Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer. Schubert already died before his 32nd birthday, but was extremely prolific during his lifetime. His output consists of over six hundred secular vocal works (mainly Lieder), seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music and a large body of chamber and piano music. Appreciation of his music while he was alive was limited to a relatively small circle of admirers in Vienna, but interest in his work increased significantly in the decades following his death. Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms and other 19th-century composers discovered and championed his works. Today, Schubert is ranked among the greatest composers of the late Classical and early Romantic eras and is one of the most frequently performed composers of the early nineteenth century.
It was in the genre of the Lied that Schubert made his most indelible mark. Prior to Schubert's influence, Lieder tended toward a strophic, syllabic treatment of text, evoking the folksong qualities engendered by the stirrings of Romantic nationalism. Schubert expanded the potentialities of the genre like no other composer before.

Wieniawski was a Polish composer. Even though he came from a jewish family, his father converted to catholocism. Wieniawski's violin talent was quickly discovere, in 1843 he attended the conservatory of Paris at the age of 8. After he graduated, Wieniawski went on tour giving many recitals. He was often accompanied by his brother, Józef. In 1847, he published his first work, the Grand Caprice Fantastique.

On invitation by Anton Rubinstein, Wieniawski moved to St. Petersburg where he stayed until 1872. There, he taught a large number of violin students, led the Russian Musical Society's orchestra and string quartet. Fro, 1872 to 1874, Wieniawski toured throughout the United States together with Rubinstein and in 1875, he replaced Henri Vieuxtemps as a violin teacher at the conservatory of Brussels. In Brussels, his health declined fast, which at one time forced him to stop a performance midway through. He gave his farewell concert in 1879. A year later he died from a heart attack in Moscow.

Joseph Maurice Ravel was a French composer who is often associated with impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as France's greatest living composer.
Born to a music-loving family, Ravel attended France's premier music college, the Paris Conservatoire; he was not well regarded by its conservative establishment, whose biased treatment of him caused a scandal. After leaving the Conservatoire Ravel found his own way as a composer, developing a style of great clarity, incorporating elements of baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz. He liked to experiment with musical form, as in his best-known work, Boléro (1928), in which repetition takes the place of development. He made some orchestral arrangements of other composers' music, of which his 1922 version of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition is the best known.
As a slow and painstaking worker, Ravel composed fewer pieces than many of his contemporaries. Among his works to enter the repertoire are pieces for piano, chamber music, two piano concertos, ballet music, two operas, and eight song cycles; he wrote no symphonies and only one religious work. Many of his works exist in two versions: a first, piano score and a later orchestration. Some of his piano music, such as Gaspard de la nuit (1908), is exceptionally difficult to play, and his complex orchestral works such as Daphnis et Chloé (1912) require skilful balance in performance.

Robert Schumann was a German composer and influential music critic. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest composers of the Romantic era. Schumann left the study of law, intending to pursue a career as a virtuoso pianist. He had been assured by his teacher Friedrich Wieck that he could become the finest pianist in Europe, but a hand injury ended this dream. Schumann then focused his musical energies on composing.
Schumann's published compositions were written exclusively for the piano until 1840; he later composed works for piano and orchestra; many Lieder (songs for voice and piano); four symphonies; an opera; and other orchestral, choral, and chamber works. Works such as Carnaval, Symphonic Studies, Kinderszenen, Kreisleriana, and the Fantasie in C are among his most famous. His writings about music appeared mostly in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (New Journal for Music), a Leipzig-based publication which he jointly founded.
In 1840, Schumann married Friedrich Wieck's daughter Clara, against the wishes of her father, following a long and acrimonious legal battle, which found in favour of Clara and Robert. Clara also composed music and had a considerable concert career as a pianist, the earnings from which, before her marriage, formed a substantial part of her father's fortune.
Schumann suffered from a mental disorder, first manifesting itself in 1833 as a severe melancholic depressive episode, which recurred several times alternating with phases of ‘exaltation’ and increasingly also delusional ideas of being poisoned or threatened with metallic items. After a suicide attempt in 1854, Schumann was admitted to a mental asylum, at his own request, in Endenich near Bonn. Diagnosed with "psychotic melancholia", Schumann died two years later in 1856 without having recovered from his mental illness.

Next to Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók was a third seminal innovator of European art music at the start of the twentieth century. Bartók, too, sought a way out of the deadlock of tonal music around 1900, and he found it in folk music. Initially, he tied in with the nationalistic tradition of Franz Liszt with his tone poem Kossuth, but eventually he found his own voice with the rediscovery of the music of Hungarian peasants. Together with Zoltán Kodály he was one of the first to apply the results of folkloric research into his own compositions. One major difference between him and composers of the 19th century, was that Bartók did not adjust to the system of tonality, but created his own musical idiom from folk music. Because of this, his composition style was flexible to other musical trends, without having to violate his own view points. For example, his two Violin sonates come close to Schoenberg's free expressionism, and after 1926 his music started to show neoclassicistic tendencies, comparable to Stravinsky's music. Bartók was not just interested in Hungarian folk music, but could appreciate musical folklore from all of the Balkan, Turkey and North-Africa as well.

