He later was kicked at the age of seventeen out of the choir because he’s amazing voice had matured and he could no longer sing the higher notes. He tried everything he could to make a living after this event from composing to free-lance musician. At age twenty-nine Haydn entered the Eszterhaza family (a wealthy aristocrat family). The Eszterhaza family employed Haydn to be their personal composer and write them pieces when they pleased. Haydn spent almost thirty years there.
Bach was trained to be a musician from the time he was a young child. At fifteen he left his brother's home and moved to another town, where he played the violin and organ to support himself in school. When he was eighteen, he became the organist for a church not far outside of his hometown. He left this church at twenty-three and married his cousin Barbara. In 1708, Bach became a court organist in Weimar.
Vienna recognized Beethoven as a great pianist and he became very popular. In 1795, he wrote his first works with opus numbers which were the three piano trios. He supported himself by giving lessons, selling his works, and gifts from aristocratic patrons. This was very unusual for musicians of his time because they normally joined the church and became clergy to gain income. In 1801 Beethoven started loosing his hearing.
This era gave birth to some of the most popular and distinguished pieces of art from all of western civilization. In the movie Amadeus, Mozart is depicted as a bit of an eccentric composer. The movie follows him through his childhood when he wrote his first symphonies, up until his abrupt death. The movie shows a human side to the composer that you cannot gain simply by listening to his music. It shows how he struggled while he was alive to earn for his family and profit off of his music.
“The King of Swing: Benny Goodman and his Lasting Influences” Known as the “King of Swing”, Benny Goodman used his love of jazz and classical music to propel a career that spanned nearly six decades and drove jazz varieties to unprecedented levels of popularity. His influences on music included the introduction of the Swing Era, the propulsion of Bebop, and the commission of some of the greatest classical clarinet compositions of all time. Yet Goodman was more than a musician, and his desire to achieve perfection led him to break racial barriers in the music scene at a time when the nation was deeply divided by color. Born to a large, poverty stricken family in 1909, Benny Goodman first discovered the clarinet at age 10 (“Benny Goodman”, 2011). Two years later, while playing onstage at a small regional show, he caught the ear of bandleader Ben Pollack and was given a spot in Pollack’s band.
Antonio Lucio Vivaldi Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was born on March 4, 1678 in Venice, Italy, and died on July 28, 1741, in Vienna, Austria. Vivaldi was an Italian music composer who lived during a period of art commonly known as the Baroque era. His father, a barber and a talented violinist at Saint Mark's Cathedral had helped him in trying a career in music and made him enter the Cappella di San Marco orchestra. Vivaldi's health was a problem during his childhod with a form of asthma. This did not prevent him from learning to play the violin, composing or taking part in musical activities, but it did stop him from playing wind instruments.
He played so well that he was sent to study in Vienna, Austria, under Carl Czerny. Unable to afford Czerny's expensive fees he became a student of Anton Halm. After a success in the first public concert in Vienna at the age of 15, his father undertook a concert tour through Hungary,
Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner stretched the limits of music and stood among the elite composers of this great age of musical accomplishment. Franz Liszt (1811-1886) was born in a small village in Doborjan, Hungary. Franz came from a musical background. His father worked, as Hadyn once did, at the Esterhazy estate. Franz was like Mozart in that he was somewhat of a child prodigy.
Bing Crosby was one of the most influential singers of the time, and from 1926 to 1977, Crosby was the number one best selling artist across the USA. Crosby was a very talented man. He could sing, dance, and act, which put him into a lot of movies. But his best known movie is “White Christmas”, where two WWII army friends that now have a big singing career happen to meet the girls of their dreams, auditioning them to sing the song “Sisters”. Through a crazy scheme, the four travel up to Vermont to see the snow at Christmas.
It became widely believed that Salieri was in fact in awe of Mozart’s musical performances. One performance in particular that he [Salieri] enjoyed was The Magic Flute. Oddly enough, two weeks after he attended this performance, Mozart was dead. Although Salieri seemed to have a newfound adoration for Mozart, it was widely known that he and Mozart had been rivals for a decade or so. The second source for the poisoning theory was a biography of Franz Xaver Niemetschek, first published in Prague in 1798.