Ludwig van Beethoven
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The events of Beethoven's life are the stuff of Romantic legend, evoking images of the solitary creator shaking his fist at Fate and finally overcoming it through a supreme effort of creative will. Born in the small German city of Bonn on or around December 16, 1770, he moved to Vienna in 1792 to study with Haydn; despite the prickliness of their relationship, Haydn's concise humor helped form Beethoven's style. Around 1800, Beethoven began to notice his gradually encroaching deafness. His growing despondency only intensified his antisocial tendencies. However, the Symphony No. 3 ("Eroica") of 1803 began a sustained period of groundbreaking creative triumph. In later years, Beethoven was plagued by personal difficulties, including a series of failed romances and a nasty custody battle over a nephew, Karl. Yet after a long period of comparative compositional inactivity lasting from about 1811 to 1817, his creative imagination triumphed once again over his troubles. Beethoven's late works, especially the last five of his 16 string quartets and the last four of his 32 piano sonatas, have an ecstatic quality in which many have found a truly mystical significance. Beethoven died in Vienna on March 26, 1827. Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, with its famous opening short-short-short-long motif, is perhaps his best-known piece of music. The symphony clearly illustrates how his works, however violent they may seem, also evince an iron formal logic in their intricate motivic webs and their clearly defined relations of specific parts to the whole. This grand work also superbly exemplifies Beethoven's definition of the individual's experience as the locus of musical expression -- a development of fundamental importance in European culture. Generalizing broadly, we might argue that, before Beethoven, a piece of music was essentially a work composed to in response to specific requests by representatives of secular or spiritual power; from Beethoven on, it was a manifestation of individual creativity. Beethoven's epochal career is often divided into early, middle, and late periods, represented, respectively, by works based on Classic-period models, by revolutionary pieces that expanded the vocabulary of music, and by compositions written in a unique, highly personal musical language incorporating elements of contrapuntal and variation writing while approaching large-scale forms with complete freedom. Among Beethoven's symphonies, the First and Second fall into the early period, the Third through the Eighth into the middle, and the vast Ninth, with its choral finale, into the late. Though certainly subject to debate, these divisions point to the immense depth and multifariousness of Beethoven's creative personality. Beethoven profoundly transformed every genre he touched, and the music of the nineteenth century seems to grow from his compositions as if from a chrysalis. A formidable pianist, he moved the piano sonata from the drawing room to the concert hall with such ambitious and virtuosic middle-period works as the "Waldstein" (No. 21) and "Appassionata" (No. 23) sonatas. His song cycle An die ferne Geliebte of 1816 set the pattern for similar cycles by all the Romantic song composers, from Schubert to Wolf. The Romantic tradition of descriptive or "program" music began with Beethoven's "Pastoral" Symphony No. 6. Even in the second half of the nineteenth century, Beethoven still directly inspired both conservatives (such as Brahms, who, like Beethoven, fundamentally stayed within the confines of Classical form) and radicals (such as Wagner, who viewed the Ninth Symphony as a harbinger of his own vision of a total art work, integrating vocal and instrumental music with the other arts). In many ways revolutionary, Beethoven's music remains universally appealing because of its characteristic humanism and dramatic power.
Johann Sebastian Bach
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Johann Sebastian Bach is the most important composer of the Baroque period, with only his contemporary Handel offering a challenge to his supremacy. Better known as a virtuoso organist than as a composer in his day, he was a conservative who used traditional forms in composition; his sacred music, organ and choral works, and other instrumental music had an enthusiasm and seeming freedom that concealed immense rigor. He never produced an opera or a bona fide oratorio, but did write music in virtually every other genre. Bach's use of counterpoint was brilliant and innovative, and the immense complexities of his compositional style -- which often included religious and numerological symbols that seem to fit perfectly together in a profound puzzle of special codes -- still amaze musicians today. Many consider him the greatest composer of all time. Bach was born in Eisenach in 1685. He was taught to play the violin and harpsichord by his father, Johann Ambrosius, a court trumpeter in the service of the Duke of Eisenach. Young Johann was not yet ten when his father died, leaving him orphaned. He was taken in by his recently married oldest brother, Johann Christoph, who lived in Ohrdruf. Because of his excellent singing voice, Bach attained a position at the Michaelis monastery at Lüneberg in 1700. His voice changed a short while later, but he stayed on as an instrumentalist. After taking a short-lived post in Weimar in 1703 as a violinist, Bach became organist at the Neue Kirche in Arnstadt (1703-1707), after which he briefly served at St. Blasius in Mühlhausen as organist, beginning in June 1707. He married his cousin, Maria Barbara Bach, that fall. Bach composed his famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565) while in Mühlhausen. He next took a post in Weimar for the Duke of Sachsen-Weimar in 1708, serving as court organist and playing in the orchestra, eventually becoming its leader in 1714. He wrote many