Composers 20th century
Hans Henning Otto Harry Baron von Voigt, best known by his nickname Alastair, was a German artist, composer, dancer, mime, poet, singer and translator. He is best known as an illustrator.
His drawings, which are often decadent in spirit and have the look of Art Nouveau, are influenced somewhat by the drawings of the English artist Aubrey Beardsley.
His drawings were in black and white ink, sometimes with one colour added. Alastair's illustrations show a strong influence from the Decadent movement in art and poetry that had begun decades earlier, with the "perverse and sinister" a recurring theme. Intricate decorative elements and fine detail are apparent in his works.
Alban Berg, full name Alban Maria Johannes Berg, was an Austrian composer, representative of expressionism in music, teacher and music critic.
A meeting with composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) in September 1904 played a decisive role in Berg's life. The latter saw talent in the young man and taught him free of charge for six years. In 1907 Berg performed his "Sonata for Piano" for the first time.
Alban Berg was very self-critical and worked on pieces for a long time. He composed orchestral music (including "Five Orchestral Songs," 1912), chamber music, songs, and two groundbreaking operas, "Wozzeck" (1925) and "Lulu" (1937). "Wozzeck," the most frequently performed theater work in the atonal idiom, is Berg's first attempt to address social issues within the framework of opera. However, its premiere turned into a scandal, with critics even calling the composer a musical fraud.
Only a few years after his death, Alban Berg was widely recognized as a composer of expression. He broke with tradition and mastered a radical technique, but at the same time he combined the old and the new and created, together with Schoenberg and Webern, the New Viennese School of the 20th century. Alban Berg was also an outstanding teacher of composition.
Benjamin Britten, full name Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, was a British composer, conductor and pianist.
Britten studied at the Royal College of Music in London, and had already written a set of choral variations, A Boy is Born (1933). He then worked as a composer for radio, theater and film, working closely with the poet W.H. Auden. His Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge for string orchestra received international acclaim in 1937. Between 1939 and 1942 Britten worked in the United States, where he composed several significant works.
His later operas include The Rape of Lucretia (1946), the comic Albert Herring (1947), Billy Budd (1951), Gloriana (1953, written for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II), and A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960). These and other works established his reputation as a leading British composer of the mid-20th century, whose operas are considered the best English works in the genre.
His song cycles occupy a significant place in Britten's oeuvre, and his largest choral work is War Requiem (1962) for chorus and orchestra. The composer wrote the Symphony in D major for cello and orchestra (1963) especially for the famous Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Britten's best-known works also include the opera Peter Grimes (1945) and the orchestral production The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1945).
In addition to his work as a composer, Britten performed as a pianist and conductor, touring internationally and visiting the USSR on several occasions.
Max Bruch, full name Max Christian Friedrich Bruch, was a German composer and conductor, violinist and teacher of the late Romantic period.
Bruch studied with the composer and pianist Ferdinand Hiller (1853-1857), wrote a symphony at age 14, and won a scholarship that allowed him to study in Cologne. His first opera, Joke, Deceit and Revenge, was performed in 1858. He conducted orchestral and choral societies in Germany, England and Poland, and from 1890 to 1911 he was a professor at the Berlin Academy of Arts.
Bruch was an ambitious and prolific composer. His greatest success during his lifetime was his huge works for chorus and orchestra, Beautiful Ellen (1867) and Odysseus (1872). He was also the author of string concertos and pieces for violin and orchestra. His Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor (1866) is one of the most popular Romantic violin concertos.
Silvano Bussotti is an Italian composer, painter and opera director, set and costume designer.
Silvano learned to play the violin at an early age, studied harmony and counterpoint at the Cherubini Conservatory in Florence, and studied with various teachers. In addition to music, he was fond of drawing and painting. His first works, influenced by Luigi Dallapiccola and Roberto Lupi, were written in the avant-garde dodecaphonic technique, and he also made extensive use of the aleatoric method. Bussotti was a participant in "anti-music" concerts, for which he created works without any sounds at all.
Bussotti's compositions include numerous pieces for various vocal, instrumental and mixed ensembles. In 1963 he co-founded the Group of 70 (Florence). Between 1968 and 2001 he worked as a director, costume designer and stage designer at the leading opera houses in Italy, La Scala, La Fenice; Massimo (Palermo), Reggio (Turin) and others. In total, he created about 40 opera productions.
Bussotti's art exhibitions are held in various countries around the world. Bussotti is also known for his extravagant graphic scores, in which he found self-expression as an artist, but this hides the meaningful nature of his musical achievements.
John Milton Cage Jr. is an American composer, philosopher, poet, musicologist, and artist. Cage is considered one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde.
Born in the United States, he studied architecture in Europe, but music and painting seemed more interesting to him and he has achieved impressive success there. John Cage is considered a pioneer of uncertainty in music and the unconventional use of instruments, and is highly regarded for his paintings and prints. In addition, he played a crucial role in the development of modern dance and performance art.
His father John Milton Cage (1886-1964) was an inventor.
Noël Peirce Coward was an English playwright, composer, director, actor, and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called «a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise».
Jorge de la Vega was an Argentine painter, graphic artist, draftsman, singer, and songwriter.
Although de la Vega studied architecture in Buenos Aires for six years, he then became self-taught as a painter. From 1961 to 1965 he was a member of the art movement called Nueva Figuración. During his involvement in this movement, he became a member of the Otra Figuración group. In the final years of his career and life he wrote and sang popular protest songs which expressed his humorous view of the world. In addition to museums in Argentina, his works hang in the Phoenix Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and the Art Museum of the Americas at the OAS in Washington, DC.
Claude Debussy, full name Achille-Claude Debussy, was a French composer, conductor, pianist and critic, a leading representative of Impressionism in music.
Debussy showed musical talent early and entered the Paris Conservatory. He lived in poverty, but at the same time he learned a luxurious life: the Russian philanthropist and the richest woman, Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck, took him under her tutelage, he mused with her children and traveled with her around Europe. His sensitive nature could not but respond to all these contrasts. During this period Debussy created one of his masterpieces, Moonlight from the Bergamo Suite.
Debussy spent the summers of 1881 and 1882 near Moscow, at the von Meck estate. In this house Debussy became acquainted with the new Russian music of Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Balakirev and Modest Mussorgsky. His stay in Russia had a beneficial effect on the young musician's development. Debussy was also influenced by the work of Richard Wagner. He developed a highly original system of harmony and musical structure that in many ways expressed the ideals to which the Impressionist and Symbolist artists and writers of his time aspired.