Jules Massenet (1842-1912) was one of the most popular opera composers of his age. He was also influential beyond the French boundaries, primarily to Italian opera composers like Puccini and Mascagni. This popularity was not valued by many critics. They accuse him of just wanting to please the audience; he would have unabashedly indulged in exoticism and would only owe his success to his gift to compose beautiful melodies. This not very flattering image has since been outdated. Massenet, composer of such diverse opera’s as Manon, Werther and Thaïs, did not indulge in blind formula work. He learned the libretto by heart before he started and he composed the music in his mind, as a result of which only few composers could surpass him in the clarity and subtlety of his orchestrations and in the nuances of his text settings. Not just his aria’s, but also his recitatives and arioso passages are enchanting. He was a master in the evocation of the couleur locale and is the composer of immortal melodies like the Méditation from Thaïs for violin and orchestra and the Élégie for cello and orchestra.
(Source: Muziekweb.nl)

Friedrich "Fritz" Kreisler was an Austrian-born violinist and composer. One of the most noted violin masters of his or any other day, and regarded as one of the greatest violin masters of all time, he was known for his sweet tone and expressive phrasing.
Like many great violinists of his generation, he produced a characteristic sound which was immediately recognisable as his own. Although it derived in many respects from the Franco-Belgian school, his style is nonetheless reminiscent of the gemütlich (cozy) lifestyle of pre-war Vienna.

Tchaikovsky is considered as one of the most talented Russian composers of the 19th century. Unlike many other Russian composers of his time, he studied at a conservatory and made the western music theory his own. So, he was not as distrustful of western music as the group of nationalistic composers surrounding Balakirev. Yet, Tchaikovsky sought to express the typical Russian mentality just as much and used many Russian folk songs in his music. He had a good relationship with Balakirev, who helped him with constructive feedback on his first masterpiece, the overture of Romeo and Juliet. At times, Tchaikovsky was emotionally unstable, which has often been attributed to struggles with his homosexuality. His decision to marry proved to be disastrous and plunged him into a deep crisis. Yet, the passionate letters of his fiance, even though they barely knew each other, did inspire him to compose his succesful opera Evgenij Onegin. Tchaikovsky had the wonderful gift of composing the most beautiful, lyric melodies. He had a feeling for creating a certain atmosphere in his music and mastered the art of orchestration. Moreover, he excelled in dance music, which made him the ideal composer for ballet. With his ballets The Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker he brought the genre to a higher level. During his life, he was already a celebrity. He often did tours to conduct his music and in the USA he was welcomed as a star. He died unexpectedly, nine days after the premiere of his incredibly gloomy Sixth Symphony, probably of cholera. Some other highlights of his body of works are his First Piano Concerto, his Violin Concerto and the Rococo-variations.

Gabriel Fauré was a French Romantic composer, organist, pianist and teacher. He was one of the foremost French composers of his generation, and his musical style influenced many 20th-century composers. Among his best-known works are his Pavane, Requiem, Nocturnes for piano and the songs Après un rêve and Clair de lune. Although his best-known and most accessible compositions are generally his earlier ones, Fauré composed many of his most highly regarded works in his later years, in a more harmonically and melodically complex style.
Fauré's music has been described as linking the end of Romanticism with the modernism of the second quarter of the 20th century. When he was born, Chopin was still composing, and by the time of Fauré's death, jazz and the atonal music of the Second Viennese School were being heard. During the last twenty years of his life, he suffered from increasing deafness. In contrast with the charm of his earlier music, his works from this period are sometimes elusive and withdrawn in character, and at other times turbulent and impassioned.

Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninov was a Russian pianist, composer, and conductor of the late-Romantic period, some of whose works are among the most popular in the classical repertoire.
Born into a musical family, Rachmaninov took up the piano at age four. He graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1892 and had composed several piano and orchestral pieces by this time. In 1897, following the critical reaction to his Symphony No. 1, Rachmaninoff entered a four-year depression and composed little until successful therapy allowed him to complete his enthusiastically received Piano Concerto No. 2 in 1901. After the Russian Revolution, Rachmaninov and his family left Russia and resided in the United States, first in New York City. Demanding piano concert tour schedules caused his output as composer to slow tremendously; between 1918 and 1943, he completed just six compositions, including Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Symphony No. 3, and Symphonic Dances. In 1942, Rachmaninov moved to Beverly Hills, California. One month before his death from advanced melanoma, Rachmaninov acquired American citizenship.
Early influences of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev, Mussorgsky, and other Russian composers gave way to a personal style notable for its song-like melodicism, expressiveness and his use of rich orchestral colors.[3] The piano is featured prominently in Rachmaninov's compositional output, and through his own skills as a performer he explored the expressive possibilities of the instrument.