Learn more about classical music Get to know the composers

Who are the composers behind the most famous classical masterpieces? Take the opportunity to get to know some of them and listen to the music - maybe it will be the start of a lifelong friendship.

Who are the composers behind the most famous classical masterpieces? Take the opportunity to get to know some of them and listen to the music – maybe it will be the start of a lifelong friendship.

1700
1800
Illustration av Clara Schumann som lutar huvudet i sin hand, med lila blommor på rosa botten som bakgrund. 1819-1896

Clara Schumann

She was the child prodigy who played piano concertos by heart. She wrote colorful compositions and taught the first female composition students. And had it not been for Clara Schumann, Brahms’ music would not have been so full of love.

Get to know Clara Schumann
1833-1897

Johannes Brahms

In the past, people talked about the music’s three big “B’s”: Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. They became white plaster busts and placed on the piano in every middle-class home, or even on a pedestal. Far away from a Hamburger guy who played the piano at cheap harbor restaurants where sailors and prostitutes flocked.

Get to know Brahms
1839-1927

Laura Netzel

What was a woman who wanted to publish her music or literature to do in the late 19th century? Well, get a gender neutral pseudonym. Today, N.Lago gets her real name on the programs.

Get to know Netzel
1841-1929

Elfrida Andrée

Elfrida Andrée became Sweden’s foremost and most successful female composer of her time. A true pioneer, and a people educator. Gothenburg’s music lovers have a lot to thank her for.

Get to know Andrée
1843-1907

Edvard Grieg

There is a weightlessness in Grieg’s music that makes it go straight in. He had a divine sense of melody and as a skilled craftsman could create an enchanted mood or a sensual intoxication in just a few moments, with seemingly simple means. The Norwegian with the hat, the drooping mustache and the sad eyes.

Get to know Grieg
1864-1949

Richard Strauss

Richard Strauss was a natural talent and with a father in the Main Opera Orchestra in Munich, there were also the external conditions. The composer often sat in the opera darkness where he got the musical experiences of his life when Wagner’s huge works were staged, magnificent both in terms of scenography, performance and musical richness of sound. This is where his taste for “extra everything” was born!

Get to know R Strauss
1865-1957

Jean Sibelius

This tough Finn is often associated with the forests and granite cliffs of Finnish nature, but he was just as much a world-famous socialite. Jean Sibelius’ real name was Johan, called Janne, and the surname has its origins in Sibbe farm, owned by the family for generations. That it became Jean is because Sibelius inherited a box of business cards from an uncle with this name.

Get to know Sibelius
1871-1927

Wilhelm Stenhammar

In Sweden, Wilhelm Stenhammar has always been regarded as a composer on a large scale. Alongside Hugo Alfvén, he is the strongest candidate as a national Swedish equivalent of the Norwegians’ Grieg, the Finns’ Sibelius and the Danes’ Nielsen. In addition, he was chief conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and one of the leading Swedish pianists of the time.

Get to know Stenhammar
illustration av kompositören Igor Stravinsky 1882-1971

Igor Stravinsky

On the space probes Voyager 1 and 2 there are gold discs with the best music that planet Earth has to offer: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart – and Stravinsky. An honor well deserved by the composer who changed classical music with his originality and finesse.

Get to know Stravinsky
1900