Debussy toured with concerts and conducted his works in England, Italy, Russia and other countries. Claude Debussy's famous works include the Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (1894), the operas Pelléas et Mélisande and The Sea (1905), the suite Children's Corner (1906-1908) and the orchestral cycle Images (1912). In 1913 he composed music for the ballet Games, which was performed by Sergei Diaghilev's Russian Seasons company in Paris and London.
Antonín Leopold Dvořák was a Czech composer of the Romantic era and one of the founders of the Czech national school of music.
Dvořák showed musical talent early on and became an accomplished violinist. After graduating from the Institute of Church Music in Prague, he worked as a musician in various ensembles and taught, but lived very poorly. However, already in the 1860s he composed two symphonies, an opera, chamber music and many songs.
In 1875 Dvořák received a state scholarship from the Austrian government and met Johannes Brahms, with whom he developed a fruitful friendship. Dvořák's Moravian Duets (1876) for soprano and contralto and Slavonic Dances (1878) for piano duet first brought the composer and the music of his country to the world's attention. In 1884 he made a successful visit to England, and in 1890 the great composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky arranged two concerts for him in Moscow. The following year Dvořák became an honorary doctor of music at Cambridge University.
In 1892 Dvořák accepted the post of director of the newly established National Conservatory in New York and, in addition to this work, traveled extensively in the United States, but in 1895 he returned to his homeland.
Through his work Dvořák expanded the path of the Czech national music school started by Bedřich Smetana. He composed in almost all classical music genres, and his symphonies and concertos, choruses and chamber compositions continue to be performed all over the world. Dvořák's best-known works include Symphony No. 9 "From the New World" (written in the USA), the opera Rusalka, the Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, the "American" String Quartet, Requiem, Stabat Mater and Slavonic Dances.
Edward William Elgar (Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet) was a British composer of the Romantic period.
The son of an organist, Elgar was a fine violinist, played the bassoon, and worked as a Kapellmeister and church organist. Then in Malvern, Worcestershire, he began composing music himself. He composed several major choral works, notably the oratorio The Light of Life (Lux Christi (1896,), and in 1898-99 he wrote the popular Enigma Variations for orchestra. Another major work followed in 1900, the oratorio The Dream of Gerontius, which is considered his masterpiece.
From 1905 to 1908 Elgar was the first Professor of Music at the University of Birmingham. During World War I, he periodically wrote patriotic works. His marches, introductions, symphonies, and concertos for strings are well known. Elgar's vibrant works contributed to the revival of English music in the 20th century during the transition from late Romanticism.
Wolfgang Flatz is a contemporary Austrian artist, stage designer, musician and composer. Currently lives and works in Munich, Germany.
After engaging with contemporary art movements such as Heppening and Viennese Actionism, Flatz creates works using a variety of media - painting, sculpture, performance, video, computer, film, photography, theatre, music, design and architecture. Subjects include voyeurism, the body, violence, aggression, pain, love, politics and audience interaction.
George Gershwin, born Jacob Gershwin, is an American composer and pianist.
George's parents emigrated from Russia to the United States in 1891, and he was about 12 years old at the piano, becoming virtually self-taught. Gershwin published his first song in 1916, but it was Swanee, written by a 20-year-old Gershwin in 1918, that made him famous. The income he received for it allowed Gershwin to concentrate on musical theater. In the 1920s, however, George, along with his older brother Ira, were major songwriters and hit songwriters on Broadway. The lyrics for all of Gershwin's films were written by Ira Gershwin, as were the lyrics for most of his musicals, although early in his career Gershwin worked with other lyric writers, including Irving Caesar and Buddy De Silva.
The Gershwin brothers' first Broadway hit was the song Lady Be Good in 1924. In his songs, Broadway shows, and movie scores, composer George Gershwin achieved unprecedented success with his masterful mastery of jazz, classical, and popular music styles. These include "Rhapsody in Blue" in 1924, "Concerto in F" in 1925, "An American in Paris" in 1928, and "Second Rhapsody" in 1931. Between 1919 and 1935. Gershwin wrote music for 31 musicals, one of which - Of Thee I Sing - in 1932 became the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for Dramaturgy. Gershwin's songs have also been used in numerous films and award-winning musicals over the years.
The opera Porgy and Bess, co-written with Dubose, Dorothy Hayward, and Ira Gershwin, was the Gershwin brothers' most ambitious project, combining memorable songs with drama. It was first performed in Boston in 1935 and was made into a movie in 1959.
In 1937, at the age of only 39, the brilliant composer died of a brain tumor. George Gershwin was at the height of his career, leaving a significant and lasting mark on the world of classical music. Today, his orchestral works are performed by most of the world's prestigious symphony orchestras. Ira Gershwin, who was two years older, lived 46 years after George's death.
Aleksandr Konstantinovich Glazunov (russian: Александр Константинович Глазунов) was a Russian late Romantic composer, conductor and teacher.
Glazunov belonged to a well-known dynasty of book publishers in St. Petersburg and showed musical ability early on. He studied music with Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov, wrote his first symphony at the age of sixteen, and was noticed by the patron of the arts Mitrofan Belyaev, who became his admirer and benefactor. Thanks to him, the young Glazunov traveled all over Europe and was introduced in Weimar to Franz Liszt, who promoted the performance of his First Symphony at the congress of the General German Musical Union.
After the death of composer Borodin, Glazunov helped Rimsky-Korsakov finish his opera Prince Igor, and in the late 1890s he was already collaborating with the Imperial Theaters and writing three ballets. In 1899 Glazunov was appointed professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, and from the end of 1905 he became its director, retaining this post even after the October Revolution of 1917. Glazunov's personality is characterized by the fact that he spent his director's salary on helping poor students. And in general, during the hungry years of post-revolutionary devastation, he supported students, even if he did not share their musical beliefs - among them the greats Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich.
In 1922, Aleksandr Glazunov was named People's Artist of the young Soviet republic. In 1928 he traveled to Vienna to take part in the jury of the Schubert Centenary Composition Competition and never returned to the USSR. However, even while living in Europe, he retained his Soviet citizenship. Officially, Glazunov's stay in Paris was explained by his serious state of health and the need for medical treatment. Already in 1972 Glazunov's ashes were transported to the USSR and reburied in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra.
