Gallery Players of Niagara

Franz Asplmayr

Franz Asplmayr was born in Linz, and it is likely that he was taught violin by his father. Little is known of his early life and formal education, but by 1760 he was working as secretary to Count von Morzin in Vienna. It is now believed that he began publishing his compositions in Paris as early as 1757.

Sérgio Assad

Coming from a family of musicians, Sérgio Assad is a living Brazilian composer and guitarist. He and his brother Odair make up the Duo Assad , while his sister Badi is also a professional guitar player. Assad began arranging and composing for guitar at the age of 14, studying guitar with Monina Tavora after the technique and style of Andrés Segovia.

Johann Sebastian Bach

Arguably the most substantial composer of the Baroque period, Johann Sebastian Bach was a bulwark of counterpoint and sacred music. In fact, the time period that we commonly understand as the musical Baroque comes to an end in 1750, as that was when J.S. Bach died.

Johann Sebastian was born in Eisenach into a large musical family, and was initially educated on the organ by his father and uncle.Both of his parents died while Bach was quite young, and he and his brother Johann Jakob went to Ohrdruf to stay and study with their older brother Johann Christoph. Johann Christoph familiarised Johann Sebastian with the works of all the great contemporary composers, allowing his younger brother a kind of Grand Tour without ever leaving Germany.

Despite his exalted reputation, Bach’s history is really that of a local church organist.A devout Lutheran, he worked in and around Thuringia (in Weimar, Arnstadt and Mühlhausen) from 1703-1717, where he composed countless organ preludes.He is reputed to have traveled 400 km by foot to visit Dietrich Buxtehude to further master his organ writing. He was promoted to konzertmeister at the Court of Duke Wilhelm-Ernst in 1709, and there he began to produce some of his first cantatas. In 1717, Bach and the Duke had a bitter dispute about Bach’s dismissal, and the composer was sent to prison for a month to atone for his misconduct.When he was released he was still jobless.

Bach, his wife and their children then moved to Köthen, where he was hired as kapellmeister for Prince Leopold.It was in Köthen that Bach concentrated further on his secular music.The Prince was a strict Calvinist, and as such had no use for sophisticated church cantatas, so Bach focussed on his instrumental suites.The composer was captivated by dance movement form, and much of his music of the Köthen period (including the solo cello suites and the solo violin sonatas and partitas) reflects this fascination.While Bach was vacationing in Carlsbad, his wife (and mother of his first seven children) Maria Barbara died of a sudden illness and the family was unable to reach Johann Sebastian.When he returned, he discovered that she had been dead and buried for more than two months. He remarried the following year, having found a young and faithful soprano (Anna Magdalena Wilcken) who was willing to raise his children and, indeed, to bear him thirteen more.

Respected musician Johann Kuhnau died in 1722, leaving his position of Thomaskantor (cantor for the Thomasschule, in charge of the music for all of the central churches in Saxony) up for grabs.The post was first offered to Georg Philipp Telemann, who turned it down.He had no interest in living in Leipzig, and he was doing well enough publishing his works that he had no need for such an office.J.S. Bach was given the job, and he and his family moved to Leipzig in 1723. A large part of Bach’s duty as Thomaskantor was to write a cantata for every Sunday of the church calendar and some for special holy days of the liturgical year. Not surprisingly, his body of work expanded enormously in this period.Bach completed annual cycles for nearly six years, each cantata consisting of different voices and instrumentation, using the relevant liturgical readings for the day.

Bach remained in Leipzig until his death in 1750, producing huge numbers of concerti, masses, oratorios, keyboard suites, chamber music and cantatas. He died at the age of 65, leaving behind nine surviving children, four of whom went on to become consequential musicians.

Fun facts:

1) Bach’s first wife (Maria Barbara) was his second cousin.Her maiden name was Bach.
2) Although they were born less than a month apart and 200 km away from each other, Bach and Handel never met.
3) Of his twenty children, only ten survived to adulthood.
4) Bach’s second wife, Anna Magdalena (to whom he dedicated a notebook of popular music) was sixteen years younger than Johann Sebastian.
5) He wrote his Mass in B minor for the coronation of Augustus as King of Poland, but the King decided not to use it.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer who remains one of the most celebrated musicians of all time. He is known today for his nine symphonies and 16 string quartets, but he also composed a great number of choral works, song cycles, piano works and pieces for chamber ensembles. Beethoven began composing before his 12th birthday, and his influence helped to bridge the gap between the Classical and the Romantic eras of music composition. His work is often divided into three periods, as his technique changed with time and age.

His formative period (approximately 1790-1800 in Bonn and Vienna) is noteworthy for its Classical sound – Beethoven was studying with Franz Joseph Haydn at this point in his life, and the inspiration he drew from the older composer is palpable here.

His middle period (1800-1815 in Vienna) is marked by his unheard-of expansion of sonata form, and experimentation with the breadth and intricacy of his large works.His only opera was composed in this time.Beethoven learned early on in this period that he was going deaf – a condition that would mark the rest of his life.

Beethoven’s third (mature) period (1816-1827) exhibits work of a contemplative nature.At this point, the composer had lost his hearing and was prone to bouts of depression and paranoia. In the last three years of his life, he devoted himself entirely to the composition of string quartets, having somewhat perfected the intimacy of the sound required for chamber music. He passed away in March of 1827 of complications from cirrhosis of the liver, having begun some sketches for a 10^th Symphony and a string quintet.

