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a German-British Baroque composer, famous for his operas, oratorios, and concertos. His works include Messiah, Water Music, and Music for the Royal Fireworks. He was strongly influenced by the great composers of the Italian Baroque and the middle-German polyphonic choral tradition.

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a large musical composition including an orchestra, a choir, and soloists. Although similar in form, there are several key differences between oratorios and operas. Opera is musical theatre, while oratorio is strictly a concert piece. Also, in an oratorio there is generally little or no interaction between the characters, and no props or elaborate costumes. A particularly important difference is in the typical subject matter of the text. Opera tends to deal with history and mythology, whereas the plot of an oratorio often deals with sacred topics.

Franz Joseph Haydn

(31 March 1732 – 31 May 1809)

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an Austrian composer, one of the most prolific and prominent composers of the Classical period. He is often called the "Father of the Symphony" and "Father of the String Quartet" because of his important contributions to these forms. He was also instrumental in the development of the piano trio and in the evolution of sonata form.

Scott Joplin

(c. July 1867 and January 1868 – April 1, 1917)

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an American composer and pianist. He achieved fame for his unique ragtime compositions, and was dubbed the "King of Ragtime." During his brief career, Joplin wrote 44 original ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, and two operas. One of his first pieces, the "Maple Leaf Rag", became ragtime's first and most influential hit, and has been recognized as the archetypal rag.

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a 19th century Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist and teacher. Liszt became renowned throughout Europe during the 19th century for his great skill as a performer. As a composer, Liszt was one of the most prominent representatives of the "Neudeutsche Schule" ("New German School"). He left behind an extensive and diverse body of work, in which he influenced his forward-looking contemporaries and anticipated some 20th-century ideas and trends. Some of his most notable contributions were the invention of the symphonic poem, developing the concept of thematic transformation as part of his experiments in musical form and making radical departures in harmony.

symphonic poem

or tone poem

Gustav Mahler

(7 July 1860 – 18 May 1911)

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a late-Romantic Austrian-Bohemian composer and one of the leading conductors of his generation. As a composer, he acted as a bridge between the 19th century Austro-German tradition and the modernism of the early 20th century, particularly for his vast symphonies and his symphonic song cycle, Das Lied von der Erde. While in his lifetime his status as a conductor was established beyond question, his own music gained wide popularity only after periods of relative neglect which included a ban on its performance in much of Europe during the Nazi era.

Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy

or Felix Mendelssohn

(3 February 1809 – 4 November 1847)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

(27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791)

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a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music. He is among the most enduringly popular of classical composers.

Mozart learned voraciously from others and developed a brilliance and maturity of style that encompassed the light and graceful along with the dark and passionate. His influence on subsequent Western art music is profound.

Jacques Offenbach

(20 June 1819 – 5 October 1880)

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a German-born French composer and cellist of the Romantic era and one of the originators of the operetta form. Of German-Jewish ancestry, he was one of the most influential composers of popular music in Europe in the 19th century, and many of his works remain in the repertory.

Offenbach's numerous operettas, such as Orpheus in the Underworld and La belle Hélène, were extremely popular in both France and the English-speaking world during the 1850s and 1860s. They combined political and cultural satire with witty grand opera parodies. Offenbach's fully operatic masterpiece, Les contes d'Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann), composed at the end of his career, has become the most familiar of Offenbach's works in major opera houses.

Johann Pachelbel

(September 1, 1653 – March 9, 1706)

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a German Baroque composer, organist and teacher, who brought the south German organ tradition to its peak. He composed a large body of sacred and secular music, and his contributions to the development of the chorale prelude and fugue have earned him a place among the most important composers of the middle Baroque era. 

Pachelbel is best known for the Canon in D, the only canon he wrote. In addition to the canon, his most well-known works include the Chaconne in F minor, the Toccata in E minor for organ, and the Hexachordum Apollinis, a set of keyboard variations.

Niccolò Paganini

(27 October 1782 – 27 May 1840)

Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev

(27 April 1891 – 5 March 1953)

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a Russian composer, pianist and conductor who mastered numerous musical genres and is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century.

Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini

(22 December 1858 – 29 November 1924)

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an Italian composer whose operas, including La bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, and Turandot, are among the most frequently performed in the standard repertoire. Some of his arias, such as "O mio babbino caro" from Gianni Schicchi, "Che gelida manina" from La bohème, and "Nessun dorma" from Turandot, have become part of popular culture.

Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff

(1 April 1873 – 28 March 1943)

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a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor. Rachmaninoff is widely considered one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, one of the last great representatives of Romanticism in Russian classical music. Early influences of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and other Russian composers gave way to a thoroughly personal idiom that included a pronounced lyricism, expressive breadth, structural ingenuity, and a tonal palette of rich, distinctive orchestral colors.

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a French composer of Impressionist music known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects.

Ravel's piano compositions, such as Jeux d'eau, Miroirs, Le tombeau de Couperin and Gaspard de la nuit, demand considerable virtuosity from the performer, and his orchestral music, including Daphnis et Chloé and his arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, uses a variety of sound and instrumentation. Ravel is perhaps known best for his orchestral work Boléro (1928).

Gioachino Antonio Rossini 

(February 29, 1792 – November 13, 1868)

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an Italian composer who wrote 39 operas as well as sacred music, chamber music, songs, and some instrumental and piano pieces. His best-known operas include the Italian comedies Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville) and La cenerentola and the French-language epics Moïse et Pharaon and Guillaume Tell (William Tell). A tendency for inspired, song-like melodies is evident throughout his scores. Until his retirement in 1829, Rossini had been the most popular opera composer in history.

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a play in four acts by Eugene O'Neill. Anna Christie is the story of a former prostitute who falls in love, but runs into difficulty in turning her life around.

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Ernest J. Gaines' eighth novel, published in 1993. This story is about a teacher who helps Jefferson, a death row inmate who has been falsely convicted of murder, face his electrocution with dignity.

Ernest James Gaines

(born January 15, 1933)

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an American author. His 1993 novel, A Lesson Before Dying, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Some of his other works include The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and A Gathering of Old Men.

Tennessee Williams

(March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983)

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an American writer, primarily of plays. He received many of the top theatrical awards for his works of drama.
He won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948 and for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955. In addition, The Glass Menagerie and The Night of the Iguana received New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards. His 1952 play The Rose Tattoo received the Tony Award for best play.

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an accidental or deliberate inconsistency in some chronological arrangement, especially a chronological misplacing of persons, events, objects, or customs in regard to each other.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard

(5 April 1732 – 22 August 1806)

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a French painter and printmaker whose late Rococo manner was distinguished by remarkable facility, exuberance, and hedonism. One of the most prolific artists active in the last decades of the Ancien Régime, Fragonard produced more than 550 paintings, of which only five are dated. Among his most popular works are genre paintings conveying an atmosphere of intimacy and veiled eroticism.

Rococo

or Late Baroque

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an 18th century style which developed as Baroque artists gave up their symmetry and became increasingly ornate, florid, and playful. The word Rococo is seen as a combination of the French rocaille, meaning stone, and coquilles, meaning shell, due to reliance on these objects as motifs of decoration.

Paul Cézanne

(19 January 1839 – 22 October 1906)

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a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism.

Cézanne's work demonstrates a mastery of design, colour, tone, composition and draughtsmanship. His often repetitive, sensitive and exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognizable. He used planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields. The paintings convey Cézanne's intense study of his subjects.

Jacques-Louis David

(30 August 1748 – 29 December 1825)

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a highly influential French painter in the Neoclassical style, considered to be the preeminent painter of the era. In the 1780s his cerebral brand of history painting marked a change in taste away from Rococo frivolity toward a classical austerity and severity, heightened feeling chiming with the moral climate of the final years of the ancien régime.

David later became an active supporter of the French Revolution and later aligned himself with yet another political regime, that of Napoleon I. It was at this time that he developed his 'Empire style', notable for its use of warm Venetian colours. 

