32 articles
Adam de la Halle
Adam de la Halle, also known as Adam le Bossu, was a 13th-century French trouvère, poet, and composer who wrote Le Jeu de Robin et Marion.
Agostino Steffani
Agostino Steffani (1655–1728) was an Italian composer, Catholic priest, and diplomat who served as Kapellmeister at Hanover and ended his career as a bishop in Germany.
Anna Amalia, Abbess of Quedlinburg
Anna Amalia of Prussia (1723–1787), sister of Frederick the Great, princess-abbess of Quedlinburg from 1755, composer of Der Tod Jesu, and creator of the Amalien-Bibliothek music collection.
Antonio Vivaldi
Antonio Lucio Vivaldi (1678-1741), the Red Priest, Venetian Baroque composer and violinist of the Ospedale della Pietà; his concertos fixed ritornello form, and The Four Seasons (Op. 8, 1725) became his signature work.
Arcangelo Corelli
Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713), Italian Baroque violinist and composer active in Rome under patrons Christina of Sweden and Cardinals Pamphili and Ottoboni; six opuses of sonatas and concerti grossi, including the Christmas Concerto, founded the modern violin school.
Bernart de Ventadorn
Bernart de Ventadorn (Bernart de Ventador) was a twelfth-century Occitan troubadour, renowned for his cansos on courtly love and his song Can vei la lauzeta mover.
Bertran de Born
Bertran de Born (ca. 1140–before 1215), Occitan troubadour and lord of Hautefort castle in Périgord, wrote about 40–48 poems, mostly political war sirventes; only Rassa, tan creis survives with music. Dante damned him in Inferno XXVIII as a sower of discord.
Carlo Gesualdo
Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa (1566-1613), Italian late-Renaissance composer famed for extreme chromatic madrigals and Tenebrae Responsoria, and for killing his wife Maria d'Avalos and her lover in 1590.
Claudio Monteverdi
Claudio Monteverdi was an Italian composer, born in Cremona in 1567, who carried music from the Renaissance into the Baroque as the first great opera composer.
Domenico Scarlatti
Domenico Scarlatti (Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti, 1685–1757), Italian Baroque composer and keyboard virtuoso, son of Alessandro Scarlatti; music master to Maria Barbara of Portugal and Spain and composer of 555 binary-form keyboard sonatas, the K-numbered catalog.
Georg Philipp Telemann
Georg Philipp Telemann (1681–1767), German Baroque composer of the mixed taste, Kantor of the Johanneum and music director of Hamburg's five main churches from 1721; over 3,600 works, first German music periodical, self-publisher, friend of Bach and Handel.
Giovanni Battista Pergolesi
Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, also known as Giambattista Pergolesi, was an Italian composer from Jesi whose comic intermezzo La serva padrona (1733) became a model for Italian opera.
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, also known as Pierluigi da Palestrina, was an Italian Renaissance composer of Roman polyphony who spent his career at Rome's basilicas and wrote over 100 Masses.
Gregorio Allegri
Gregorio Allegri, Roman priest, singer, and composer (c. 1582–1652), contralto of the Sistine Chapel from 1629; famed for the 1638 nine-voice Miserere, orally ornamented in Holy Week and transcribed by Mozart in 1770.
Guillaume de Machaut
Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300–1377) was a French poet and composer of the ars nova, canon of Reims, who wrote the first complete polyphonic Mass by a single composer.
Henry Purcell
Henry Purcell (c. 1659–1695), English Baroque composer and organist of Westminster Abbey and the Chapel Royal; wrote Dido and Aeneas, King Arthur, The Fairy Queen, about 800 works; died at 36, buried in the Abbey.
Jean-Baptiste Lully
Jean-Baptiste Lully (Giovanni Battista Lulli, 1632–1687), Italian-born founder of French opera, surintendant of Louis XIV's music, creator of the tragédie en musique with Quinault, holder of the 1672 opera monopoly, died of gangrene after a conducting-cane injury.
Jean-Philippe Rameau
Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764), Dijon-born French Baroque composer and theorist, master of tragédie lyrique after Lully; author of the 1722 Traité de l'harmonie and operas including Hippolyte et Aricie, Les Indes galantes, and Les Boréades.
Johann Pachelbel
Johann Pachelbel (baptized 1653, Nuremberg; died 1706) was a German Baroque composer and organist of the south German tradition, teacher of Johann Christoph Bach, known for organ chorales, Hexachordum Apollinis, and the Canon in D.
Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), Baroque composer and organist born in Eisenach, died in Leipzig; Thomaskantor 1723–1750, composer of the Brandenburg Concertos, Mass in B minor, Well-Tempered Clavier, and 300+ cantatas, subject of major 19th-century revival.
John Dowland
John Dowland (c. 1563–1626), English Renaissance composer and lutenist, famous for melancholic lute songs (ayres) such as "Flow My Tears" and the pavan set Lachrimae (1604); court lutenist to James I from 1612.
Josquin des Prez
Josquin des Prez (ca. 1450–1521), Franco-Flemish Renaissance composer also called Josquin Des Prés, princeps musicorum, active in Milan, Rome, Ferrara, and Condé-sur-l'Escaut; famed for Missa Pange lingua and Ave Maria, with only 143 of 335 attributed works accepted as authentic.
Léonin
Léonin (Magister Leoninus, c. 1135–1201), Parisian canon, poet, and composer of the Notre-Dame school, credited by Anonymous IV with the Magnus liber organi, the earliest named body of measured two-voice polyphony.
List of Baroque composers
List of Baroque composers: major European art-music composers c. 1600–1750, from Monteverdi, Schütz, and Frescobaldi through Lully, Purcell, Corelli, Vivaldi, Telemann, Rameau, Bach, and Handel, grouped by national style and period phase.
Marin Marais
Marin Marais (1656-1728), French viola da gamba virtuoso and composer, Ordinaire de la Chambre du Roy 1679-1725, five books of Pièces de viole, four operas including Alcyone, pupil of Sainte-Colombe and Lully.
Notker the Stammerer
Notker the Stammerer, Latin Notker Balbulus, was a Benedictine monk, poet, and composer at the Abbey of St. Gall in Switzerland from about 840 until his death in 912.
Oswald von Wolkenstein
Oswald von Wolkenstein (1376/77–1445) was a Tyrolean poet, composer, and diplomat from South Tyrol, called the last of the Minnesänger; his 131 songs include 37 polyphonic settings.
Thomas Tallis
Thomas Tallis (c. 1505–November 1585) was an English Renaissance composer and Chapel Royal Gentleman serving four Tudor monarchs; known for the 40-voice motet Spem in alium, Parker's 1567 psalm tunes, and the 1575 Tallis–Byrd music printing patent.
Tomaso Albinoni
Tomaso Albinoni, also known as Tomaso Giovanni Albinoni, was an Italian Baroque composer born in Venice in 1671, a concerto pioneer remembered for the Adagio in G minor, a famous work he did not write.
Trouvère
A trouvère was a poet-composer of northern France who wrote courtly songs in Old French from the mid-twelfth to the mid-fourteenth century, adapting the forms of the Occitan troubadours.