Antonio Salieri was an Italian composer and teacher of the classical period. He was born in Legnago, south of Verona, in the Republic of Venice, and spent his adult life and career as a subject of the Habsburg monarchy.
Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. He is one of the most revered figures in the history of Western music; his works rank among the most performed of the classical music repertoire and span the transition from the Classical period to the Romantic era in classical music. Beethoven's career has conventionally been divided into early, middle, and late periods. His early period, during which he forged his craft, is typically considered to have lasted until 1802. From 1802 to around 1812, his middle period showed an individual development from the styles of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and is sometimes characterized as heroic. During this time, he began to grow increasingly deaf. In his late period, from 1812 to 1827, he extended his innovations in musical form and expression.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical period. Despite his short life, his rapid pace of composition resulted in more than 800 works of virtually every Western classical genre of his time. Many of these compositions are acknowledged as pinnacles of the symphonic, concertante, chamber, operatic, and choral repertoire. Mozart is widely regarded as among the greatest composers in the history of Western music, with his music admired for its "melodic beauty, its formal elegance and its richness of harmony and texture".
The Magic Flute, K. 620, is an opera in two acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to a German libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder. The work is in the form of a Singspiel, a popular form during the time it was written that included both singing and spoken dialogue. The work premiered on 30 September 1791 at Schikaneder's theatre, the Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna, just two months before the composer's premature death. Still a staple of the opera repertory, its popularity was reflected by two immediate sequels, Peter Winter's Das Labyrinth oder Der Kampf mit den Elementen. Der Zauberflöte zweyter Theil (1798) and a fragmentary libretto by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe titled The Magic Flute Part Two.
John Anthony Burgess Wilson, who published under the name Anthony Burgess, was a British writer and composer.
Howard Chandler Robbins Landon was an American musicologist, journalist, historian and broadcaster, best known for his work in rediscovering the huge body of neglected music by Haydn and in correcting misunderstandings about Mozart.
Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550 was written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1788. It is sometimes referred to as the "Great G minor symphony", to distinguish it from the "Little G minor symphony", No. 25. The two are the only extant minor key symphonies Mozart wrote.
Zaide is an unfinished German-language opera, K. 344, written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1780. Emperor Joseph II, in 1778, was in the process of setting up an opera company for the purpose of performing German opera. One condition required of the composer to join this company was that he should write a comic opera. At Salzburg in 1779 Mozart began work on a new opera. It contains spoken dialogue, which also classifies it as a Singspiel. Only the arias and ensembles from the first two acts were composed. Missing are an overture and third act.
Beethoven's Last Night is a rock opera by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, released in 2000. The album tells the fictional story of Ludwig van Beethoven on the last night of his life, as the devil, Mephistopheles, comes to collect his soul. With the help of Fate and her son Twist, Beethoven unwittingly tricks the devil and is allowed to keep his soul which he had thought lost, but that the devil had no claim on. The opera features many classical crossover rock songs which are clearly based on melodies from classical music, particularly Beethoven's works. It is the first Trans-Siberian Orchestra album that does not feature Christmas themes. The original cover art was created by Edgar Jerins, and re-issued cover art was created by Greg Hildebrandt.
Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (ISBN 0-224-01009-3) is Anthony Burgess's fictional recreation of the life and world of Napoleon Bonaparte, first published in 1974. Its four "movements" follow the structure of Beethoven's Symphony No. 3, known as the Eroica. Burgess said he found the novel "elephantine fun" to write.
The composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart went by many different names in his lifetime. This resulted partly from the church traditions of the day, and partly from Mozart being multilingual and freely adapting his name to other languages.
Hélène Rose Paule Grimaud is a French classical pianist and the founder of the Wolf Conservation Center in South Salem, New York.
Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia Mozart, called "Marianne" and nicknamed Nannerl, was a musician, the older sister of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) and daughter of Leopold (1719–1787) and Anna Maria Mozart (1720–1778).
Emanuel Schikaneder was a German impresario, dramatist, actor, singer, and composer. He wrote the libretto of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera The Magic Flute and was the builder of the Theater an der Wien. Peter Branscombe called him "one of the most talented theatre men of his era". Aside from Mozart, he worked with Salieri, Haydn and Beethoven.
This is a list of works by the English writer Anthony Burgess.
The composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) led a life that was dramatic in many respects, including his career as a child prodigy, his struggles to achieve personal independence and establish a career, his brushes with financial disaster, and his death in the course of attempting to complete his Requiem. Authors of fictional works have found his life a compelling source of raw material. Such works have included novels, plays, operas, and films.
Paul Anthony Griffiths is a British music critic, novelist and librettist. He is particularly noted for his writings on modern classical music and for having written the libretti for two 20th-century operas, Tan Dun's Marco Polo and Elliott Carter's What Next?.
The Magic Flute is a celebrated opera composed in 1791 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Mozart employed a libretto written by his close colleague Emanuel Schikaneder, the director of the Theater auf der Wieden at which the opera premiered in the same year.. Grout and Williams describe the libretto thus:
Schikaneder, a kind of literary magpie, filched characters, scenes, incidents, and situations from others' plays and novels and with Mozart's assistance organized them into a libretto that ranges all the way from buffoonery to high solemnity, from childish faerie to sublime human aspiration – in short from the circus to the temple, but never neglecting an opportunity for effective theater along the way.