Fun facts:

1) Beethoven’s father and grandfather had been employed as musicians in the Court of the Electorate of Köln (in Bonn), and Ludwig van Beethoven followed in their footsteps.
2) It is possible that Beethoven was what is now known as dyslexic, having great trouble with sums and orthography.
3) For many years, a parable existed outlining Beethoven’s spurious encounter with Mozart in 1787, at which Mozart is said to have proclaimed: “Do not forget his name, you will hear it spoken often.”
4) Much of Beethoven’s music has been used to illustrate political ideals, long after his death.Because of this, many people still associate his music with German/Prussian military campaigns.
5) An unsent love letter addressed to “Immortal Beloved” (Unsterbliche Geliebte) was found amongst Beethoven’s papers after his death.The identity of the intended recipient of this letter is still being disputed by scholars.

Leonard Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein was the first American-born conductor to achieve a truly international status. Born to Russian-Jewish immigrants at the end of World War I, Bernstein lived the American Dream. He flourished at school, went on to Harvard and from there to the Curtis Institute. He spent summers at the Tanglewood festival as assistant to Serge Koussevitzky.

In 1943, Artur Rodzinski took over the New York Philharmonic and appointed Bernstein as his deputy.Like a movie with a score by Leonard Bernstein, in November of 1943, a guest conductor was taken ill and Bernstein took over the podium, broadcasting live to the entire country.This placed his career in the fast lane, and his symphonies began to be premiered, he was in demand as conductor for recordings and guest appearances…life was good.

In 1944, choreographer Jerome Robbins took interest in the ballets Bernstein had written, and the composer had his first stage successes with Fancy Free and On the Town.Bernstein married Chilean actress Felicia Montealegre in 1951 and was appointed the same year to the faculty of Brandeis University.While his success as a composer of both serious works (such as his symphony Kaddish) and lighter fare (like Wonderful Town) continued in the United States, he was in demand as a conductor in Europe – even directing Maria Callas at La Scala and Isaac Stern at the Venice Festival.

In 1957 one of Bernstein’s crowning achievements was produced: West Side Story.This retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet set the lyrics of Stephen Sondheim and the choreography of Jerome Robbins in a complex, updated theme.The same year, he was named co-conductor of the New York Philharmonic with Dimitri Mitropoulos, becoming the youngest music director of the organisation ever.In 1969, his position was commuted to Laureate Conductor for Life.Bernstein continued to appear as guest conductor with the Metropolitan Opera, the Israel Philharmonic, the Vienna State Opera and many more.Bernstein passed away in 1990.

Fun Facts:

1)Bernstein was a great advocate of using the arts in education.He believed that a full understanding of the arts leads to a fuller understanding of all disciplines.
2)Though he married a woman and the two had three children before her death in 1978, Bernstein identified as an openly gay man.
3)Chevy Chase approached Leonard Bernstein to host Saturday Night Live in 1975, but Bernstein was not interested.
4)Bernstein had a combative friendship with pianist Glenn Gould, and the two maintained a grudging respect for one another despite disagreements about musical ideas.
5)When premiered in 1956, Bernstein’s opera Candide was a flop, but was revived with new poetry in 1974 to great esteem.

Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber

Born in what is now the Czech Republic, Bohemian composer Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber began his musical training under organist Wiegan Knöffel. Biber became a member of Prince-Bishop Karl Lichtenstein-Kastelkorn’s orchestra (as a violinist) at Kremsier by 1668. In 1670, the Prince-Bishop of Olmütz sent Biber to his friend Jakob Stainer, a luthier, in order to obtain more instruments for the orchestra’s use. While staying with Stainer in his home near Innsbruck, Biber attained employment in Salzburg in the chapel of the Prince-Bishop Maximilian Gandolf von Khünberg.

The composer abandoned his position in Kremsier, much to the disappointment of Prince-Bishop Karl.

In Salzburg, Biber began to tuck into composition in earnest.He was known for his unparalleled violin technique, and was thought to be influenced by (if not taught by) Johann Schmelzer.Biber introduced scordatura to the world of the violin. This technique, borrowed from an early lute school, involves retuning some of the strings of the violin in order to extend the reach of various keys and positions, and to permit extraordinary multiple stops.Biber’s most famous work (The Mystery Sonatas) consists of fifteen sonatas in differing tunings, each illustrating one of the mysteries of the Holy Rosary.It is customary for a violinist performing the eleventh sonata (The Resurrection) to intersect the middle two strings of the violin at the tailpiece below the bridge, creating a symbolic cross.

As a virtuoso and an innovative composer, Biber found himself receiving accolades and honours, rising in rank and in reputation.The successive Bishops of Salzburg each appointed him to higher and higher positions, and eventually he was awarded the patent of nobility by Emperor Leopold I.Quite a number of instrumental and choral works survive, showing Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber von Bibern to be one of the most inventive composers of his generation.

Fun facts:

1) Since Biber left his employment under the Prince-Bishop of Olmütz illegally, he spent a good deal of the early 1670s dedicating his published work to the Bishop as penance.The Bishop eventually released him from the contract he had violated in 1676.
2) Biber’s capabilities as a violinist allowed him to use 6^th and even 7^th position on the finger board - unheard of in 17^th Century Salzburg.
3) Two of Biber’s sons and one of his daughters became known musicians.
4) His position as kapellmeister to the Prince-Bishop of Salzburg was considered to be just below the position of High Court Justice.
5) Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber von Bibern is not an ancestor of Canadian heartthrob Justin Bieber.

