
Who are the most famous German composers of all time?
1 Max Wagenknecht (1857–1922) 2 Ignatz Waghalter (1881–1949) 3 Richard Wagner (1813–1883) 4 Siegfried Wagner (1869–1930) 5 Karl Heinz Wahren [ de] (born 1933) 6 Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826) 7 Kurt Weill (1900–1950) 8 Hans Jürgen von der Wense (1894–1966) 9 Richard Wetz (1875–1935) 10 Jörg Widmann (born 1973) More items...
Why is Johann Sebastian Bach considered one of the greatest composers?
Although he was admired by his contemporaries primarily as an outstanding harpsichordist, organist, and expert on organ building, Bach is now generally regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time and is celebrated as the creator of the Brandenburg Concertos, The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Mass in B Minor,...
Who gave Johann Sebastian Bach his first piano lessons?
This Christoph had been a pupil of the influential keyboard composer Johann Pachelbel, and he apparently gave Johann Sebastian his first formal keyboard lessons. The young Bach again did well at school, and in 1700 his voice secured him a place in a select choir of poor boys at the school at Michaelskirche, Lüneburg.
What type of music did Bach write in the Baroque era?
His compositions represent the best of the Baroque era. What did Johann Sebastian Bach compose? Johann Sebastian Bach composed over 1,000 pieces of music. Some of his most famous work included the Brandenburg Concertos , The Well-Tempered Clavier, and the Mass in B Minor.

Who was Germany's most influential composer?
JS BachJS Bach (1685-1750) We named JS Bach one of the best Baroque composers ever and the greatest composer of all time. Born in 1685 into a prodigiously gifted musical family, Bach spent most of his career as an organist for churches and royal courts.
Who preceded Bach?
Johann KuhnauJohann Kuhnau: The Polymath Composer Who Preceded Bach : Interlude. 300 years ago, on 5 June 1722, Johann Kuhnau (1660-1722) the immediate predecessor of Johann Sebastian Bach as Kantor at the Thomasschule in Leipzig, passed away after suffering from extended periods of illness.
Who is the greatest German composer of the 17th century?
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) Born in Eisenach, Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer and musician of the Baroque period. He is celebrated for his Brandenburg Concertos, The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Mass in B Minor and a number of other instrumental masterpieces.
Who was considered the greatest composer in German opera?
theorist Richard WagnerThe German composer and theorist Richard Wagner extended the opera tradition and revolutionized Western music. His dramatic compositions are particularly known for the use of leitmotifs, brief musical motifs for a character, place, or event, which he skillfully transformed throughout a piece.
Who influenced Bach?
Antonio VivaldiJohann PachelbelDieterich BuxtehudeHiromiJohann Kaspar KerllJohann Sebastian Bach/Influenced by
Who is the father of music?
Johann Sebastian BachBorn21 March 1685 (O.S.) 31 March 1685 (N.S.) EisenachDied28 July 1750 (aged 65) LeipzigWorksList of compositionsSignature2 more rows
Who is a German Baroque composer?
Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672) Heinrich Schütz was the greatest German composer of the 17th century and the first of international stature.
Why are the greatest composers German?
It used to be bigger, when the Prussian and Austro-Hungarian empires extended into Central Europe, North Italy and the countries north of the Adriatic. So it's simple matter of arithmetic — more German-speaking people equals a greater number of composing geniuses.
Which German composer is best known for his lies?
Franz Schubert, who composed more than 600 lieder, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Hugo Wolf are among the finest 19th-century lied composers.
Who was the first great composer of opera?
Claudio MonteverdiJacopo Peri's Euridice of 1600 is generally regarded as the earliest surviving opera. Opera's first composer of genius however, was Claudio Monteverdi, who was born in Cremona in 1567 and wrote Orfeo in 1607 for an exclusive audience at the Duke of Mantua's court.
Who are the 3 famous composers of the classical period?
