Classical music is famous for its prodigies and young geniuses.

However, more than a few composers have defied this stereotype. Many composers continued to write, perform, and inspire well past the age when most people retire. Some of them even lived for over a century!

Today, we’re looking at the stories of eight of the oldest composers to ever live.

Grete von Zieritz – 1899-2001; 102 years old

Grete von Zieritz: Zehn Japanische Lieder

Grete von Zieritz was born in Vienna in 1899 into a noble family. She began studying piano at the age of six and gave her first public performance at eight. Without any composition training, she wrote her first Romance for violin and piano at thirteen.

In 1917, she moved to Berlin to study with Liszt‘s student Martin Krause, and between 1919 and 1921, she taught at the Stern Conservatory, a private music school in Berlin.

Grete von Zieritz

In 1921, her work Zehn Japanische Lieder (“Ten Japanese Songs”) received its premiere, to rave reviews. It was so successful, she decided to become a composer.

To get by, she worked as a music teacher and appeared as a touring pianist, but her heart was always in writing music. In 1928, she won the Mendelssohn state prize for composition.

By the time of the Nazi takeover, her reputation was such that she became one of the twelve Austrian women composers allowed to work professionally.

Her career was helped by the fact that her style was tonal and traditional: a language that was in vogue with Nazi officials…but which would fall out of favour with European and American modernists after the end of World War II.

She held fast to that personal style until the end of her composing career. She was still writing music in her late eighties!

Elliott Carter – 1908-2012; 103 years old

Elliott Carter: Piano Sonata

Elliott Carter was born in New York in 1908. He took piano lessons as a boy but became especially interested in music and composition in his teen years.

In the 1920s and 1930s, he studied English and music at Harvard, then went to Paris to study under composition teacher Nadia Boulanger.

Elliott Carter

He taught at a number of colleges, but spent the longest time at the Juilliard School in New York City. Over the decades, thanks to both his teaching and his compositions, he became a fixture in twentieth-century American classical music.

He composed five string quartets, around a dozen concertos, and multiple works for piano, voice, and orchestra, among many other works.

He was still composing when he was over a hundred years old.

Jenő Takács – 1902-2005; 103 years old

Jenő Takács: Tarantella zongorára és zenekarra

Jenő Takács was born in the town of Siegendorf on the present-day Austria / Hungary border in 1902. He studied in Vienna, and as a teenager, toured as a pianist.

In the 1920s, he met fellow composer Béla Bartók. They became friends, and you can hear in their music how they were both inspired by similar influences.

Jenő Takács

During his career, he taught in Cairo, the Philippines, Switzerland, and Cincinnati. After he retired from teaching, he moved from America back to Siegendorf, where he lived for the next thirty-five years.

In 1982, he wrote a memoir of his friendship with Bartók. He continued composing and arranging into his mid-90s.

Margaret Ruthven Lang – 1867-1972; 104 years old

Margaret Ruthven Lang: A Spring Idyll, Op. 33

Margaret Ruthven Lang was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1867. She was the daughter of two musicians and grew up in a musical household. Many of the great touring artists of the late nineteenth century traveling through Boston, visited her home when she was young.

She grew into a promising pianist and composer. She went abroad to study in the late 1880s and early 1890s, then returned to America and studied with various members of the Second New England School.

Margaret Ruthven Lang

In 1893, when her “Dramatic Overture” was performed by the Boston Symphony, it became the first work by a woman composer ever played by a major American orchestra. (Amy Beach’s Gaelic Symphony would become the first symphony in 1896.)

Unfortunately for curious future generations, Lang was a perfectionist, and she destroyed work she wasn’t happy with, including her orchestral work. Her Dramatic Overture is one of the pieces that was lost.

She wrote her final composition in 1919, the year she turned 52.

Afterwards, although she ceased composing, she continued supporting the Boston Symphony. She ended up being the longest consecutive subscriber to the Boston Symphony Orchestra, retaining her seat for a mind-boggling 91 years.

Matilde Capuis – 1913-2017; 104 years old

Matilde Capuis: Tre Momenti

Matilde Capuis was born in Naples in 1913. She studied music at the Venice Conservatory and the Florence Conservatory.

She later taught at the Turin Conservatory, becoming the head of theory and composition there.

Matilde Capuis

She was also in a piano-cello duo with cellist Ugo Attilio Scabia, and one of the recordings they made together was her cello sonata.

When she died, she was 104 years old.

Leo Ornstein – 1895-2002; around 106 years old

Documentary on Leo Ornstein

Leo Ornstein was born in present-day Ukraine in the mid-1890s (the exact date is unknown).

He was a piano prodigy who studied at both the St. Petersburg Conservatory and Moscow Conservatory.

Leo Ornstein

In order to escape pogroms, the family fled to the United States. Ornstein was eleven years old. He began studying at New York’s Institute of Musical Art, predecessor to the Juilliard School, and made his debut in 1911, at the age of sixteen.

He began composing highly dissonant works, not exactly knowing where they came from: “I really doubted my sanity at first. I simply said, what is that? It was so completely removed from any experience I ever had.”

He and his music gained a reputation for what was termed “ultra-modernism.”

However, when his fame was at its peak, he began losing interest in music. He gave his last public performance in the early 1930s.

He and his wife founded a music school in Philadelphia, but when they retired in the 1950s, it was closed, and they relocated to a trailer park in Texas.

Decades later, in the 1980s, he returned to music. He wrote his seventh piano sonata at the age of 92 and his eighth piano sonata at 94.

Leo Ornstein – Piano Sonata No. 8

He died in February 2002.

Roy Douglas – 1907-2015; 107 years old

Roy Douglas: Cantilena

Roy Douglas was born in Kent in 1907. He began playing piano by ear at the age of five. His health was poor as a child, so he spent a lot of time on the piano bench, experimenting.

In 1927, he began performing with the Folkestone Municipal Orchestra. After positions were cut, he moved to London and began performing on keyboard and percussion with the London Symphony Orchestra.

During this time, he began writing music in earnest. Much of it was performed on the BBC.

Roy Douglas

He also had a knack for orchestration. In fact, his orchestration of the Chopin piano works used in the ballet Les Sylphides was written in just nine days, and the income he earned from it helped to support him for the rest of his life.

Over the course of his career, he arranged the famous “Warsaw Concerto” by Richard Addinsell, partnered with William Walton to correct his scores, and copied out manuscripts for Ralph Vaughan Williams.

He died in 2015 at the age of 107.

Cecilia Seghizzi – 1908-2019; 111 years old

Cecilia Seghizzi arr.Matteo Firmi: Tre Colori (2019)

Here’s the oldest composer on our list: Cecilia Seghizzi, who was a remarkable 111 years old when she died in 2019.

She was born in the town of Gorizia, a town in present-day northern Italy, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Cecilia Seghizzi

When she was a child, she and her family were displaced by World War I and lived in a refugee camp. Her composer father began a music school there, where she began her early musical studies.

As a young woman, she studied violin and composition and graduated with honours from the Milan Conservatory.

Unfortunately, her family did not support her becoming a professional musician. She became one anyway and married a pianist and recital partner named Luigi Campolieti.

She eventually returned to her hometown to stay near family…and stifled her own career to do so. She said of the return, cryptically: “My return completely changed the direction of my career; there is nothing else to say.” She began focusing on teaching.

In the 1950s, she began conducting a choir, delving into her newfound fascination with polyphonic music from the Renaissance and Baroque Eras.

She also continued to compose, eventually writing around 130 works, many of which remain unpublished today.

She was also a talented painter.

At the time of her death at the age of 111, she was believed to be the oldest composer alive.

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