Luiz Floriano Bonfá

Perhaps best known for the music he composed for the film Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus), Luiz Floriano Bonfá was a guitarist and composer from Brazil. He began to play the guitar at a young age, and studied under Isaías Sávio for most of his youth.

Paul Bowles

Novelist and composer Paul Bowles was man of the hour in New York musical circles of the 1940s. He was also man of the hour in American literary circles of the 1950s. Much of this has since been forgotten, however, and he has fallen into obscurity in both fields. As a friend and disciple of Aaron Copland, Bowles accompanied the older composer to Morocco for a while. The two then travelled to Paris, where they became acquainted with Virgil Thomson. Bowles remained in Paris for a short time, studying there with Copland, Thomson and Nadia Boulanger.

Benjamin Britten

Perhaps the most prolific and recognised composer of the post-World War II generation, Benjamin Britten’s work has a sobriety and modernity that is instantly identifiable. Brought up by a typically austere English family, Britten was sent to boarding school and began to compose at a young age. From the age of twelve he spent his school holidays studying with composer Frank Bridge, going on to the Royal College of Music and studies with John Ireland and Arthur Benjamin. Britten became fascinated by the techniques of Mahler and Walton, though he shunned the music of Elgar and Vaughan Williams.

In 1935, Britten was hired by the documentary film unit of the post office, where he met his greatest and most influential friend, W. H. Auden.

Auden and Britten collaborated as poet and composer in every way they could dream up – films, plays, song cycles and more.The two shared pacifist, liberal views and garnered themselves a reputation for political outpourings.Auden foresaw the start of the Second World War, and emigrated to America in 1938.In 1939, Britten and his partner Peter Pears travelled to Canada and the United States to explore the musical microcosm of that part of the world.The two spent three years there, enriching their educations and avoiding persecution as conscientious objectors to the war.Britten’s fecundity of writing did not suffer while he was away, and many of his major works date from that period.

Britten and Pears returned to England in 1942, upon reading an article by E. M. Forster about the poet George Crabbe and his epic poem The Borough.Britten and Pears declared themselves conscientious objectors and were ordered by the Home Office to keep up morale in English towns by presenting concerts wherever they went.This they took to like fish to water, and Britten wrote his opera Peter Grimes, based on a single chapter of Crabbe’s The Borough, as well as his Ceremony of Carols, Rejoice in the Lamb and many other of his primary works.Peter Grimes, when it was first performed in 1945, was met with the greatest critical acclaim in decades.At this point, Britten’s status in the big leagues was sealed.He moved to Aldeburgh in 1947, where he settled for the rest of his life.There he founded the Aldeburgh Festival and wrote Albert Herring, the War Requiem, Billy Budd and all the rest of his distinguished works.Britten passed away in 1976 after a series of heart attacks.

Fun Facts:

1)Benjamin Britten was viewed as pretentious and arrogant by outsiders.
2)Britten was a prominent member of the homosexual community despite the criminalisation of homosexual acts in England throughout most of his life.He maintained close friendships with W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood.
3)He felt that music had gone soft with Beethoven and claimed that once a year he would play a piece by Brahms to make sure it was as bad as he remembered.
4)One of Britten’s prime objectives in life was to differentiate himself from Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose music he claimed repulsed him.
5)Britten struck up a friendship with cellist Mstislav Rostropovich in the late 1960s and wrote several works for him.

Cris Derksen

Juno nominated Cris Derksen is an Internationally respected Indigenous Cellist and Composer. In a world where almost everything — people, music, cultures — get labelled and slotted into simple categories, Cris Derksen represents a challenge. Originally from Northern Alberta she comes from a line of chiefs from NorthTall Cree Reserve on her father’s side and a line of strong Mennonite homesteaders on her mother’s. Derksen braids the traditional and contemporary, weaving her classical background and her Indigenous ancestry together with new school electronics to create genre-defying music.

Mauro Giuliani

Mauro Giuliani was the foremost guitarist of his generation. Born in Bisceglie, his early training (on the cello) was in the town of Barletta. Though he never abandoned the cello entirely, Giuliani quickly focussed his efforts on the guitar. He married around the turn of the 19th century, and he and his wife and young son moved to Vienna in 1806 on the heels of some excellent reviews that had reached Austria.

João Teixeira Guimarães

João Teixeira Guimarães was known as “Pernambuco”, as that was the area of Brazil he represented musically. Born in Pernambuco, Guimarães relocated to Rio de Janeiro in 1891 when his mother remarried after his father’s death. He began composing in his late teens, finding inspiration in his working life as a blacksmith.

Franz Joseph Haydn

Showing signs of musical capacity at an early age, Franz Joseph Haydn was sent to live with an educated relative in Hainburg. He learned singing, harpsichord and violin, and at the age of eight was recruited to the choir of St Stephen’s in Vienna (now known as the Vienna Choirboys.) There he received his rudimentary musical education, and he went on to teach himself music history and composition by studying Fux, C.P.E. bach and more. He started teaching harpsichord lessons, soon becoming teacher to a Countess.

This opened the door for him to meet other musicians and he began to experiment with writing string quartets for presentation in the salons of the rich.

Haydn’s earliest symphonies were written during his employment under the Count von Morzin, and he quickly moved on to the opulent court of the Esterházy family. In service to the wealthy noble family, Haydn lived in Eisenstadt and was charged with the directorship of the musical life of the household. His winning personality (thus his nickname Papa Haydn) helped him to recruit talented musicians from around the country, and soon the music of Haydn and Eisenstadt had garnered a reputation for excellence. When the Esterházy Principality was passed to Nikolaus, the new Prince had a colossal palace built, which he called Esterház. The opulence of the new castle demanded music, and Haydn’s gift was in high demand. Audiences came from all over to experience the operas and, symphonies and divertimenti of the master. Haydn’s career as composer and director for Esterház lasted over 30 years.