The Greatest Composers of the Classical Periodof 08. Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) ... of 08. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) ... of 08. Antonio Salieri (1750-1825) ... of 08. Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787) ... of 08. Muzio Clementi (1752-1832) ... of 08. Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805) ... of 08. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788) ... of 08.
Who was the German composer?
Johann Sebastian Bach is often credited as the most influential composer of the Baroque period and one of the best composers of all time. He was born in Eisenach, Germany on the 31st March 1685 to a family that had already produced multiple famous composers and would produce even more after him.
What is Bach's greatest composition?
Through his lifetime Bach produced countless masterpieces, including solo keyboard works, cantatas, concertos, oratorios, and solo and orchestral suites and his greatest composition is widely believed to be St Matthew Passion. His keyboard works are particularly revered, particularly the Brandenburg Concertos and The Well-Tempered Clavier.
Who is the most famous composer of all time?
Beethoven needs little introduction and is one of the most famous composers ever. Born in 1770, he straddled both the Classical and Romantic eras, and his wide-ranging music dominated the musical landscape at the time. He is the composer credited with reinventing classical music and developing the symphony , bringing revolutionary new ideas to composition.
What is Handel's most famous piece?
Handel’s most famous pieces include Messiah, the Water Music, his Keyboard suites, Dixit Dominus and ‘ Zadok The Priest ’ , which is played at every coronation.
What was Karlheinz Stockhausen's contribution to modernism?
Karlheinz Stockhausen was a seminal figure in post-1945 Modernism and one of the most experimental and progressive composers of the 2oth century. He redefined notions of what types of sound could be deemed acceptable in composition and took a pioneering approach with his use of electronics in art music.
What movement did CPE Bach play in?
CPE Bach was also a key figure of the Sturm und Drang movement
What is Brahms' music known for?
When growing up in Hamburg, he was fascinated by folk tales and songs and his music is famous for being intensely dark – and is notoriously difficult to play. He was influenced Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann.
Which country has the best compositional voice?
Germany has produced some of the greatest compositional voices in history – many of whom are considered among the best across the entire globe. Here, in alphabetical order, we present some of the very best
Which composer developed a lot of the harmony that is still in use today?
J.S Bach however was one of the most important composers of all time and developed a lot of the harmony that is still in use today.
Who was born in Munich?
One of the few composers to remain in Germany for the majority of his career, Richard Georg Strauss (not to be confused with Austrian composer Johann Strauss II) was born in Munich on the 11th June 1864.
Why did Schumann write for the piano?
Because of his love for the piano, Schumann wrote pieces exclusively for the piano until around 1840.
What is Strauss' style of music?
Being heavily inspired by German composer Wagner (who we’ll look at later in this article), Strauss’s music is usually associated with the late romantic style with lush melodies and large emotion and expression.
How old was Ernst Dressler when he wrote his first composition?
His first composition was 9 Variations on a March by Ernst Dressler which he wrote when he was only 12 years old.
Where was Johannes Brahms born?
Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg, Germany on the 7th May 1833.
Where was Beethoven born?
Ludwig van Beethoven, one of the most popular composers of all time, was born in the city of Bonn, Germany in 1770. No one actually knows his date of birth but he was baptized on the 17th December 1770 so it must have been around then.
What influences did Bach have on his music?
From the series of cantatas written in 1714–16, however, it is obvious that he had been decisively influenced by the new styles and forms of the contemporary Italian opera and by the innovations of such Italian concerto composers as Antonio Vivaldi. The results of this encounter can be seen in such cantatas as No. 182, 199, and 61 in 1714, 31 and 161 in 1715, and 70 and 147 in 1716. His favourite forms appropriated from the Italians were those based on refrain ( ritornello) or da capo schemes in which wholesale repetition—literal or with modifications—of entire sections of a piece permitted him to create coherent musical forms with much larger dimensions than had hitherto been possible. These newly acquired techniques henceforth governed a host of Bach’s arias and concerto movements, as well as many of his larger fugues (especially the mature ones for organ), and profoundly affected his treatment of chorales.