In addition to ballets, Aleksandr Glazunov wrote eight symphonies (the ninth remained unfinished), seven string quartets and a great deal of orchestral music. He wrote mainly for piano and organ, and at the end of his life he composed works for saxophone - a solo concerto and a quartet for saxophones. Glazunov's most popular works today are his ballets The Seasons (1898) and Raymonda (1897), his Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the Polonaise from Les Sylphides, and his two concert waltzes.
Woodrow Wilson Guthrie or Woody Guthrie is an American folk and country singer and musician.
Guthrie was born in difficult economic times in the United States. At first, he earned a living as a sign painter in different cities, traveling by hitchhiking. At the age of 20, he began learning to play guitar, playing in saloons and labor camps during the Great Depression. In his travels, the musician absorbed and performed many of the old folk ballads he heard around him and wrote many new songs reflecting the everyday joys and hardships of the ordinary people he met in his travels.
Guthrie was a major influence on folk and rock musicians from Bob Dylan to Wilco. Among Guthrie's best-known songs are Pastures of Plenty, Bound for Glory, and This Land is Your Land, the latter of which, due to its popularity, has become something of an "alternative national anthem" in the United States. In 1940, he recorded four hours of songs and stories for the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress (now the Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center). Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Guthrie had a high-profile career in radio broadcasting and recording.
Woody was a very prolific composer, writing thousands of songs. He also wrote an autobiographical novel, On the Road to Fame, and drew thousands of pen and ink drawings, many of which are now in the Ralph Rinzler Center's Folklife Archives and Collections.
Gustav Holst, birth name Gustavus Theodore Von Holst, is an English composer and educator. Holst studied at the Royal College of Music in London, including playing the trombone, and for several years after graduation he earned a living as a trombonist in various orchestras. In 1905 he became a music teacher at St. Paul's Girls' School and later music director of Morley College, positions he retained throughout his life. A brilliant educator, Holst pioneered music education for women.
Holst's music is often built on English national folklore and has much in common with the work of composer and contemporary Vaughan Williams. However, he combines it with an international flavor based on the styles of Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, and other innovators, with a continuation of English Romanticism. This influence is reflected in Holst's most famous work, the orchestral suite The Planets. Also in the Hindu opera Savitri and other cosmopolitan works.
Holst's works also include the opera Sita, Hymn to Jesus for chorus and orchestra (1917); Ode to Death for chorus and orchestra (1919), the opera The Perfect Fool (1923), the Choral Symphony (1923-24), the Double Concerto for Two Violins and Orchestra (1929), and Hammersmith for Orchestra (1930).
Arthur Honegger was a Swiss-French composer, violinist and cellist, and music critic.
Honegger was born into a Swiss family but spent most of his life in France. He studied at the Zurich and Paris conservatories. After World War I, he joined Les Six, a group of young composers that also included Georges Auric, Germain Taillefer, Francis Poulenc, Darius Millau, and Louis Durey.
In the early 1920s Honegger asserted himself with strong orchestral and chamber works, including Pacific 231 (inspired by the sounds of a steam locomotive) and Pastorale d'Eté. In his dramatic oratorios Joan of Arc at the stake and Dance of the Dead, he turned to mysticism and religious meaning, which informed many of his later works.
Honegger was a prolific composer and composed several operas and a ballet, oratorios, five symphonies, and several chamber works for strings. He also wrote music for several movies. Honegger's music is written in a relaxed musical style that combines the French avant-garde with the large forms and massiveness of the German tradition.
Honegger is also known for his critical publications and musicological essays, particularly on composer Igor Stravinsky, whom he considered a genius and an example.
Leoš Janáček, birth name Leo Eugen Janáček, was a Czech composer and musicologist, folklorist, publicist and teacher.
Janáček was a singer in Brno, and studied at the Prague, Leipzig and Vienna Conservatories. In 1881 he founded the Collegium of Organists in Brno, which he directed until 1920. From 1881 to 1888 he directed the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, and in 1919 he became professor of composition at the Prague Conservatory.
Janáček was deeply in love with national music, collecting folklore and publishing the journal Musical Pages. He was inspired by Moravian and other Slavic music, including Eastern European folk music, to create an original modern musical style.
In his early period of creativity, Janáček was strongly influenced by the musical style and aesthetics of his friend Dvořák. His first opera, Šarka (1887-88), was a romantic work in the spirit of Wagner and Smetana. In his later operas he developed his own distinctly Czech style, built on the intonations of his native speech and folk melodies. Janáček's most important operas are Jenůfa (1904) and Her Foster Daughter, which established the composer's international reputation; The Case of Macro Pulos (1926), From the Dead House (1930), and others. Most of Janáček's operas have been staged in Czech.
Janáček visited Russia three times, and his interest in Russian language and literature resulted in the opera Katya Kabanova (1921) and the orchestral rhapsody Taras Bulba (1918). Janáček also wrote a number of instrumental chamber works. The world-famous composer spent most of his life in Brno, where the vast majority of his works were performed for the first time. Today, Janáček is the most frequently performed Czech opera composer in the world.
André Jolivet was a French composer.
André's composition teacher was the French composer Marie-Paule Le Flem. Jolivet became interested in atonal music and then became a student of composer Edgar Varèse, who taught him musical acoustics, atonal music, and orchestration.
In 1936 Jolivet co-founded the group La jeune France, and in 1945 he was appointed music director of the Comédie Française. He developed an expressive melodic style, epitomized in the virtuosic Concertino for trumpet, strings and piano (1948) and the 1949 Flute Concerto.
André Jolivet is known for his complex, expressive experiments with rhythm and new sounds. He adapted music from Egypt, the Middle East, Africa and Asia into his distinctly French style.
Jens Gerd Joneleit is a German abstractionist and composer who lives and works in Germany and the United States.
He studied art and music at the University of South Dakota and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, then returned to Germany.
His paintings and other visual works have been the subject of numerous gallery exhibitions of contemporary art in the United States and Europe.
As a composer, Jens Jonleit has written numerous compositions for orchestras, ensembles, and chamber groups in Europe and the United States. He is also known as a composer of music and theater works and opera.
György Ligeti, full name György Sándor Ligeti, was a Hungarian and Austrian composer and musicologist.
