Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart was born on January 27, 1756 in Salzburg, at that time an autonomous city-state with a Prince-Archbishop who provided both temporal and spiritual leadership. Mozart's father, Leopold, was a musician and composer in the Prince-Archbishop's court. Leopold provided Mozart's only formal teaching in music, and quickly recognized his son's prodigious gifts for learning and for music when the boy taught himself how to play the violin before turning seven years old.

After studying music with his uncle, Fortunato Magi, and with the director of the Istituto Musicale Pacini, Carlo Angeloni, he started his career at the age of 14 as an organist at St. Martino and St. Michele, Lucca, and at other local churches. However, a performance of Verdi's Aida at Pisa in 1876 made such an impact on him that he decided to follow his instinct for operatic composition. With a scholarship and financial support from an uncle, he was able to enter the Milan Conservatory in 1880. During his three years there his chief teachers were Bazzini and Ponchielli.

Schubert was born in Vienna, Austria on January 31, 1797. His father, Franz Theodor Florian, the son of a Moravian peasant, was a parish schoolmaster; his mother, Elizabeth Vietz was the daughter of a Silesian master locksmith, and had also been a housemaid for a Viennese family prior to her marriage. Of the Schuberts' sixteen children (one illegitimate child was born in 1783), eleven died in infancy; five survived. Their father Franz Theodor was a well-known teacher, and his school on the Himmelpfortgrund, a part of Vienna's 9th district, was well attended.citation needed He was not a famous musician, but he taught his son what he could of music.

Both his parents were musicians, his father a horn player, his mother a singer; he learnt the horn and singing and as a boy sang in at least one opera in Bologna, where the family lived. He studied there and began his operatic career when, at 18, he wrote a one-act comedy for Venice. Further commissions followed, from Bologna, Ferrara, Venice again and Milan, where La pietra del paragone was a success at La Scala in 1812. This was one of seven operas written in 16 months, all but one of them comic.

He was the son of a professional violinist who played at St. Mark's and may have been involved in operatic management. Vivaldi was trained for the priesthood and ordained in 1703 but soon after his ordination ceased to say Mass. he claimed this was because of his unsure health (he is known to have suffered from chest complaints, possibly asthma or angina). In 1703 he was appointed maestro di violino at the Ospedale della Pietà, one of the Venetian girls' orphanages; he remained there until 1709, and held the post again, 1711-16; he then became maestro de' concerti. Later, when he was away from Venice, he retained his connection with the Pietà (at one period he sent two concertos by post each month). He became maestro di cappella, 1735-8; even after then he supplied concertos and directed performances on special occasions.

Tchaikovsky was the second of five sons and one daughter. As a youngster he was very devoted to his mother, Alexandra who herself was a nervous epileptic. In his early teens, he had to be held back from holding the carriage wheels to prevent his mother’s parting.

He began his piano training at five and within a year was a better player than his teacher. His father, however, had different aspirations for his son. Pytor was encouraged to study law. The family moved from Votkinsk first to Moscow and soon after to St. Petersburg. Here the young adult Tchaikovsky was enrolled in the School of Jurisprudence and after graduation, worked for four years as a civil servant in the Ministry of Justice.

Pagliacci (Players, or Clowns) is an opera consisting of a prologue and two acts written and composed by Ruggero Leoncavallo. It recounts the tragedy of a jealous husband in a commedia dell'arte troupe. (Its name is sometimes incorrectly rendered as I Pagliacci with a definite article.)

Pagliacci premiered at the Teatro Dal Verme in Milan on May 21, 1892, conducted by Arturo Toscanini with Adelina Stehle as Nedda, Fiorello Giraud as Canio, Victor Maurel as Tonio, and Mario Ancona as Silvio.

Since 1893, it has usually been performed in a double bill with Pietro Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana. It is the only one of Leoncavallo's operas that is still widely staged.

Unfortunately Mozart did not complete the Requiem – in one of life’s supreme ironies, death took the quill from his hand – so there are a variety of competing versions which claim to be authentic to Mozart’s style and vision of the work, and the chorus music is slightly different (or sometimes, wildly at variance) in each. The traditional completion is in fact the work of between three and five composers! In addition to Mozart, the others are Freystädtler (possibly), Eybler (certainly), Stadler (probably), and Süssmayr (definitely).

The latter did the bulk of the work, but compared to the genius of Mozart he was unfortunately a composer of quite limited technique. However, it should be noted that the movements Mozart did compose have all of the voice parts and the orchestral bass line fully scored, with occasional accompanying motifs written here and there in the other instruments.

It has been observed that Bach's melodies are harmonically conceived and his harmonies melodically conceived. This is a pithy way of saying that the music of Johann Sebastian Bach is the culmination of not only the Baroque era, but the Renaissance as well.

The Baroque era began as a reaction against the highly refined and intellectual Flemish contrapuntal style that is the essence of the high Renaissance. Early Baroque opera led to our modern concept of harmony by declaring the primacy of a single melodic line supported by chords designated by a figured bass.

The concept of melody with harmonic accompaniment was the beginning of thinking about harmony and harmonic progressions as an important entity and not just the by-product of intersecting lines. Two hundred and fifty years later, Schumann, great student of Bach that he was, would declare that in the chess game of music melody is the queen but the game depends on harmony, the king.