Edvard Hagerup Grieg was a Norwegian composer and pianist who composed in the romantic period. He is best known for his Piano Concerto in A minor, for his incidental music to Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt (which includes In the Hall of the...

Emmanuel Chabrier was a French Romantic composer and pianist. Although known primarily for two of his orchestral works, España and Joyeuse marche, he left an important corpus of operas (including the increasingly popular L'étoile), songs, a...

Antonin Dvorak was the greatest Bohemian composer and one of the leading masters of symphonic and chamber music of the late 19th century. Dvorak displayed unusual musical talent at an early age and learned to play the violin from the local...

Piotr Tchaikovsky, Russian composer, started piano studies at five and soon showed remarkable gifts. He began to compose at age ten, and soon after was sent to the School of Jurisprudence where he remained for nine years. Tchaikovsky joine...

Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, one of the Russian composers known as the Five, was an innovator of Russian music. He strove to achieve a uniquely Russian musical identity, often in deliberate defiance of the established conventions of Western...

Georges Bizet, French composer. Son of a music teacher, he gained admission to the Paris Conservatoire at age 9, and at age 17 he wrote the precocious Symphony in C Major (1855). Intent on success on the operatic stage, he produced The Pear...

Georges Bizet was a French composer of the romantic era. Best known for his operas in a career cut short by his early death, Bizet achieved few successes before his final work, Carmen, which has become one of the most popular and frequently...

Johannes Brahms was a German composer and pianist. Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna, Austria. In his lifetime, Brahms's popularity and influence were considerable; following a comment by the nineteenth-century conductor...

Johann Strauss II (the Younger), was an Austrian composer known especially for his waltzes, such as The Blue Danube. Son of the composer Johann Strauss I, and brother to the composers Josef Strauss and Eduard Strauss, Johann II is the most...

Henri Vieuxtemps was a Belgian violinist and composer. He was a child prodigy and one of the most important composers of violin music in the latter-nineteenth century. He was an innovator within the Romantic movement, though he was not alwa...

Jacques Offenbach is best known for his opera Les contes d'Hoffman (Tales of Hoffmann) and for a work he did not compose, Gaîté parisienne, which used his themes as assembled and arranged by Manuel Rosenthal. Offenbach was one of those popu...

Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is primarily known for his operas (or, as some of his later works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote bot...

Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was an Italian opera composer. Verdi was born near Busseto to a provincial family of moderate means, and developed a musical education with the help of a local patron. Verdi came to dominate the Italian...

August Gottfried Ritter was a German romantic composer and organist. Co-creator, together with Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, of the first example of Romantic Organ Sonata (the first one was composed in 1845); he moved in 1847 from being orga...

Franz Liszt was a prolific 19th-century Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor, music teacher, arranger, organist, philanthropist, author, nationalist and a Franciscan tertiary. Liszt gained renown in Europe during the early nin...