After leaving the decadence of his noble patrons, Haydn moved to Vienna and traveled to London, where he was received with admiration. His composition of symphonies, quartets, masses and operas continued through that time, and in the summer of 1791 Haydn was granted an honorary doctorate from Oxford University. He returned to Vienna to write six new symphonies, and there he began to teach Ludwig von Beethoven. Beethoven had no respect for Haydn, however, and Haydn abandoned the proposition. He spent the next several years traveling between London and Vienna to please his adoring fans.

Haydn’s exhausting schedule eventually caught up with him, as did the Napoleonic wars. After the siege of Vienna in 1809, he played through his Austrian anthem on the piano and then died in his sleep.

Fun Facts:

1)Haydn narrowly escaped becoming a castrato in Vienna. When his family refused the proposition, he was thrown into the streets by the choir master.
2)As an adolescent, trying to make ends meet, Haydn acted as body servant to Nicola Porpora.
3)The girl he loved took holy orders, and so Haydn married her older sister. She turned out to be a whiny drain on him, and he happily paid to build her own house in a different town.
4)His Symphony No. 45 is dubbed the “Farewell” Symphony because when it was presented to Nikolaus the Magnificent, each player snuffed out his candle when his part ended and left the room. It is rumoured that the Prince then did the same.
5)Haydn loved the playfulness of composition and his kindness and comical character have ascribed him a reputation for humour in his music.

Antônio Carlos Jobim

Antônio Carlos Jobim was a 20th century Brazilian pianist, composer and guitarist. He began his professional career playing piano in beach bars in the Copacabana and Ipanema areas in the 1940s. He soon became an arranger for a recording label, which led to his appointment as artistic director of the Odeon label in 1956.

Bryce Kulak

A young singer and composer from Edmonton, Bryce Kulak is enjoying critical acclaim in musical circles around North America. He has sung with the Edmonton Symphony and Quartetto Gelato.

Friedrich August Kummer

Cellist Friedrich August Kummer began his musical career as an oboist. Following in his father’s footsteps, he took up a position as an orchestral oboist at the court in Dresden. Kummer was primarily a cellist, having been appointed to the Royal Opera House by Carl Maria von Weber. When the principal cello position in the court orchestra was vacated by the death of Karl Höckner, Kummer stepped in. A contemporary of Mendelssohn and Schubert, Kummer performed chamber music with Schubert’s son (also named Franz) and in string quartets with Mendelssohn.

Celso Machado

Celso Machado is a composer and instrumentalist from Brazil who lives in Canada. Machado began to play guitar in street bands at the age of seven, and formed a guitar quartet with three of his five brothers in the early 1970s. He works widely with World-Music organisations here and abroad, having played with the Assad Brothers, Peter Finger and others.

Gustav Mahler

Raised in a small German-Jewish town in what is now the Czech Republic, Gustav Mahler’s music is heavily influenced by the First Viennese School of composition. Mahler became interested in music at a young age, and though his family was Jewish, he joined the choir at a local Catholic church, receiving instruction from the choir director. His musical talent was discovered by a rich patron when he was a teenager, and he was brought to the Vienna Conservatory to study Julius Epstein, a friend of Johannes Brahms.

There, Mahler became close friends with Hugo Wolf, and garnered a reputation for perfectionism and punctiliousness. His Jewishness and Socialism had him knocking heads with the head of the Conservatory a few times, and he eventually left the institute to study harmony with Anton Bruckner at the University.

Mahler achieved employment in Austria and Bohemia, directing choirs and orchestras and writing symphonies and operas.His career took a turn for the better when he was appointed music director of the court at Kassel at the age of 23.While there, he traveled to Bayreuth to experience Wagner’s Parsifal and to witness the conducting of Hans von Bülow.This event had a long-lasting impact on his musical ideas, and Mahler became restless in Kassel. From there, he spent several years oscillating between Prague and Leipzig, and was then engaged as the director of the Royal Budapest Opera.The Hungarian public was not prepared, however, to accept a young Jewish director, and he was given the cold shoulder by audiences there.Determined to win them over, Mahler wrote two operas in Hungarian, which were met with great celebration.His subsequent attempts to woo the Budapest audience were less successful, and his reception soon grew cold again.

Despite his cool support in Budapest, Mahler was now established as a proven entity in the musical world of Eastern Europe.From Budapest he went on to direct groups in Hamburg, Cologne, New York and London, premiering his own songs, symphonies and operas in those places, as well as Berlin, Vienna, Venice and Paris.His prominence allowed him to become acquainted with all of his major contemporaries, and he prospered for many years in comfortable employment.

Fun Facts:

1)After discovering his wife’s affair in 1910, Mahler consulted Sigmund Freud, who told him that they both suffered from Oedipal tendencies.
2)Mahler’s parents had fourteen children, only six of whom survived infancy.
3)His friendship with Hugo Wolf came to an abrupt end when Wolf accused him of stealing the idea for an opera.
4)Mahler felt that his religious background was a stumbling block to success, and denied it whenever possible.It is rumoured that he converted to Christianity in his 30s.
5)Mahler was known for his increasingly bizarre displays of facial hair.
6)It is said that Mahler’s last word was “Mozart.”

