Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi was an Italian composer, string player, choirmaster, and priest. A composer of both secular and sacred music, and a pioneer in the development of opera, he is considered a crucial transitional figure between the Renaissance and Baroque periods of music history....

Mikhail Vasilievich Pletnev is a Russian pianist, conductor, and composer.

Pletnev was born into a musical family in Arkhangelsk, then part of the Soviet Union. He studied with Kira Shashkina for six years at the Special Music School of the Kazan Conservatory, before entering the Moscow Central ...

Joseph Maurice Ravel (7 March 1875 – 28 December 1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with Impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as ...

Jacques Offenbach ( 20 June 1819 – 5 October 1880 ) was a German-born French composer, cellist and impresario of the Romantic period. He is remembered for his nearly 100 operettas of the 1850s to the 1870s, and his uncompleted opera The Tales of Hoffmann. He was a powerful influence on later comp...

Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen 10 December 1908 – 27 April 1992) was a French composer, organist, and ornithologist who was one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex; harmonically and melodically he employs a system he called modes of limited trans...

Pierre Louis Joseph Boulez (26 March 1925 – 5 January 2016) was a French composer, conductor and writer, and the founder of several musical institutions. He was one of the dominant figures of post-war Western classical music.

Born in Montbrison in the Loire department of France, the son of an en...

Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev ( 27 April 1891 – 5 March 1953 ) was a Russian Soviet composer, pianist and conductor. As the creator of acknowledged masterpieces across numerous music genres, he is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century. His works include such widely heard piec...

Ruggero (or Ruggiero) Leoncavallo (23 April 1857 – 9 August 1919) was an Italian opera composer and librettist. Although he produced numerous operas and other songs throughout his career it is his opera Pagliacci (1892) that remained his lasting contribution, despite attempts to escape the shadow...

Rodion Konstantinovich Shchedrin born 16 December 1932) is a Soviet and Russian composer and pianist, winner of USSR State Prize (1972), the Lenin Prize (1984), and the State Prize of the Russian Federation (1992), and is a former member of the Inter-regional Deputies Group (1989–1991). He is al...

Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns was a French composer, organist, conductor and pianist of the Romantic era. His best-known works include Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso (1863), the Second Piano Concerto (1868), the First Cello Concerto (1872), Danse macabre (1874), the opera Samson and Delilah (18...

Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg was an Austrian-born composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Vienn...

Robert Schumann (8 June 1810 – 29 July 1856) was a German composer, pianist, and influential music critic. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest composers of the Romantic era. Schumann left the study of law, intending to pursue a career as a virtuoso pianist. His teacher, Friedrich Wieck, ...

Bedřich Smetana was a Czech composer who pioneered the development of a musical style that became closely identified with his people's aspirations to a cultural and political "revival." He has been regarded in his homeland as the father of Czech music. Internationally he is best known for his ope...

Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff (1 April [O.S. 20 March] 1873 – 28 March 1943) was a Russian composer, virtuoso pianist, and conductor. Rachmaninoff is widely considered one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, one of the last great representatives of Romanticism in Russian class...

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (17 June 1882 – 6 April 1971) was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor, later of French (from 1934) and American (from 1945) citizenship. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century.

Stravinsky's compositional ...

Witold Roman Lutosławski (25 January 1913 – 7 February 1994) was a Polish composer and conductor. Among the major composers of the 20th century, he is "generally regarded as the most significant Polish composer since Szymanowski, and possibly the greatest Polish composer since Chopin". His compos...