Icons of Classical Music

Icons of Classical Music

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Johann Sebastian Bach

Ludwig van Beethoven

Antonio Vivaldi

The Stradivarius

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Franz Liszt

Johann Sebastian Bach

J.S. Bach was a man renowned for his organs. It's true. Bach's contemporaries knew him mainly as an organ expert--someone who could build and repair the instruments almost as well as he could play them. Of course, today we remember Bach as a composer. And for good reason. In a 40-year career, the Baroque master penned more than 1,000 pieces--for voices, solo instruments, and ensembles of all sorts. Here's a look at (and a listen to) some Bach basics.

Born in Germany in 1685, Bach was the youngest of eight children. His father was a professional musician, and the entire Bach clan was known for its musical gifts. His parents died within a year of each other when Bach was just 10 years old. So he went to live with his older brother, a professional organist. Bach's father had likely taught him strings already. His brother now trained him on keyboards.

By age 15, Bach was singing for his supper--and his schooling--after winning a spot in a prestigious boys' choir. At 18, he won his first full-time job as a professional organist. He stayed in the church position for four years, except for a four-month stint spent trekking to see an organ virtuoso 200 miles (320 km) away. That trip didn't please his employers, who had agreed only to a one-month absence.

In 1707, Bach took a new job. A year later, he took another new job, as organist for the duke of Weimar. Those years were productive ones. Bach's first published compositions appeared, his reputation as an organ virtuoso grew, and the first of his 20 children were born (10 would survive to adulthood; 5 would become reputable musicians themselves). Around this time, he likely composed his dazzling Toccata and Fugue in D minor for the organ.

In 1714, the duke promoted Bach to concertmaster. In 1717, he won an organ-playing duel--by forfeit--with a famed French keyboardist, Louis Marchand. The Frenchman left town the day of the contest, so Bach performed alone before an audience of dignitaries. A few months later, he had a new job: music director for the prince of Anhalt-Köthen.

Bach spent the next six years composing for the prince's talented chamber ensemble--the first musicians to play a slew of Bach masterpieces, including the Brandenburg Concertos. He also began the collection of keyboard pieces now known as The Well-Tempered Clavier. Composed, in part, as practice pieces for Bach's sons, they've since instructed a long line of musical descendants, including Beethoven.

In 1723, Bach took over one of the most prestigious music jobs in Germany: cantor at the Saint Thomas School in Leipzig. In this role, he was responsible for teaching, overseeing four churches' music programs, and composing. He especially excelled at composing. During his first few years, he cranked out one cantata a week.

Still, Bach never much cared for his other duties, and trouble with his bosses eventually set in. He kept his job until his death in 1750, but he complained that "the authorities are odd and very little interested in music." For 50 years after his death, Bach's music was largely forgotten. But around 1800, a Bach revival began--and Bach has been back ever since.

Steve Sampson

Ludwig van Beethoven

Born in Bonn, Germany, in 1770, Beethoven became one of the greatest composers in the history of western music--despite being deaf for at least the last decade of his career.

Like most 18th-century composers, Beethoven was born into a musical family. His father tried to turn him into a popular child prodigy, as Mozart had been. Ludwig didn't exactly become a big child star, but he did become a working musician by age 12.

By 1787, local socialites were impressed enough to send him to Vienna to study with Mozart. But that potentially momentous musical matriculation came to naught when Beethoven's mother died two months later. Beethoven returned home, took charge of the family (his father was an alcoholic), and became a court musician and music tutor.

Then, in 1790, another famous composer--Joseph Haydn--"rediscovered" Beethoven. In 1792, Beethoven left Bonn and went to study with Haydn in Vienna. Almost as soon as he arrived, Vienna was abuzz with rumors of the virtuoso from Bonn--a musician with the chops to rival even the recently deceased master Mozart.

At the time, Viennese society was high on music, and Beethoven's performances became de rigueur. Aristocrats rushed to hear the impetuous pianist, who accrued enough fame and fortune to live as a freelance musician, beyond the system of aristocratic patronage his predecessors needed. But even as he reached new heights of popularity, Beethoven realized that he was going deaf.

At first, he hid the malady, fearing to "admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than others." But as his hearing--and so his performing career--deteriorated, the performer increasingly became a composer. And his compositions became increasingly brilliant.