organ compositions during this period, including his Orgel-Büchlein. Owing to a political controversy that had a negative impact on the court's musicians, Bach left and secured a post in December 1717 as Kapellmeister at Cöthen. In 1720, Bach's wife suddenly died, leaving him with four children (three others had died in infancy). A short while later, he met his second wife, soprano Anna Magdalena Wilcke, whom he married in December 1721. She would bear 13 children, though only five would survive childhood. The six Brandenburg Concertos (BWV 1046-51), among many other works, date from his Cöthen years. Bach became Kantor of the Thomas School in Leipzig in May 1723, and held the post until his death. It was in Leipzig that he composed the bulk of his religious and secular cantatas. Bach eventually became dissatisfied with this post, not only because of its meager financial rewards but also because of onerous duties and inadequate facilities. Thus, he took on other projects, chief among which was the directorship of the city's Collegium Musicum in 1729. This ensemble was comprised of professional and student musicians who gave weekly concerts. He also became music director at the Dresden Court in 1736, in the service of Frederick Augustus II, though his duties were vague and apparently few. Bach began making trips to Berlin in the 1740s, not least because his son Carl Philipp Emanuel served as a court musician there. In May 1747, the composer was warmly received by King Frederick II of Prussia, for whom he wrote the gloriously abstruse Musical Offering (BWV 1079). Among Bach's last works was his 1749 Mass in B minor. Besieged by diabetes, he died on July 28, 1750.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
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The incomparable and inimitable Mozart, who signed himself W.A. or Wolfgang Amadé (never "Amadeus" except in jest after 1773), was the lone surviving son of a proud, shrewd, exploitative father. Leopold toured the boy and his sister, Nannerl, as prodigies between 1762 and 1773, from London to Italy via Germany, France, England, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and, of course, Vienna, the Hapsburg capital. Mozart, although frequently and seriously ill, including with typhus and smallpox, spent less than four years at home in Salzburg before 1773. The arrival of a haughty, stingy new archbishop in 1771 curtailed father-son travel time (Nannerl was dropped from the act in 1766). Grudgingly, Leopold sent his wife in 1777 - 1778 to chaperone an ill-fated trip to Paris (where she died). En route, Mozart fell in love at Mannheim with Aloisia Weber, whose sister Constanze he happily married in 1783, without papa's approval.
Mozart's reprieve from provincial Salzburg came from the Elector of Bavaria: a commission to compose Idomeneo for Munich's 1780 - 1781 carnival season. From there, the archbishop summoned Mozart to Vienna for the coronation of Joseph II, Maria Theresa's successor, where he dismissed his exasperating employee. From 1782 on, Mozart was his own man (although perpetually nagged by papa, whose funeral in 1787 Mozart boycotted). Vienna emancipated him from a stultifying routine, although before age 20 he had written nine operas, five violin concertos, at least 30 symphonies, a sheaf of divertimentos and serenades, a ream of liturgical pieces, six sonatas, and six concertos for klavier. Several startlingly individual works were not the result of Leopold's tutelage, his son's first and strictest teacher, but came after instruction by Johann Christian, the "London Bach," in 1764 - 1765; Padre Martini in Italy after 1769; and frequent advice from Michael Haydn, Franz Josef's younger brother, appointed musical director at Salzburg in 1762 and indubitably influential after 1771.
Although Mozart achieved celebrity in Vienna early on, Emperor Joseph II never formally employed him despite a high regard for Mozart's genius. Mozart began presenting solo concerts with orchestra, which produced a trove of sublime klavier concertos between 1782 and 1786 with Nos. 12 to 25. Only two more followed before his death five years later. After the successful Singspiel Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Harem) in 1782, he wrote just two operatic fragments and the single-act Der Schauspieldirektor before five final and uniquely brilliant operas. La nozze di Figaro offended many aristocratic sponsors, as the Emperor intended when he suggested the subject to librettist Lorenzo da Ponte (although Beaumarchais' original play was banned in Vienna). Prague, however, loved Figaro and immediately commissioned Don Giovanni. In 1784, Mozart joined the Freemasons, whose ideas would infuse many of his works. The Ottoman War of 1788 - 1790 shuttered Vienna's theaters for two years: ergo, the belated creation of Così fan tutte, which Joseph's sudden death suspended after just five performances. When Constanze became chronically ill (six pregnancies in as many years), the family coffers that had been well-filled since 1783 emptied quickly as Mozart had no sense of money management whatsoever. In 1791, however, the Die Zauberflöte commission materialized and prospered greatly, followed by a Prague commission for Tito to celebrate the coronation of Leopold II (the son whom Maria Theresa had advised, when he was still King of Lombardy, not to engage Mozart as court composer because she considered his father vulgar and greedy). All debts were repaid before Mozart's untimely death, except 1000 kroner owed a fellow mason, which Constanze settled posthumously. In his last year, Mozart earned the equivalent of 80,000 U.S. dollars, including his fee for the unfinished Requiem, completed by a pupil.
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I pity the fool - he knows who he is (no names mentioned here, but if you feel upset by this statement, you must be The Fool!)
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