Rudolf Matz

Rudolf Matz was a 20th century Croatian composer, cellist and teacher. A very active conductor and member of the musical community of Zagreb, Matz also composed over 500 pieces in his lifetime. His works for cello were often meant to instruct or to demonstrate technique, and his unconventional quartet for four cellos is unique in its treatment of the first cello.

Colin McPhee

Born in Canada and raised in the United States, Colin McPhee was a composer who explored the world in his life and music. He studied piano and composition in Canada, the United States and Europe. His first piano concerto was premiered by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in 1924. When he settled briefly in New York, he produced a Sea Chanty Suite and some music for experimental moving pictures. It was at this point that McPhee heard a recording of the gamelan (a Balinese melodic percussion instrument) and decided to continue his musical exploration in that country.

Felix Mendelssohn

Felix Mendelssohn was born in Hamburg to a well-educated family. His paternal grandfather was a Jewish philosopher and contemporary of Immanuel Kant, while his maternal grandfather was a Court Jew in the court of Friedrich the Great of Prussia. Felix and his siblings were secretly baptised into the Protestant Christian faith in 1816, and in 1822 they were advised to start using the name Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (after a family farm) in order to distance themselves from the Jewish surname Mendelssohn.

Felix Mendelssohn and his sister Fanny began playing chamber music at a very young age, and were exposed early to the music of Bach and Handel.Felix began to study violin with C.W. Henning and organ with A.W. Bach and was considered something of a prodigy as his musical education progressed swiftly and his first composition has been dated back to 1819, when the composer was ten years old.

Mendelssohn experienced success and encouragement from that point forward, and his writing encompassed every perceivable form – Oratorio, secular cantatas, symphonies, concerti, you name it.In 1829 he embarked on a Grand Tour after a successful revival of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, and a rewarding premiere of his overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Mendelssohn visited England, Scotland, parts of Germany, France and Italy, all the while adding scores to his extensive library and having chats with some of the most notable dignitaries of all time (Goethe, Sir Walter Scott, Chopin, Hans Christian Andersen and even Pope Gregory XVI.)Mendelssohn’s music was received well everywhere he went, and his reputation grew by the day.He was subsequently offered positions all over the world, and found himself taking consecutive jobs in Düsseldorf, Leipzig and Berlin.

Fun facts:

1) Mendelssohn’s library contained manuscripts of many great Baroque works.He re-orchestrated and revived a number of these works, and we have him to thank for their popularity today.
2) Whenever Mendelssohn visited England, he spent time with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
3) Mendelssohn and his wife Cécile had five children, but that did not stop rumours from flying about the composer’s relationship with the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind.
4) Six months following the death of his beloved sister Fanny, Felix Mendelssohn died of what was thought to be a broken heart (now known to be a series of strokes) at the age of 38.
5) Mendelssohn was a contemporary of Richard Wagner.Throughout the height of the Nazi regime in World War II, the music of Wagner was promoted as the Aryan ideal while the music of Mendelssohn was banned due to his Jewish heritage.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is perhaps the most recognisable name in Classical music. Son of the inflexible and exacting Austrian composer Leopold Mozart, Wolfgang was considered a musical prodigy. He played the clavichord by the age of three and even composed short pieces by the time he was four. He and his sister Nannerl (the only two surviving children of seven) were paraded before the world as musical wunderkinds, spending three whole years touring Europe to amaze and delight the Royal houses of France, England, Holland and Germany.

The family returned to Salzburg when Mozart was ten, after he and Nannerl were nearly killed by typhus in The Hague. Back home, he recovered and began to compose in earnest.By twelve, the boy had written symphonies, sonatas and even a couple of operas.

At thirteen, Mozart was appointed konzertmeister of the Salzburg Court and took small tours of Italy in order to master the technique of Italian opera. He met with Giovanni Battista Sammartini, Niccolò Jommelli, Giovanni Paisiello and other great composers, all culminating in Mozart’s creation of two successful Italian operas. His triumphant return to Salzburg was met with the death of Archbishop Sigismund in 1771.

Back in Austria, Mozart dedicated his time to composition.By 1777, he had written symphonies, chamber music and Masses, and had completed all of his violin concerti. His opera Idomeneo brought him to Munich in 1780, and from there he accepted a position in Vienna, where he settled and married Constanze Weber. Mozart continued to write sonatas and quartets through the 1780s, appearing in front of audiences as frequently as he could, but he was no longer making enough money to keep him in the luxury to which he had become accustomed. Mozart composed his most famous works close to the end of his short life, producing Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflöte all between 1786 and 1791. He contracted a fever in 1791 and died before his 35^th birthday, leaving behind an unfinished Requiem Mass, a wife, two children and a mountain of debt.

Fun facts:

1) Wolfgang had a reputation as a juvenile pest, known for including scatological humour in his music and communications.
2) Mozart only outlived his imposing father Leopold by just over three years.
3) Mozart became a Freemason in 1784, where Haydn, Dittersdorf and Vanhal were his “lodge brothers.”
4) As a child, Mozart’s party tricks included playing the piano with a dropcloth over the keyboard and memorising every note of a piece by ear and playing it back to an admiring audience.
5) Wolfgang and Nannerl both survived typhus and smallpox in their youth, which may have contributed to Wolfgang’s early death.
6) Mozart’s opera Bastien und Bastienne was premiered privately under the sponsorship of astrologist Dr Anton Mesmer, who was known for his hypnotism techniques.

Ernesto Nazareth

Ernesto Nazareth was a Brazilian composer who lived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He began his career working at cafes and parties, playing his way through every piano piece available. Nazareth’s early compositions were influenced by his great love of the music of Frédéric Chopin, but by the end of the 19th century he was composing only in the local popular dance forms of Brazil.

