Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. Born in Salzburg, Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood. Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five...

Antonio Salieri is still better known today for the renowned composers with whom he was associated than for his own many and varied compositions. While he cannot be ranked among the great masters himself, he has nevertheless come into view...

Sir Frederick William Herschel was a German-born British astronomer and composer who became famous for discovering Uranus. He also discovered infrared radiation and made many other discoveries in astronomy. He played the cello besides th...

Joseph Haydn was a prominent and prolific composer of the Classical period. He was instrumental in the development of chamber music such as the piano trio and his contributions to musical form have earned him the epithets "Father of the Sym...

Ignatius Sancho was a composer, actor, and writer. He is the first known Black Briton to vote in a British election. He gained fame in his time as "the extraordinary Negro", and to 18th century British abolitionists he became a symbol of th...

Johann Gottfried Müthel was a German composer and noted keyboard virtuoso. Along with C.P.E. Bach, he represented the Sturm und Drang style of composition. As far as is known, he was the first to use the term fortepiano in a published wo...

François-André Danican Philidor, often referred to as André Danican Philidor during his lifetime, was a French composer and chess player. He contributed to the early development of the opéra comique. He was also regarded as the best chess p...

Claude Balbastre was a French composer, organist, harpsichordist and fortepianist. He was one of the most famous musicians of his time. Balbastre's father, Bénigne, a church organist in Dijon, had 18 children from two marriages; Claude w...

Christoph Willibald (von) Gluck was a German composer, one of the most important opera composers of the Classical music era, particularly remembered for Orfeo ed Euridice. He is also remembered as the music teacher of Marie-Antoinette who a...

The second surviving son of J.S. Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel was the most innovative and idiosyncratic member of an extremely talented musical family. His music, unlike that of his father or that of the master he influenced, Haydn, did not d...

As a brilliant, undisciplined, and unconventional thinker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau spent most of his life being driven by controversy back and forth between Paris and his native Geneva. Rousseau first attracted wide-spread attention with his...

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Italian composer of the Neapolitan school. Although he died at the age of 26, he is credited with masterpieces in two fields of music: La serva padrona (The Maid as Mistress, c.1733), an intermezzo, or short com...

Pietro Antonio Locatelli was an Italian composer and violinist. A child prodigy on the violin, he was sent to study in Rome under the direction of Arcangelo Corelli. Little is known of his subsequent activities except that he finally settle...

Unico Wilhelm, Count van Wassenaer Obdam, was a Dutch nobleman who was a diplomat, composer, and administrator. He reorganized the Bailiwick of Utrecht of the Teutonic Order. His most important surviving compositions are the Concerti Armoni...

Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer, organist, harpsichordist, violist, and violinist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ul...