What was Bach's main focus in his music?
There, as musical director, he was concerned chiefly with chamber and orchestral music. Even though some of the works may have been composed earlier and revised later, it was at Köthen that the sonatas for violin and clavier and for viola da gamba and clavier and the works for unaccompanied violin and cello were put into something like their present form. The Brandenburg Concertos were finished by March 24, 1721; in the sixth concerto—so it has been suggested—Bach bore in mind the technical limitations of the prince, who played the gamba. Bach played the viola by choice; he liked to be “in the middle of the harmony.” He also wrote a few cantatas for the prince’s birthday and other such occasions; most of these seem to have survived only in later versions, adapted to more generally useful words. And he found time to compile pedagogical keyboard works: the Clavierbüchlein for W.F. Bach (begun January 22, 1720), some of the French Suites, the Inventions (1720), and the first book (1722) of Das Wohltemperierte Klavier ( The Well-Tempered Clavier, eventually consisting of two books, each of 24 preludes and fugues in all keys and known as “the Forty-Eight”). This remarkable collection systematically explores both the potentials of a newly established tuning procedure—which, for the first time in the history of keyboard music, made all the keys equally usable—and the possibilities for musical organization afforded by the system of “functional tonality ,” a kind of musical syntax consolidated in the music of the Italian concerto composers of the preceding generation and a system that was to prevail for the next 200 years. At the same time, The Well-Tempered Clavier is a compendium of the most popular forms and styles of the era: dance types, arias, motets, concerti, etc., presented within the unified aspect of a single compositional technique—the rigorously logical and venerable fugue.
Why did Bach resign?
While at Mühlhausen, Bach copied music to enlarge the choir library, tried to encourage music in the surrounding villages, and was in sufficient favour to be able to interest his employers in a scheme for rebuilding the organ (February 1708). His real reason for resigning on June 25, 1708, is not known.
How many children did Bach have?
Johann Sebastian Bach had 20 children, 7 with his first wife and 13 with his second wife. Only 10 of them lived to adulthood. Several of his sons, including Wilhelm Friedemann , Carl Philipp Emanuel, and Johann Christian, who was called the “English Bach,” were also composers.
How many pieces of music did Bach compose?
Johann Sebastian Bach composed over 1,000 pieces of music. Some of his most famous work included the Brandenburg Concertos , The Well-Tempered Clavier, and the Mass in B Minor.
What is the first movement of Brandenburg Concerto No. 1?
First movement, “Allegro,” of J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 in F Major, BWV 1046; from a 1949 recording by the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra conducted by Karl Münchinger.
Where did Johann Sebastian Bach study organ music?
At Arnstadt, on the northern edge of the Thuringian Forest, where he remained until 1707, Bach devoted himself to keyboard music, the organ in particular. While at Lüneburg he had apparently had no opportunity of becoming directly acquainted with the spectacular, flamboyant playing and compositions of Dietrich Buxtehude, the most significant exponent of the north German school of organ music. In October 1705 he repaired this gap in his knowledge by obtaining a month’s leave and walking to Lübeck (more than 200 miles [300 km]). His visit must have been profitable, for he did not return until about the middle of January 1706. In February his employers complained about his absence and about other things as well: he had harmonized the hymn tunes so freely that the congregation could not sing to his accompaniment, and, above all, he had produced no cantatas. Perhaps the real reasons for his neglect were that he was temporarily obsessed with the organ and was on bad terms with the local singers and instrumentalists, who were not under his control and did not come up to his standards. In the summer of 1705 he had made some offensive remark about a bassoon player, which led to an unseemly scuffle in the street. His replies to these complaints were neither satisfactory nor even accommodating; and the fact that he was not dismissed out of hand suggests that his employers were as well aware of his exceptional ability as he was himself and were reluctant to lose him.