Johann Joachim Quantz

Best known for his widely-distributed treatise On Playing the Flute, Johann Joachim Quantz was a well-rounded musician. He sang, played oboe, violin, trumpet, viola da gamba and pretty much everything else. With both of his parents dead before he was ten, Quantz was sent to live with an uncle in Merseburg. His uncle Justus was a musician who began to instruct the boy, but he also died within the year.

Quantz’s upbringing and musical education were then left to Adolf Fleischhack, who is credited for broadening Quantz’s horizons.

At the age of seventeen, Quantz began a period of living and working around Dresden.It was there that he first encountered the music of Antonio Vivaldi, inspiring him to begin a study of musical composition.Quantz’s primary composition teacher was Jan Dismas Zelenka, who himself had been a student of Johann Joseph Fux.In 1718, the transverse flute had just begun to surge in popularity, and Quantz found it prudent to master the instrument under the tutelage of Pierre-Gabriel Buffardin.That is where the composer found his true niche, and his reputation as a flautist, flute instructor and composer are what keep him in history books today.

Quantz took his Grand Tour, in the custom of the young men of his day, and while abroad he met countless famous and respected composers.He returned to Dresden in 1728, where he was Prussia’s only flute virtuoso. Crown Prince Frederick (later to become Frederick the Great) became enamoured of the flute, and Quantz travelled to Berlin a few times a year to instruct him. Once Frederick became King in 1740, he hired Quantz as his Music Master and Court Composer.Johann Joachim Quantz lived out his life in the luxury of the courts of Berlin and Potsdam.

Fun facts:

1) Quantz and his wife Anna Rosina Schindlerin were known to be insufferable, narcissistic snobs.A letter from Frederick II to his sister in 1736 describes Quantz: “The only way to bring his haughtiness to an end is not to treat him too much like a grand gentleman.”
2) On Playing the Flute, Quantz’s seminal treatise, is not simply a flute method.It includes performance practice techniques for all instruments and voices, ornamentation, instruction for stage deportment, music criticism and much more.
3) His treatise (published in 1752) is still used today to solve many historical performance practice conundrums.
4) Frederick the Great offered Quantz a lifetime contract with an mind-blowing salary.In return, Quantz was answerable only to the King.
5) Quantz invented the telescoping end-joint of the transverse flute, thus solving a number of intonation problems the instrument had been having.

Maurice Ravel

Considered to be one of the founders of musical impressionism, Maurice Ravel was raised in Paris at the turn of the 20th century. He was considered an intelligent and capable musician at a young age, but his laziness in practising piano caused his father to find incentive for him to continue his studies. After receiving one franc for every thirty minutes of practice, Ravel was convinced to advance in his field. He began to take harmony lessons and his tastes were refined over the years.

Ravel found himself attracted to Symbolist literature, and to the music of Mozart, Gounod, Saint-Saëns and others.In 1895 he had a momentous meeting with Erik Satie, and his output started to reflect that influence.

A few years later, Ravel found that his productivity was lagging, and he returned to the Conservatoire in Paris, under the tutelage of Gabriel Fauré.He slowly found he was able to churn out more work, and by 1905 he had found his groove and was somewhat known as a composer. He had created Pavane pour une Infante Défunte, Shéhérazade and L’Heure espagnole, which engendered some fame for the composer. In 1909 the Ballet Russes arrived in Paris, and Ravel was commissioned to write a ballet. While he toiled over Daphnis et Chloë, fussing over every detail, he struck up a friendship with Igor Stravinsky and became a director of the Société Musicale Indépendante.

In 1914, Ravel tried to volunteer for the French army to help defend against the German invasion of Belgium. His services were denied, as he was too thin, but he eventually managed to finagle a spot in the Air Force. His physique did not allow him to fly planes, however, and he wound up driving a truck for the motor transport.Even this task proved too rugged for the composer, and he was soon confined to hospital with amoebic dysentery. Ill health tormented him for the rest of his life, and as a result, his artistic crop was meager compared to his contemporaries. In 1928 he wrote Boléro for the dancer Ida Rubinstein, and struggled with dichotomy of the response – public popularity, but critical eye-rolling. While swimming in 1935, Ravel found himself unable to control his motions. His condition worsened and a brain tumour was suspected.Ravel died in a coma at the age of 62.

Fun Facts:

1)Ravel’s friends found him to be sarcastic and wry, famously hard to please.
2)The composer never quite reached the height of five feet.
3)Friends recall that Ravel was enamoured of toys and small animals.This child-like behaviour led to his excellent rapport with the children of loved ones.
4)Ravel’s degenerative brain disease was eventually diagnosed as Pick’s Disease.
5)While he agreed to tutor Ralph Vaughan Williams, Ravel rejected George Gershwin as a student.
6)Ravel was often accused of stealing ideas from Claude Debussy.

James Rolfe

Toronto composer James Rolfe (b. Ottawa, 1961) has been commissioned and performed by ensembles, orchestras, choirs, and opera companies in Canada, the USA, Europe, and New Zealand. His work has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship (2000), the K. M. Hunter Music Award (2003), the Louis Applebaum Composers Award (2005), the Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music (2006), and SOCAN’s Jan V. Matejcek Concert Music Award (2009), and the 2014 Outstanding Choral Work Award from the Association of Canadian Choral Communities.