Around the time he realized he was going deaf, Beethoven moved from what historians call his first or early period--during which his compositions were heavily indebted to Mozart and Haydn--to his second or "heroic" period. On the cusp of that transition came his famous Piano Sonata No. 14 in C sharp minor, nicknamed the "Moonlight Sonata." (You're probably familiar with the first part, but do you know the ferocious third movement?)

A few years later, Beethoven composed his Fifth Symphony, perhaps the world's most recognizable piece of music. (You're probably humming the first four notes to yourself already--three short Gs and a long E-flat.) Still, many would argue that Beethoven's most remarkable accomplishment was the Ninth Symphony, composed during his third and final period--and after he was completely deaf.

The Ninth Symphony incorporates parts of a poem--Friedrich Schiller's ode "To Joy"--sung by a chorus. No major composer had ever used a chorus in a symphony before, and the Ninth has since become known as the "choral" symphony. Tradition says Beethoven couldn't hear the audience applauding after its first performance. A musician on stage had to prompt him to turn around to see the cheering crowd. It was Beethoven's final symphony. He died in 1827, after a bout with pneumonia.

Steve Sampson

Antonio Vivaldi

by Laura Kane

There's American Idol, and then there's, our Baroque Idol: violin virtuoso and concerto master Antonio Vivaldi, born in 1678. You've heard his famous music whether you realize it or not.

Before he was a famous composer, Antonio Vivaldi was just a boy learning the family trade. His father, Giovanni, was a violinist in St. Mark's Basilica orchestra in Venice, his son's music teacher, and a walking advertisement for home schooling. Witnesses to Antonio's virtuoso violin performances were so distracted by his blazingly fast bow and finger movements they could hardly remember what they heard.

Like most serious musicians of his day, young Vivaldi faced a choice between working in the courts of kings or in the cloisters of the church. The nobles paid handsomely but often practiced creative despotism, while the church's repertoire needs were rather confining.

Vivaldi chose the church. He was ordained a priest in 1703 and made an instructor at the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, a home for orphaned and illegitimate girls. Musical education was the specialty of the house. Vivaldi taught violin, conducted choirs and orchestras, and composed prodigiously to keep his talented students busy.

When Vivaldi's full-time employment at the Pietà ended in 1709, he was free to pursue new, secular musical forms, including opera. He traveled extensively to musical meccas like Paris and Vienna, doing freelance composing and listening to examples of this new art form.

In art and music, the Baroque period was a time of high drama and complex ornamentation. Where Renaissance artists focused on the wonders of the human form and mind, Baroque folk depicted humans in motion, interacting with each other and the world. Baroque music used contrasts--between instrumental and vocal parts, loud and soft, soloists and larger ensembles--to create drama and evoke emotion.

Vivaldi composed some 50 Baroque operas, many of which were acclaimed as exemplary, but few of them are performed today. Musical tastes have changed radically, and we're not just talking Vivaldi vs. Britney. The librettos, or scripts, of Baroque operas seem stilted even to today's opera buffs.

Now concertos, that's another story. You're almost certainly familiar with Vivaldi's magnum opus, the 1725 concerto cycle known as The Four Seasons. Still a popular musical form today, the concerto pits a solo instrument (or small group of players) against a larger orchestra. Vivaldi's concerti, with their intense rhythmic energy, lyrical themes, and fast-slow-fast plan for the three movements, became the gold standard of the era. Baroque heavy-hitter Johann Sebastian Bach even honed his composing skills by transcribing 10 of Vivaldi's concerti for keyboard instruments.

By the time the concerto form reached its height in the late 18th century, Vivaldi's fast-slow-fast plan had become de rigueur. His trademark use of the "ritornello" form had lasting impact, too. Concerto composers everywhere worked to showcase the virtuoso's talents by alternating an orchestra's statement of a straightforward melodic refrain with the virtuoso's departure from it.

Unfortunately, though he was popular and well paid at the zenith of his career in the 1720s, Vivaldi's music quickly fell out of fashion in the 1730s, as audiences sought lighter, less ornamented sounds. He died in poverty in 1741. His manuscripts were purchased by a private collector and remained hidden until they were rediscovered and claimed by an Italian museum in the 1920s.

Since then, classical connoisseurs have periodically taken renewed interest in all things Baroque, and with each revival, Vivaldi's stock has risen, with musicians and listeners alike.

Laura Kane
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The Stradivarius

Three hundred years ago, Antonio Stradivari (1644-1737) set the standard for violin craftsmanship. Now scientists say they've discovered the secret to his instruments' sublime sounds: pest control.