Ligeti was born into a Jewish family, but his mother tongue was Hungarian and from an early age he was exposed to Romanian and Hungarian folk music. His first significant work was the Romanian Concerto, which he wrote in 1951. In 1956 Ligeti emigrated from Hungary to Austria, receiving Austrian citizenship in 1968.
In 1957 in Cologne, Ligeti met the experimental composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gottfried König and worked with them in the field of academic electronic music, but soon switched to instrumental music. He gained recognition from the Western avant-garde in 1961 with his work Visions and others, in which he used sonorics and the micropolyphony technique he had invented. In 1965 Ligeti completed one of his major works, Requiem.
During his life, Ligeti changed his compositional style and technique several times, ranging from electronic music and sonoricism (1950s and 1960s) to neoromanticism (1980s and 1990s). He has also written many theoretical articles on new currents in music.
Michael Vasilyevich Matyushin (Russian: Михаил Васильевич Матюшин) was a pivotal figure in Russian art and music, known for his multifaceted talents that spanned painting, composing, and theoretical contributions to the avant-garde movement. Born in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, in 1861, he initially made his mark as a musician, becoming the first violinist of the St. Petersburg Court Orchestra after studying at the Moscow Conservatory. Matyushin's artistic journey took a significant turn when he delved into painting, studying under various tutors and eventually meeting his future wife, Elena Guro, in an artist's studio. This partnership led to the creation of the "Crane" publishing house, fostering connections with futurists and other avant-garde artists.
Matyushin is perhaps best known for his theory of "extended seeing," which focused on the exploration of space and the interactions between color, form, and perception. This innovative approach aimed at extending the boundaries of human perception, a concept he developed further through his establishment of the Zorved group. His efforts were grounded in the belief that individuals could learn to perceive more than the visible, including information and events occurring outside their immediate sensory range.
His contributions to both the visual and musical arts culminated in notable works like the futurist opera "Victory Over the Sun," where his collaboration with Kazimir Malevich and Alexei Kruchonykh marked a significant moment in avant-garde history. After the Russian Revolution, Matyushin led an art class on Color at the Free Workshops, despite facing challenges from neoclassical revivalists. Despite these obstacles, he remained a prominent figure in Leningrad's Institute of Artistic Culture, where he continued his experimental work.
Today, Matyushin's legacy is preserved in the Museum of Avant-Garde in Saint Petersburg, housed in the very building where he lived and worked alongside other luminaries of the Russian avant-garde. For art collectors and experts, Matyushin's work represents a fascinating confluence of artistic innovation and theoretical exploration, highlighting his significant impact on both Russian art and the broader avant-garde movement.
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Olivier Messiaen, full name Olivier Eugène Charles Prosper Messiaen, was a French composer, music theorist, and teacher.
At the age of seven Olivier taught himself to play the piano, at the age of 11 he entered the Paris Conservatory, where his teachers were organist Marcel Dupré and composer Paul Duca. At the conservatory, Messiaen also began to study Eastern rhythms, the peculiarities of birdsong and microtonal music, which uses intervals of less than a semitone. All of this knowledge he innovatively utilized later in his compositions.
In 1931 Messiaen was appointed organist at the church of St. Trinité in Paris. In 1936 he co-founded La Jeune France ("Young France"), a group whose aim was to promote new French music. During these same years and until the outbreak of war, he taught.
As a soldier in the French army, he was taken prisoner by the Nazis, but even in the camp he managed to compose music, he even organized concerts for the exhausted fellow prisoners. After his release from captivity in 1942, Messiaen resumed his work at St. Trinité and later taught at the Paris Conservatoire. His students include dozens of future celebrated musicians, performers and composers.
Much of Messiaen's music was inspired by Roman Catholic theology, and the composer interpreted mystical and religious themes in his own manner. He developed his own style, characterized by rhythmic complexity, rich tonal color and a unique harmonic language. Olivier Messiaen is the author of the monumental opera St. Francis of Assisi (1983), and has toured the world as an organist and pianist, performer of his own works and brilliant improviser.
Jovan Mihailović is a Serbian and American musician, artist and writer.
Jovan Mihailović was born and raised in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, where he and his family survived the Nazi occupation and the transition to communism. From a young age, he demonstrated artistic ability and began to draw, paint and play the violin. He studied at the Belgrade Theater Academy, worked as a playwright in Yugoslavia and traveled throughout Western Europe as a folk musician before immigrating to Sweden, Canada and finally Chicago in 1971.
Jovan was an active member of Chicago's creative community for four decades, writing dozens of novels, plays, and short stories, as well as performing music in restaurants and cafes. He also created many hundreds of drawings and paintings that are full of emotionally intense images from the artist's mystical universe of beauty.
Darius Milhaud was a French modernist composer, conductor, music critic and teacher.
Born into a Jewish family, Milhaud studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Paul Dukas and Vincent d'Indy. During his years of study, he met his future colleagues in Les Six, A. Honegger and J. Taifer. Around 1913, Milhaud began to use bitonality and polychords in his music. He studied polytonality (the simultaneous use of different keys) and consistently developed this technique.
Milhaud's bold, individual style was particularly evident in the ballets Man and His Desire (1918) and The Creation of the World (1923). He wrote incidental music for Claudel's Protea (1920). His other works include the operas Christophe Colomb (1930), David (1954), Medea (1939), and others, totaling 16 operas. A prolific composer, Milhaud wrote more than 400 works, including scores for radio and film, arrangements of the Jewish Sabbath morning service, symphonies, and choral works. Among chamber works, the composer composed many concertos for strings and other instruments.
In 1940 Millau became a professor at Mills College in Oakland, California; in 1947 he was one of the founders of the Summer Conservatory of Music at the Music Academy of the West in California. After 1947, he also taught at the Paris Conservatory of Music almost until the end of his life. His students include many future jazz and classical composers.
Carl Orff, full name Carl Heinrich Maria Orff, was a German composer, representative of expressionism in music, and teacher.
Orff studied at the Munich Academy of Music with composer Heinrich Kaminski, and later conducted in Munich, Mannheim, and Darmstadt. In 1937, he wrote the oratorio Carmina Burana, a staging with dance, based on a manuscript of medieval poems, which became one of the most popular choral works of the 20th century. Inspired, Orff later created several more operatic mysteries based on ancient Greek tragedies and medieval chants, Baroque theater, and Bavarian peasant life.