Alessandro Scarlatti

Pietro Alessandro Gasparo Scarlatti (dit Alesssandro) was born in Palermo but raised in Rome. It is not known who Scarlatti’s formal musical tutors were, but by the age of 19 he was a married father and already producing his first large-scale Oratorio, commissioned by the Arciconfraternità della Santissimo Crocifisso.

His first opera (Gli Equivoci nel Sembiante) was performed the same year (1679), and he was appointed Maestro di Capella of San Giacomo degli Incurabili.Exiled in Rome, Queen Christina of Sweden attended the opera and became Scarlatti’s patron then and there. Pope Innocent XI was gaining a reputation for misogyny and was nursing a grudge against the Scarlatti family for some public affairs Alessandro’s sister Anna Maria was having with Bishops and politicians.The Swedish Queen had no time for the Pope’s prejudice, and decided to hire Scarlatti as her own Maestro di Capella.

Five years later, Alessandro and his brother were appointed to the vice-regal court in Naples.There Scarlatti premiered dozens of works in a new style.His drammi per musiche (musical dramas) catered to the notoriously low-brow audiences of Naples while creating a lighter, shorter and less formal genre of opera.The War of the Spanish Succession challenged the security of the Neopolitan throne, and Scarlatti’s position at court became precarious.By 1702, Scarlatti had a few commissions from Ferdinando de’ Medici in Florence and moved there in search of a quiet life.When it proved difficult to find enough work to feed his family, he briefly returned to Rome.There he continued to write operas, comedies and cantatas, both secular and sacred.By 1713, Naples had recovered somewhat from its instability, and the Neopolitan court told Scarlatti that he could name his price if he would return.Scarlatti returned to Naples, where he lived out his days composing hundreds of vocal and instrumental works, occasionally sojourning in Rome to premiere an opera or two.

Fun facts:

1) Johann Adolf Hesse was a student of Alessandro Scarlatti, and he is imputed to have introduced the older composer to Joachim Quantz, thus dispelling Scarlatti’s distaste for wind instruments.
2) Scarlatti and his wife Antonia Anzalone had ten children, five of whom lived to adulthood.His sixth child, Domenico, went on to become an accomplished keyboard composer.
3) There were rumours that Alessandro and his brother Francesco attained their posts in Naples as a result of their sister Melchiorra’s affairs with various Neopolitan politicians.
4) During Scarlatti’s first period of employment at Naples, the court frequently forgot to pay him.
5) In 1706, Scarlatti and Arcangelo Corelli were appointed to the Accademia degl’Arcadi, where they met and discussed music with a young Georg Friedrich Handel.

Franz Schubert

Franz Schubert was a native of Vienna, and composer of over six hundred lieder, as well as symphonies, operas, chamber music and more. He began to compose as an adolescent, but following the death of his mother, he trained as a schoolteacher in order to make ends meet. The early compositions of Schubert displayed the influence of fellow Austrian composers Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose canon was integral to the development of the young composer’s technique.

Robert Schumann

German composer Robert Schumann was introduced to the public at the age of eleven, when he and his brother Karl began performing as pianists and actors at the Zwickau Gymnasium.

Schumann studied with Friedrich Wieck in Leipzig, where he perfected and even invented many styles of music.He is known now for his lieder (secular songs with piano accompaniment), but was quite adventurous in composition.As a theorist, he developed a system of genres, in which he spent short periods of time devoted to individual classifications of music.1840-1841 was the year of the lieder, 1841 was symphonies, while 1842 was chamber music, 1843 encompassed oratorio and so on.

In 1845, Schumann travelled to Russia on a concert tour with his wife Clara, who was the daughter of his former teacher Friedrich Wieck and a world-famous pianist.Schumann became psychologically ill on the trip, and when they returned to Wieck’s new home in Dresden following the tour, the Schumanns decided to stay and set up their lives in Dresden, for the sake of Robert’s health and career.After a period of depression and psychosis, in which he hallucinated angels, Schumann resurged in Dresden with a “new manner” of composition.He began to compose in wildly varying manners, which was later attributed to the onset of serious mental illness.After a suicide attempt, Schumann was confined to Endenich Asylum for the last two and half years of his life, plagued by demonic visions.His dementia led him to be treated with mercury, which caused his death in 1856.

Fun facts:

1) Schumann studied law in University, but never went to class.His time was spent obsessing over the books of Jean Paul (Johann Richter) which he claims led him to become enamoured of the music of Franz Schubert.
2) Friedrich Wieck opposed his daughter’s marriage to Schumann, worried that her career as a pianist would suffer.He even tried to shoot Robert at one point.
3) Schumann worried that he would harm his wife when his mental illness was at its peak, which caused the sanatorium to prohibit contact between them.
4) Clara and Robert Schumann were responsible for promoting Johannes Brahms as a deserving and published composer.They remained friends throughout their lives.
5) Schumann is buried in a small cemetery in Bonn.

Richard Strauss

Richard Strauss enjoyed a long life and a prolific career as a representative of the end of the Romantic era. Coming from a musical family, Strauss quickly rose in the ranks of musical Munich after composing his first works at the age of six. Richard Strauss was raised on the music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, and though he began his career writing lieder and chamber music, he soon became interested in orchestral works.

He met and fostered a friendship with Hans von Bülow, eventually succeeding von Bülow as Kepellmeister in Meiningen. Strauss’s music, such as Der Rosenkavalier, was deeply rooted in the German Romantic style at this point, and it was a surprise to his devotees when he took a tour of Italy and came back as the composer of some considerably more modern tone poems.