Using the latest high-tech imaging techniques, Joseph Nagyvary and his colleagues analyzed wood shavings from five 18th-century instruments--including a Stradivarius violin and cello, and a violin made by Giuseppe Guarneri (Stradivari's main competitor in virtuoso violin-making). They found that wood from both Italian masters' "acoustical marvels" had been "brutally treated by chemicals."

Nagyvary thinks the master-craftsmen boiled their wood in chemically treated water to protect it against scourges like woodworm and fungi. And he thinks this pest-control practice altered the acoustical properties of the instruments they ultimately made. Now he hopes to figure out exactly which chemicals the masters used, with an eye toward enabling modern violin makers to mimic their process.

That may prove difficult. After all, Stradivarius shavings are hard to come by. Fewer than 700 of the instruments still exist, and the last one sold at public auction fetched $3.5 million. What's more, many experts doubt that 18th-century wood treatments are really the secret of Stradivari's success. Previous researchers have offered lots of alternate explanations--from where he got his wood, to the types of glue he used, to environmental conditions in Italy way back when. Each has ultimately proved wanting.

This much we know. The modern violin evolved during the Renaissance, from earlier stringed instruments such as the medieval fiddle, which varied in size, shape, and number of strings. It soon became a favorite of composers, musicians, and audiences alike. Around 1700, Stradaveri and others innovated its design, changing the violin's proportions and establishing a standard that "luthiers" (stringed instrument makers) have aimed for practically ever since.

--Steve Sampson

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Born January 27, 1756, in Salzburg, Austria, Mozart showed serious musical skills by the time he was three years old. So his father, Leopold, a musician himself, decided to show off his son's talent and make a few bucks.

At six, the young Mozart performed for the Austrian empress. At seven, he toured Europe with his father and sister (a talented keyboard player). At eight, he composed his first symphony. By 13, he was back in Salzburg, working as the archbishop's concertmaster.

The following year, Mozart was commissioned to compose an opera seria (serious opera) in Milan. He also visited Vienna and Munich as a teen, always looking for work and constantly composing. From symphonies to sacred works to dance music, Mozart mastered the major musical forms of his era.

At 21, Mozart traveled to Munich, Mannheim, and Paris, searching for professional prospects. He didn't find regular employment, but he did fall in love with a young singer, Aloysia Weber. Aloysia didn't return Mozart's affections, so a few years later, he married her sister, Constanze.

By then, Mozart had parted ways with the archbishop of Salzburg--permanently. According to the composer, he was dismissed "with a kick in the seat of the pants." He moved to Vienna, Austria's imperial (and musical) capital, and worked as a freelance composer, music teacher, and performer. Later he received a minor post at Emperor Joseph II's court, though the emperor evidently wasn't his biggest fan. After watching a Mozart opera, Joseph reportedly offered a simple critique: "Too many notes."

Elsewhere, Mozart's work was better received. So were a series of string quartets Mozart dedicated to his friend, Joseph Haydn, and a series of piano concertos he wrote to perform himself. Then came a series of great operas--The Marriage of Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787), and Cosi Fan Tutte (1790)--not to mention symphonies, concertos, and other works, many of them masterpieces. Mozart earned acclaim and a decent living, but he spent lavishly and faced financial difficulties for the rest of his short life.

Mozart died on December 5, 1791, not long after the premiere of his most successful opera yet, The Magic Flute. The cause of his death has been disputed for years--at least since the 1820s, when a rumor began to circulate that another composer, Antonio Salieri, had poisoned him.

That rumor inspired the dramatic end of Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus (and the Academy Award-winning movie based upon it). Yet there's almost no historical evidence to back it up. Scholarly inquiries have blamed typhus, streptococcus, and other natural ailments. We may never know the truth. But in any case, Mozart's masterful music endures.

Steve Sampson

Franz Liszt

In 1838, composer Franz Liszt performed several concerts to aid Danube flood victims in Hungary. His philanthropy made him a celebrated figure in Hungary for a time. There was even talk of awarding him a Hungarian title, although nothing came of this. As time went on, Liszt's inflated ego and unabashed desire to be part of aristocratic society were gleefully lampooned and ridiculed in the Paris press, and he evolved into a 19th-century media joke.

Unknown author or copyright. Used without permission, but with the best of intentions.

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