Orff's system of musical education for children, based largely on developing a sense of rhythm through group lessons and playing percussion instruments, became widespread. In 1924 in Munich he founded the School of Gymnastics, Dance and Music together with the German gymnast Dorothea Gunther. Orff believed that music, being the foundation, brought together movement, singing, playing and improvisation.
During the period of National Socialist rule in Germany, Carl Orff managed to survive quite well: he continued to compose music and teach. From 1950 to 1960, Carl Orff held the chair of musical composition at the Musikhochschule in Munich, and he received many state awards for his many years of activity.
Nigel Osborne is a British composer, educator and humanitarian activist.
He studied composition at Oxford and in Warsaw. In Poland he co-founded one of the first live electronic performance groups in Eastern Europe and worked in the Experimental Studio of Polish Radio, beginning a special relationship with electroacoustic music throughout Europe.
Nigel Osborne works extensively in long-term collaborative projects, for example with the Vienna 20jh Ensemble, the London Symphonietta, the Nash Ensemble, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and others. Theater productions have always been an important area for him. Among the major works for the theater is an interesting opera "Electrification of the Soviet Union". His series of musical and dance collaborations - "Apollo in Despair", "Wilderness", "Zanza", "Mythologies", and in opera and musical theater - "Hell's Angels", "Faust" and others are known.
Osborne's major orchestral works include Symphony 1 for the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Sun of Venice for the Philharmonic Orchestra. Osborne is a full-time professor at the University of Edinburgh and an advisor to War Child, the charity responsible for the humanitarian aid program in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He is generally known for his extensive charity work supporting children traumatized by war, particularly in the Balkans during the Bosnian War and in the Syrian conflict, using his own music therapy techniques.
Hilda Paredes is a composer originally from Mexico, mainly living and working in London.
After studying at the Conservatory of Music in Mexico City, Hilda Paredes earned a Master of Arts degree at City University in London and a doctorate at the University of Manchester under the supervision of Professor John Casken. She has been living and working in London for some 40 years, but continues to be involved in the musical life of her native Mexico as a composer and teacher. Hilda has taught composition and lectured at the University of Manchester, the University of California San Diego, and the University of Buffalo.
Although there is evidence of the presence of Mexican art in her works, Hilda Paredes also draws inspiration from many composers and cultures from around the world. Her music has been critically acclaimed for its refinement of craftsmanship, dramatic power, and poetic approach. Hilda incorporates a wide range of electroacoustic elements into her works.
One of Paredes' most internationally acclaimed works is the chamber opera Harriet. It has been performed in Mexico, the UK, France and Belgium. For this work, Hilda was awarded the prestigious Ivors Composer Award 2019 (formerly British Composer Awards).
Giacomo Puccini, full name Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini, was an Italian opera composer, organist and choirmaster.
Puccini was born into the family that for two centuries directed the musical organization of the Cathedral of San Martino in Lucca, and the young musician inherited the position of cathedral organist until his adulthood. He also played organ in small local churches. Giuseppe Verdi's opera Aida, which he saw in Pisa in 1876, was a boost for him and he entered the Milan Conservatory in 1880.
Puccini carefully studied contemporary operatic compositions, particularly the work of Claude Debussy, Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky. Soon he wrote Triptych (1918), three one-act operas - the melodramatic The Cape, the sentimental Suor Angelica and the comic Gianni Schicchi. Puccini's other mature operas are La bohème (1896), Tosca (1900), and Madama Butterfly (1904).
The composer did not manage to finish his last opera, Turandot - he died of cancer with its score in his hands. This work is the only Italian opera in the Impressionist style. Puccini is also considered the greatest representative of opera realism, as well as the Verismo movement in music, attempting to faithfully portray the social and psychological conflicts of the new national-historical reality after the unification of Italy.
Maurice Ravel, full name Joseph Maurice Ravel, was a French composer, pianist and conductor, a representative of Impressionism in music.
At the age of 14 Maurice entered the Paris Conservatory and during his studies he composed several works. Already in these early sonatas and compositions he skillfully adapted traditional structures in music to his own personal ones, thus creating his own musical style.
Of Ravel's piano works, the virtuosic "Miroir" and "Gaspard de la Nuit" are popular, while of his orchestral works the most famous are the "Spanish Rhapsody" and Bolero. After 1905, Ravel's name is placed almost on a par with the recognized Impressionist composer Claude Debussy. Ravel met the famous Russian entrepreneur and organizer of the Russian Seasons, Sergei Diaghilev, which was a highlight in his career. He was specially commissioned by him to compose music for Mikhail Fokine's ballet Daphnis and Chloe (1912), starring the great Russian dancer Vatslav Nijinsky.
Ravel toured extensively as a pianist and conductor, performing his own works in Italy, Holland and England. In 1928, he made a successful four-month tour of Canada and the United States, where he impressed with jazz and blues compositions.
Maurice Ravel has gone down in history as one of the leading exponents of musical impressionism.
Augusta Read Thomas is an American composer and professor.
Augusta Thomas studied composition at the Tanglewood Music Center and at Yale University, Northwestern University, and the Royal Academy of Music in London. She was a member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for many years. Thomas was also composer-in-residence with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra. Augusta Read Thomas is Professor of College Composition at the University of Chicago, In 2016, she founded that university's Center for Contemporary Composition, which provides a dynamic, collaborative, and interdisciplinary environment for the creation, performance, and study of new music, as well as career development for emerging and established composers and performers.
One of Thomas' best-known works is Astral Song for solo flute, solo violin and orchestra. Her most recent works include the opera Sweet Potato Kicks the Sun (2019), and she has also written numerous orchestral and choral works, concertos, and solo compositions. Augusta Read Thomas is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is considered the best-known contemporary American composer.
Steve Reich, full name Stephen Michael Reich, is an American minimalist composer.
Reich came from a Jewish family, graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy, and pursued a parallel career in music education. At Mills College in Oakland, California, he earned a master's degree in composition.
In 1966, he founded his own ensemble, Steve Reich and Musicians, where he was free to experiment with the form of composition. One of the pioneers of minimalism, he composes music that is essentially tonal-modal and characterized by repetition, a steady pulse, and a clear structure. His innovations include the use of tape loops to create phased patterns.