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret

 or Le Corbusier

(October 6, 1887 – August 27, 1965)

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a Swiss architect, designer, urbanist, writer and painter, famous for being one of the pioneers of what now is called Modern architecture or the International style. He was a pioneer in studies of modern high design and was dedicated to providing better living conditions for the residents of crowded cities.

Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud

(20 October 1854 – 10 November 1891)

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a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21. As part of the decadent movement, Rimbaud influenced modern literature, music and art. He was known to have been a libertine and a restless soul. His greatest poem is “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”).

Camille Pissarro

(10 July 1830 – 13 November 1903)

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a Danish Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born in the Virgin Islands. His importance resides in his contributions to both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, as he was the only artist to exhibit in both forms.

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a triad consisting of two minor thirds above the root — if built on C, a diminished chord would have a C, an E♭ and a G♭. It resembles a minor triad with a lowered (flattened) fifth.

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the period in the history of European art music (broadly called classical music) spanning the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods and lasting from about 1600 until about 1900.

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the lengthening or widening of rhythms, melodies, intervals or chords. The opposite is diminution.

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many types of art that were in the cultures of ancient societies, such as those of ancient China, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome. There are few remaining examples, with early art often favouring drawing over colour. Work has been found recently in tombs, Egyptian frescoes, pottery and metalwork.

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relating to or from ancient Roman or Greek architecture and art. Mainly concerned with geometry and symmetry rather than individual expression. The Classical period saw changes in the style and function of sculpture. Poses became more naturalistic, and the technical skill of Greek sculptors in depicting the human form in a variety of poses greatly increased.

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religious art characterised by large domes, rounded arches and mosaics from the eastern Roman Empire in the 4th Century.

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highly religious art beginning in the 5th Century in Western Europe. It was characterised by iconographic paintings illustrating scenes from the bible. Medieval art was produced in many media, and the works that remain in large numbers include sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, stained glass, metalwork and mosaics. Medieval art in Europe grew out of the artistic heritage of the Roman Empire and the iconographic traditions of the early Christian church.

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the prevailiant style between the 12th century and the 16th century in Europe. Mainly an architectural movement, Gothic was characterised by its detailed ornamentation most noticeably the pointed archways and elaborate rib vaulting.

First developed in France, Gothic was intended as a solution to the inadequacies of Romanesque architecture. It allowed for cathedrals to be built with thinner walls and it became possible to introduce stained glass windows instead of traditional mosaic decorations. The term was also used to describe sculpture and painting that demonstrated a greater degree of naturalism.

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a movement that began in Italy in the 14th century and the term, literally meaning rebirth, describes the revival of interest in the artistic achievements of the Classical world. Initially in a literary revival Renaissance was determined to move away from the religion-dominated Middle Ages and to turn its attention to the plight of the individual man in society. Individual expression and worldly experience became two of the main themes of Renaissance art.

Some of the key artists of the period include Leonardo da Vinci, the archetypal Renaissance man;  Michelangelo and Raphael, famous for producing works regarded for centuries as embodying the classical notion of perfection; painters Titian and Botticelli; and architects Alberti, Brunelleschi, and Bramante.

Francesco Petrarca

or Petrarch

(July 20, 1304 – July 19, 1374)

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an Italian scholar, poet and one of the earliest Renaissance humanists. Petrarch is often called the "Father of Humanism." His sonnets were admired and imitated throughout Europe during the Renaissance and became a model for lyrical poetry. Petrarch was also known for being one of the first people to refer to the Dark Ages. His most famous works are his Italian poems Canzoniere ("Songbook") and the Trionfi ("Triumphs").

Tiziano Vecelli

or Tiziano Vecellio

or Titian

(c. 1488 – 27 August 1576)

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an Italian painter, the most important member of the 16th-century Venetian school. Titian was one of the most versatile of Italian painters, equally adept with portraits, landscape backgrounds, and mythological and religious subjects. His painting methods, particularly in the application and use of color, would exercise a profound influence not only on painters of the Italian Renaissance, but on future generations of Western art.