Through his somewhat combative friendships with Alexander Ritter and Hans von Bülow, Strauss thrived as a composer and a conductor.He explored the world of opera, being ultimately hailed as the heir apparent to the Wagner crown in Bayreuth. Strauss’s tone poems and operas were very popular in Bavaria and Austria, and the composer started to allow egotism to take hold. He initiated a series of offensive satirical works, disfavoured opera scores and boring orchestral cantatas. Critics lambasted him internationally, and the composer had to find a new tack.

Around the turn of the century, Strauss attended a German-language performance of Oscar Wilde’s Salome.This inspired him to produce his famous opera based on the same work. The opera generated a scandal due to its incestuous and perverse content – the Archbishop of Vienna had it banned until the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.The Met in New York struck it from the roster.But somehow, Strauss beguiled Kaiser Wilhelm and the opera was performed in Berlin and Dresden. Audiences went wild – they could not get enough of the debauchery – and soon Salome had paid for Strauss’s villa and padded his family’s coffers.

Strauss became Generalmusikdirektor of the Berlin Philharmonic in 1907, and there he developed a partnership with playwright Hugo von Hoffmannsthal.The two men spent years collaborating on operas – both seria and buffa – and the composer returned to his Classical roots. His new operas toured the world, but audiences waned in the early 1930s.At this time, the Nazi party came to power in Germany, and in 1933 Hitler named Strauss head of the Reichsmusikkammer. Smug from the validation, Strauss began to cavort with Hitler and Goebbels. He was given special dispensation to compose an opera with libretto by a Jew who had fled Germany (Stefan Zweig), but when he found that Zweig’s name was left off the poster, Strauss protested.The Gestapo then ordered him to resign his position.The musician lived until the age of 85, never slackening in his impressive compositional output.

Fun Facts:

1)Strauss’s opera Guntram failed to be staged from 1887-1894, due to artistic flare-ups between performers and temper tantrums.
2)His propensity to write musical autobiographies throughout his life was thought to prove his overwhelming Narcissism.
3)In 1929, Strauss set out to write an opera set in the family of the Habsburg/Vienna Strausses (the Waltz Kings – no relation). The result was Arabella.
4)During the writing of Arabella, Hoffmannsthal’s son committed suicide, and Hoffmannsthal died two days later of a stroke.
5)Strauss wrote the Olympic Hymn for the Berlin 1936 Olympic Games, and his music maintained popularity in Nazi Germany despite his falling out with Hitler and Goebbels.

Jan kYtitel (johann baptist) vanhal-wanhal

Jan Křtitel Vanhal

One of the Bohemian composers who thrived in Austria, Vanhal is often ignored in the annals of Classical music. He was an autodidact as a teenager, teaching himself organ, violin and cello. When he reached adulthood, a rich noblewoman from his village near Prague sent him to Vienna to study with Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf.

Heitor Villa-Lobos

Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos is the most renowned composer from his country. Born in 1887 in Rio de Janeiro, Villa-Lobos was raised by a librarian and strict educator. The composer split his time between his two favourite instruments – the cello and the guitar. After formal schooling in Western art music and in the popular music of Brazil, Villa-Lobos taught himself to compose music for the piano. He married Lucília Guimarães, a pianist of some fame, who premiered his pieces throughout the 1910s and 20s.

Kurt Weill

Kurt Weill is perhaps best known for his satirical work and collaborations with the like of Ira Gershwin, Langston Hughes and Ogden Nash, but his story began long before those illustrious projects. Weill was the son of a synagogue cantor in Germany in the early 20th century. As you might imagine, that was not an easy time to be a Jewish artist. His father was a minor composer in his own right, and he encouraged Weill’s musical education.

As a young man, Weill traveled to Berlin to study with Albert Bing and Engelbert Humperdinck, eventually writing symphonies, chamber music and ballets.Weill encountered success in Europe, and began a fruitful period of composition for theatre, in collaboration with poet Bertolt Brecht.

During this period, Weill created Der Dreigroschenoper (The Three Penny Opera) – his and Brecht’s reworking of John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, and his reputation was cemented around the world. Now widely considered to be the most successful composer to come out of the Weimar Republic, Weill’s works were the target of anti-Semitic movements in his time.It became a goal of the Third Reich to drive his productions out of state-sponsored theatres.Weill’s very public Judaism and left-wing leanings made him a target of the burgeoning Nazi party, and he and his wife made the decision to flee Germany in 1933.Thinking that the situation would blow over, they settled temporarily in Paris and London.Weill was appalled to see pro-Nazi demonstrations at his Parisian productions, and began to worry that they were no safer in France than they had been in Germany.By September of 1935, the couple had defected to the United States during a production of his work The Eternal Road.

In America, Weill’s success continued and he became known for his musical setting for stage and screen, opera houses and cabarets.His loud political leanings leant him an air of the exotic, and he enjoyed fame and abundance of work.In 1950, at the age of 50, an abiding heart disease took his life.Weill’s music remains popular to this day.

Fun Facts:

1)When Kurt Weill met his wife Lotte Lenja, the two were unable to see each other due to his position behind a piano and her position auditioning for a play on stage.
2)Before fleeing Berlin, Weill contributed weekly to a German radio programme of music criticism.
3)At the same time that the Weills moved to Paris, Bertolt Brecht left Germany for Denmark, also fearing persecution by Hitler and the Nazi party.
4)Weill’s father’s synagogue in Dessau was burnt down during Kristallnacht in November of 1938.In 2015, the Kurt Weill foundation had the synagogue restored.
5)Kurt Weill never returned to Germany after leaving in 1933.