Reich himself cites the works of Igor Stravinsky, Johann Sebastian Bach, jazz music, and the music of West Africa as sources of his inspiration.
Nikolai Andreevich Rimskii-Korsakov (russian: Николай Андреевич Римский-Корсаков) was a Russian composer, teacher and conductor, music critic, and member of the Mighty Handful.
Originally from an old noble family, Rimskii-Korsakov studied piano from the age of six and by the age of nine was already trying to compose music. After graduating from the St. Petersburg Naval School, in 1862-1865 he was on a round-the-world voyage, during which he was made an officer. He participated in an expedition to the shores of North America, visited Great Britain, Spain, Norway. In 1873-1884 he worked as an inspector of military bands of the fleet.
During his studies at the school and during the expedition Nikolai Rimskii-Korsakov continued to study music. His acquaintance in 1861 with the composer Miliy Balakirev and his circle "The Mighty Handful", which included composers Caesar Cui, Modest Mussorgsky and Alexander Borodin, became the impetus for his work. Rimskii-Korsakov 's aesthetic views and worldview were formed under the influence of the "Mighty Handful" and its ideologist V. Stasov.
Nikolai Rimskii-Korsakov was very prolific, and almost all of his works are based on folk and classical Russian literature and melodies. He composed 15 operas, including The Pskovite Girl (1872), May Night (1879), The Snow Maiden (1881), Sadko (1896), The Tsar's Bride (1898), The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1900), Kashchey the Immortal (1902), The Tale of the Invisible City of Kitezh..." (1904), The Golden Cockerel (1907). Fragments from some operas have become the most performed in the world, among them "The Song of the Indian Guest" from "Sadko" and "The Flight of the Bumblebee" from "Saltan".
The composer's works also include three symphonies (the first of which he completed while sailing around the world), symphonic works, instrumental concertos, cantatas, chamber instrumental, vocal and sacred music. In 1886-1890 Rimskii-Korsakov conducted the "Russian Symphonic Concertos" in St. Petersburg, and in 1898 - in Moscow, at the same time he was also engaged in teaching. In 1871 he became a professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where he taught classes in practical composition, instrumentation and orchestration.
As a teacher, Rimskii-Korsakov trained over 200 composers and musicians, including Alexander Glazunov, Mikhail Gnesin, Alexander Grechaninov, Anatoly Lyadov, Sergei Prokofiev, and Igor Stravinsky. He also published several textbooks on harmony and orchestration. Rimskii-Korsakov's work had a great influence on the development of Russian classical and foreign music.
Gerhard Rühm is an Austrian author, composer and visual artist.
His artistic production is inspired by August Stramm, Kurt Schwitters, Gertrude Stein, Carl Einstein und Paul Scheerbart. Rühm's works are often located at the border between music, language, gestures and the visual. His audible works are outstanding examples of innovative radio plays and acoustic art. During a sojourn in Lebanon he became interested in eastern musical styles.
Robert Saxton, full name Robert Louis Alfred Saxton, is a British composer.
Born into a family of Jewish immigrants, Robert began composing music at the age of six and studied at Cambridge and Oxford Universities. Saxton has worked as Professor of Composition at Oxford University and as a Research Fellow in Music at Worcester College. Since 2013 he has been Composer of the Purcell School for Young Musicians Association and has been appointed an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy.
Robert Saxton works in a wide variety of genres. His recent works include the opera The Wandering Jew, song cycles, orchestral symphonic compositions and works for strings and piano.
Arnold Schoenberg, real name Arnold Franz Walter Schönberg, was an Austrian and American composer, representative of musical expressionism, teacher, musicologist and conductor.
Schoenberg came from a Jewish family and began studying the violin at the age of eight and later the cello. While working as a bank clerk, he simultaneously studied composition with Alexander Zemlyansky (1871-1942) and soon wrote his first string quartet (1897) to acclaim. With the help of Richard Strauss, he obtained a teaching position in Berlin, and lived for a time in two cities. In 1904, Alban Berg and Anton Webern began studying with Schoenberg, and this largely determined their future artistic careers.
Around 1906, through much experimentation, Schoenberg came to the conclusion that tonality should be abandoned. He created new methods of music-making and composition involving atonality. In the subsequent period of "free atonality" from 1907 to 1916, he composed the monodrama "Reason", "Five Orchestral Pieces", "Pierrot Lunaire" and other works.
In 1933, due to the rise of National Socialism in Germany, Schoenberg was expelled from the country and emigrated to the USA, in 1941 he took American citizenship and taught at the University of California at Los Angeles until 1944. The works of this period demonstrate the composer's ever-increasing skill and freedom in the use of the 12-tone method.
Although Schoenberg was never accepted by the general public, he nevertheless had a significant influence on 20th century music, being the founder of the New Viennese School of Composition.
Alfred Garrievich Shnitke (russian: Альфред Гарриевич Шнитке) was a Soviet and Russian avant-garde and postmodernist composer, music educator and musicologist.
Alfred's father was journalist and Russian-German translator Harry Shnitke, his mother was German teacher Maria Vogel, and Russian and German were spoken in the house. In 1946-1948 he lived with his family in Vienna, where he learned to play the piano and compose. From 1948 he lived in the Moscow region, then in Moscow. In 1953 Shnitke graduated from the conducting and choir department of the Music and Pedagogical College (now the Shnitke Moscow State Institute of Music), and in 1958 from the Tchaikovsky Moscow Conservatory. Between 1961 and 1972 he taught instrumentation, score reading, polyphony and composition at the Moscow Conservatoire. From the mid-1970s he appeared as a pianist, performing his own compositions.
In the early 1960s Shnitke turned his attention to modern compositional techniques, including dodecaphony, became an active supporter of the European musical avant-garde and tried to find his own style. His first significant achievements in this field were Dialogue for cello and seven instrumentalists (1965) and the Second Violin Concerto (1966).
Shnitke wrote more than 200 musical works in various genres, including the operas The Story of Dr. Johann Faust (1983-1994) and Life with an Idiot (1991); and the ballets Labyrinths (1971), Sketches (1971-1985) and Per Gynt (1986). Among his choral works, Requiem (1975) is widely known, as well as Poems of Penitence for a cappella choir (1987) and others. The composer wrote nine symphonies, concertos for violin, viola, cello, piano and other instruments. Shnitke also wrote music for many famous and popular films and cartoons from 1964-1994, as well as for theatrical productions of the main theaters of Russia.
