Johannes Brahms has one of the most mythologised biographies in classical music. He’s remembered as a scarred teenager in brothels – a friendless conservative shackled to old forms – a bearded misanthrope who couldn’t stand women. Some of that image

Late in life, Giuseppe Verdi called Alzira, a musical setting of a drama by Voltaire from 1845, “downright ugly.” The premiere performance on 12 August 1845 at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples was only a partial success, and subsequent

All seven careers on this list stopped for years, sometimes decades – for wildly different reasons. Vladimir Horowitz suffered from nervous exhaustion. Leon Fleisher and Murray Perahia lost the use of their hands. Ivo Pogorelić withdrew from the stage after

Camille Saint-Saëns, born on 9 October 1835, was one of the greatest child prodigies in music, and Franz Liszt famously called him the world’s greatest organist. However, he was also a composer, pianist, conductor, expert in ancient music, playwright, poet,

Tōru Takemitsu, born on 8 October 1930, freely admits that his first real composition teacher was the radio. Nursing an extended illness, he listened to as much Western music as possible, broadcast on Armed Forces Radio. His first mentor was

Dmitri Shostakovich wrote several of his greatest works knowing they might never be performed. Between 1936 and 1949, he composed a symphony, a violin concerto, a song cycle, and a string quartet that were too dangerous to premiere under Stalin.

In 1995, Pekka Kuusisto became the first Finnish violinist to win the International Jean Sibelius Violin Competition. He also received a special prize for the best performance of the Sibelius Violin Concerto. One of the most versatile and distinctive musicians

The five composers here represent two different kinds of silencing by the Nazis. Mendelssohn and Mahler were already dead by the time Hitler came to power. Both had converted to Christianity, but that meant nothing to a regime that measured