an early obsession with questions about life and death. In his ten symphonies, each dealing with these topics, he hoped to find the answer to those questions. Mahler composed them in his holiday villa, because during the year he had a busy and highly prestigious job as conductor of the Vienna opera. There, he was known as a gifted but temperamental person. Meanwhile, he married the 20-year-old Alma Schindler, who later threatened to leave him. The grand Eighth Symphony was an attempt to win her back. With his long works and huge orchestrations, he took the romantic symphony to its zenith.

Dmitri Shostakovich

For Shostakovich, the glass was half-empty rather than half-full, and he had every reason to be. In the Soviet Union, music had to be intelligible to everyone and preferably as cheerful as possible, so that it could serve as propaganda. So a creative, innovative composer like Shostakovich had no choice artistically. Yet blood ran where it couldn't go, and with a daring opera like Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, he antagonised Stalin. An over-the-top joyful finale of the Fifth Symphony then ensured that Shostakovich was safe again for a while, but the tension remained. Even after Stalin's death, the pain remained and this can be clearly heard in, for instance, his Eighth String Quartet and Thirteenth Symphony. His most famous symphony is the Seventh, inspired by the Battle of Leningrad in World War II. Despite everything, unlike Stravinsky and Rachmaninoff, for instance, he did not flee his homeland.

These were the 3 parts of our short course in which we take you into the world of classical music? Want to know much more about (classical) music? Then take a look at concertgebouw,nl/ontdek. And would you like to come and listen sometime? Use our Concert Matchmaker to find the concert that suits you!