Alfred Shnitke is an Honored Art Worker of the RSFSR, winner of the N.K. Krupskaya State Prize of the RSFSR and the State Prize of the Russian Federation. In 1990 the composer, together with his wife, pianist Irina Kataeva-Shnitke, moved to Germany and received German citizenship, as an exception he was allowed not to renounce his Soviet citizenship. He taught composition at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hamburg, and was elected a member of the West Berlin Academy of Arts, the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, and the Royal Swedish Academy.
Shnitke died in Hamburg from the effects of four strokes, and is buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.
Ean Sibelius, birth name Swedish Johan Julius Christian Sibelius, is a Finnish symphonic composer and a prominent representative of the Finnish national art.
Sibelius was born in a city belonging to the Russian Empire to a family of Finnish Swedes. At the age of about 20, he left Finland to pursue music studies in Berlin and Vienna, before returning to his homeland. Sibelius' first large-scale orchestral work, the Kullervo Symphony ((Kullervo, 1892), created a sensation in his homeland. His next works - En Saga (1892), Karelian Music and Four Legends - established him as Finland's leading national composer working in the Romantic tradition. These were years of patriotic upheaval in Finland, and in recognition of his merit and genius, the Finnish Senate granted Sibelius a lifetime pension.
The composer's main creative achievements relate to orchestral music, including 7 symphonies, symphonic poems and suites. The violin concerto, the orchestral "Sad Waltz" and the choral "Hymn of Finland" are also widely known. Many of Sibelius' compositions are directly or generalized related to Finnish national themes. He is a prominent representative of the "golden age" of Finnish art in the period 1880-1910.
Thomas Simaku is an Albanian and British composer living and working in York.
Simaku graduated from the Albanian State Conservatory of Music in Tirana, before being appointed music director of the Palace of Culture of Permet in southern Albania. In 1991 Simaku moved to England, studied with David Blake at the University of York and earned a doctorate in composition.
Thomas Simaku rose to fame in 1995 when his work Epitaph for String Orchestra was selected by an international jury to participate in the ISCM World Music Days in Germany. It was the first time the music of an Albanian composer was included in this prestigious festival. His works then participated many times in various world music festivals.
In 2000, Simaku was granted British citizenship. He lives in York and teaches composition at the University of York.
Howard While Skempton is a British composer, pianist and accordionist.
From 1967 Skempton studied in London with Cornelius Cardew, who helped him discover a musical language of great simplicity. Skempton and became known for the particular clarity of his musical language. He wrote over 300 works, many of which are miniatures for solo piano or accordion.
Skempton calls his works the "central nervous system" of his oeuvre. They include pieces for solo cello and guitar, Chamber Concerto for fifteen instruments, Concerto for Hardy Gurdy and Percussion, and others. Skempton's first major success came in 1991 with the premiere of his orchestral composition Lento. His orchestral and instrumental works have been recorded by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Bash Ensemble, among others.
In recent years Skempton has increasingly concentrated on vocal and choral music; his choral commissions include works for the BBC Singers and the Belfast Philharmonic Society. He is Professor Emeritus of Music at De Montfort University.
Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German innovative and avant-garde composer, conductor, and musical theorist.
Stockhausen studied at the State Academy of Music in Cologne and the University of Cologne, then in 1952 in Paris with composers Olivier Messiaen and Darius Millau. Returning to Cologne in 1953, he joined the electronic music studio West German Broadcasting (Westdeutscher Rundfunk), of which he was artistic director from 1963 to 1977. Stockhausen created his first electronic music piece in 1953.
In the mid-1950s Stockhausen studied phonetics, acoustics and information theory at the University of Bonn, all of which he used in his musical compositions. From 1953 he began teaching composition in Darmstadt and later organized seminars in Cologne. From 1971 to 1977 he was already professor of composition at the State Academy of Music in Cologne.
Stockhausen used both electronic and traditional instrumentation and supported his approach with rigorous theoretical reasoning and radical innovations in musical notation. He ensured that sounds were equally interesting regardless of the order in which they appeared; random decisions of musical order play an important role in many of his compositions.
Stockhausen lectured and gave concerts with his works throughout Europe and North America. As a creator and theorist of electronic and serial music, he had a significant influence on avant-garde composers of the 1950s and 1980s.
Richard Strauss, full name Richard Georg Strauss, was a German composer of the late Romantic era, a bright representative of German expressionism, and a conductor.
Richard received his first musical education from his father, a virtuoso French horn player at the Munich Opera. The boy was very musical and from the age of six began composing pieces. Growing up, Strauss led a successful career as a conductor of leading orchestras in Germany and Austria. In 1889 in Weimar he conducted the first performance of his symphonic poem Don Juan, which was received with triumph. Strauss was hailed by critics as Wagner's heir and from that moment his career as a composer began.
In 1904, with his singer wife Paulina Maria de Ana, who was an outstanding performer of his songs, Strauss made a concert tour of the United States.
Richard Strauss equally idolized Wolfgang Mozart and Richard Wagner, and much of his work grew out of this reverence. He excelled at writing works for large orchestra, but he was equally successful at subtlety in chamber music. The composer possessed unrivaled descriptive power and the ability to convey psychological detail. This was particularly evident in his operas Guntram, Salome, Elektra and others.
Together with Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss represents the late flowering of German Romanticism, which combined innovative subtleties of orchestration with an innovative harmonic style.
Igor Fedorovich Stravinskii (russian: Игорь Фёдорович Стравинский) was a Russian composer, a citizen of France and the United States. One of the greatest representatives of the world musical culture of the 20th century.
The future composer was born into a creative musical family. Igor Stravinskii's father was an opera singer, soloist of the Mariinsky Theater Fedor Stravinskii, and his mother was a pianist Anna Kholodovskaya. Igor studied music at home, the Stravinskiis were often visited by their friends: composers Caesar Cui and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, critic Vladimir Stasov and writer Fyodor Dostoevsky. For five years from 1902 Igor Stravinsky studied with the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. At the same time he became close to the impresario Sergei Diaghilev and the artists of the "World of Art" association.
Stravinskii 's first works were created under the influence of Rimsky-Korsakov and the French Impressionists, and his music bears a vivid imprint of the Russian cultural tradition. Igor Stravinskii's first ballet, The Firebird, was performed in June 1910 at the Paris Grand Opera House, and he later wrote music for Diaghilev's ballets Petrushka (1911) and Sacred Spring (1913). It was after the premiere of his ballets at Sergei Diaghilev's Russian Seasons in Paris that Stravinskii gained worldwide fame. The sets for his ballets were created by the artists Alexander Benois and Nikolai Roerich, the choreography was prepared by the famous dancers Vaclav Nijinsky and George Balanchine, and the costumes were designed by Coco Chanel herself.
In 1920 Stravinskii moved to France and in 1934 he took French citizenship. In Paris, the composer composed many works that became world-famous. In 1939 Igor Stravinskii moved to the United States and in 1945 he took American citizenship. During this period, he began to turn more to biblical themes and music of the pre-Brahmsian period.
From 1924 Stravinskii also performed as a pianist and conductor of his own works. In 1962, at the invitation of the USSR Ministry of Culture, Igor Stravinsky gave several concerts in Moscow and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg).
Critics believe that in recent years Stravinskii was moving further and further away from the Russian style, but the composer himself believed otherwise. On the basis of Russian folk songs, in 1965 he created a canon for orchestra, "Not a Pine Tree at the Gate Rocked". A year before his death, in 1966, the composer wrote the requiem "Funeral Chants", which he considered to be one of the major works of his life.
Giles Swayne, full name Giles Oliver Cairnes Swayne, is a British composer.
Swayne began composing music at an early age, receiving his musical training at Ampleforth College and the University of Cambridge, and then at the Royal Academy of Music. He wrote a series of relatively small pieces, mostly aimed at children or amateurs, which explored ways of conveying complex musical thought as simply as possible.
Swayne's stylistic approach to virtuosic simplicity is noted in his Symphony for Small Orchestra and Naaotwa Lala, his Mozart chamber opera The Wedding of Cherubino, written in 1984. Many other works in various genres followed, including "Silent Land" for cello and 40-part choir, Symphony No. 1 - "Small World," String Quartet No. 4 and others.
Rabindranath Tagore was a South Asian Bengali polymath who worked as a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter. He reshaped Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of the "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful" poetry of Gitanjali, he became in 1913 the first non-European and the first lyricist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tagore's poetic songs were viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal. He was a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. Referred to as "the Bard of Bengal", Tagore was known by sobriquets: Gurudev, Kobiguru, Biswakobi.
Luís Tinoco is a Portuguese composer and producer of new music programs on radio.
Tinoco studied at the Escuela Superior de Musica de Lisboa, then at the Royal Academy of Music in London and at the University of York, where he received his doctorate in composition. Since 2000 he has been working as a freelance composer. He is also the author and producer of new music radio programs for Antena 2/RTP and lectures at the Escuela Superior de Música de Lisboa (EMSL).
Luis Tinoco's major works include the operas Evil Machines and Color Me, as well as the cantata The Wanderings of a Lonely Dreamer.
Tristan Tzara, originally named Sami (Samuel) Rosenstock, was a Romanian and French artist and writer best known as a founding figure of the Dada movement. Born in 1896 in Moinești, Romania, Tzara's influence extends across poetry, performance, and manifesto writing, marking him as a pivotal personality in 20th-century art and culture. His work challenged conventional norms and sought to disrupt the traditional boundaries of art, making him a central figure in the avant-garde community.
Dada, the movement with which Tzara is most closely associated, emerged as a reaction against the horrors of World War I, advocating for irrationality and anti-bourgeois protest. Tzara's contributions, including his manifestos, poetry, and performances, were instrumental in shaping Dada's legacy. His art and writings emphasized the importance of spontaneity and chaos, challenging the status quo and the very definition of art itself. Tzara's approach was not confined to a single medium; he explored poetry, playwriting, and critical theory, leaving a diverse and impactful body of work.
Though Tzara is not widely known for sculpture or painting in the traditional sense, his influence on these and other art forms is undeniable. His work and ideas laid the groundwork for later avant-garde movements, including Surrealism. While specific works of Tzara in museums or galleries were not detailed in the research, his legacy is preserved through the collections of major institutions worldwide, reflecting his enduring impact on the arts.
For collectors and experts in art and antiques, understanding Tzara's contributions provides insight into the radical shifts in culture and art in the early 20th century. His work remains a testament to the power of art to challenge, provoke, and transform. To stay informed about new product sales and auction events related to Tristan Tzara, sign up for our updates. This subscription ensures you're alerted to unique opportunities to engage with the history and legacy of a key figure in modern art.
Mili Weber, full name Berta Emilie Weber, is a Swiss artist, illustrator, writer and musician.
From childhood, Mili showed an interest in nature and painting, with her older half-sister Anna being her first mentor. Mili attended the School of Arts and Crafts in Biel, where she later taught various arts and crafts subjects, she also studied at the Academy of Painting in Munich. From 1914, Mili began painting portraits of children, producing watercolor postcards with motifs from fairy tales and fables, and illustrating books. Her most famous images are of children among magical flowers. In addition to watercolor painting, Weber wrote short stories and composed music.
In 1917, the family moved to a picturesque wooden house built by Mili's brother and father on the edge of the forest near Lake St. Moritz. The most luxurious thing in this house was the organ on which she mused. Mili created her own wonderful world here: the artist decorated the ceilings and walls of the house with her marvelous frescoes of fairy tale scenes. She lived in this house all her life and now it is the home of the Mili Weber Museum, a "fairy house".
Ralph Vaughan Williams was a British composer, organist, conductor and teacher.
Vaughan Williams studied at the Royal College of Music and Trinity College, Cambridge, continued his studies in Berlin and Paris, and worked as a music editor for a magazine. After artillery service during the First World War, he became Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music. All the while he was engaged in folkloristics, collecting English folk tunes and songs, which was reflected in his later work.
In addition to teaching and composing, Williams was active as a conductor, including the Bach and Handel Society choirs.
Vaughan Williams' legacy is extensive: he composed six operas, three ballets, nine symphonies including the London Symphony, cantatas and oratorios, works for piano, organ and chamber ensembles, arrangements of folk songs and many other works. Vaughan Williams managed to break away from German traditions and create a truly national, English tradition in the creation of classical music. He is one of the founders of the new English school of composition - the so-called "English musical renaissance".