The Eight Greatest Teachers in Classical Music History?

by Emily E. Hogstad  

Have you ever wondered who the best teachers in classical music history were?

Us, too. But of course, there’s no way to objectively measure who “the best” teachers are. (Surely the best teachers in your life are the incredible men and women who have taught you over the years.)

Nevertheless, we wanted to try to put together some kind of list addressing the question, so today we’re looking at eight candidates.

If a teacher worked with over half a dozen famous names, they became a candidate for this list. From there, we looked at who had the most impact on the art. After that, we made some subjective choices.

It goes without saying, it was a hard job to narrow a list down to the top eight, but here’s our best shot at it, presented in rough reverse order of influence and importance.

Let us know if you think we got our ranking wrong (or right!).

8) Maria Curcio

Pupils: Martha Argerich, Myung-whun Chung, Simone Dinnerstein, Leon Fleisher, Radu Lupu, Mitsuko Uchida

Maria Curcio – piano teacher, her life and musical philosophy (part 1) 

Maria Curcio was born in the summer of 1918. Her father was Italian, and her Jewish-Brazilian mother was a talented pianist.

She began playing piano when she was three years old and was consequently barred by her parents from having a normal childhood. She enrolled in the Naples Conservatory when she was nine years old and graduated at fourteen.

An important moment in her artistic development came in 1933, when she auditioned for the studio of influential pianist Artur Schnabel. Initially, he didn’t want to accept such a young pupil, but when he heard her, he was flabbergasted and claimed she was “one of the greatest talents I have ever met.”

Maria Curcio

In 1939, barely twenty years old, she followed Schnabel’s Jewish secretary Peter Diamand on tour to Amsterdam. While they were there, World War II broke out, and soon the city fell under Nazi control.

The couple went into hiding. Between the stress, poor nutrition, and a tuberculosis infection, Curcio ended the war very sick. The chronic health issues that developed afterwards derailed her performing career for over a decade.

Effectively barred from a performing career, she began teaching more and more. Her studio witnessed a number of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century, and her legacy lives on through them today.

7) Franz Liszt

Pupils: Eugen d’Albert, Hans von Bülow, Amy Fay, Agathe Backer Grøndahl, Sophie Menter, Carl Reinecke, Pauline Viardot, and countless others. 

Today, Franz Liszt is remembered primarily as a composer and virtuoso who revolutionised piano technique. But he was also a hugely important mentor for countless nineteenth-century musicians.

According to student Amy Fay, who wrote a book about her European training, Liszt hated being thought of as an official teacher. His teaching arrangements tended to be loose and informal.

But he was incredibly generous with his time and attention, and even those musicians he never taught “officially” soaked in his artistry and technique via listening and conversation. They, in turn, shared what they had learned with their students. His legacy continues today.

In the words of Fay:

Under the inspiration of Liszt’s playing, everybody worked “tooth and nail” to achieve the impossible. A smile of approbation from him was all we cared for. This is how it is that he turned out such a grand school of piano-playing.

He was not afraid, and his pupils are like him. They are not afraid, either, and it is they who have revealed Liszt’s beautiful compositions and brilliant concert style to the world.

It is the direct inheritance of his teaching and ex­ample, and even his least eminent pupils have caught something of Liszt’s largeness of horizon.

6) Johann Georg Albrechtsberger

Pupils: Ludwig van Beethoven, John Field, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Friedrich Kalkbrenner, Ignaz Moscheles, Anton Reicha

Johann Georg Albrechtsberger taught some of the most influential teachers of the nineteenth century, but he is little-known today.

He was born just outside of Vienna in 1736. Initially, he pursued a career in church music. Later, his facility with compositional technique made him a popular teacher in Vienna.

In 1790, he wrote a treatise on compositional theory. After his death, his writings on harmony were published posthumously. These works remained in print for many years.

He died in 1809, never witnessing the full flowering of his best students’ potential.

Johann Georg Albrechtsberger

Without knowing it, Albrechtsberger laid the groundwork for the Romantic era: the revolutionary compositions of Beethoven; the emotional and virtuosic piano playing of Field, Kalkbrenner, and Moscheles; and the pedagogical influence of Anton Reicha, whose time working at the Paris Conservatoire in the 1830s made a huge impact on French music.

5) Carl Reinecke

Pupils: Isaac Albéniz, Max Bruch, Ferruccio Busoni, Edvard Grieg, Leoš Janáček, Amanda Röntgen-Maier, Ethel Smyth, Charles Villiers Stanford  

Romantic era music also owes a huge debt to the pupils of Carl Reinecke.

Reinecke was born in the city of Altona, Hamburg, in present-day Germany in 1824. Working under his musician father, he began composing at the age of seven. He gave his first public performance on the piano when he was twelve.

As a young man, he moved to Leipzig, Germany, where he studied under Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, and Franz Liszt.

Carl Reinecke

In 1860, when he was in his mid-thirties, he was named to the music directorship of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. He also took a position teaching piano and composition at the Leipzig Conservatory.

Over his decades of working as a teacher, a truly amazing array of pupils came through his studio, including many who composed in diverse styles influenced by the rising tide of nationalism in music.

Albéniz wrote famously Spanish music; Grieg, of course, took great inspiration from the folk music of Norway; Janáček became one of the most famous Czech composers ever; and Ethel Smyth and Charles Villiers Stanford helped to set the stage for a turn-of-the-century renaissance in British music.

4) Antonio Salieri

Pupils: Ludwig van Beethoven, Carl Czerny, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Franz Liszt, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Ignaz Moscheles, Maria Theresia von Paradis, Franz Schubert  

Thanks to the movie Amadeus, Antonio Salieri is unfairly remembered as “the jealous composer who murdered Mozart.” (There is no evidence that he ever did such a thing.)

He was born in 1750 near Verona in present-day Italy. He began studying the violin with a musically talented brother, and moved to Vienna when he was sixteen.

Antonio Salieri painted by Joseph Willibrord Mähler

He eventually worked his way up to become the preeminent composer of Italian opera in Vienna during the late eighteenth century. (Mozart, being a native-born Austrian, was jealous of Salieri’s success.)

In addition to being a well-respected opera composer, he was also a sought-after teacher. Over the course of his career, he ended up tutoring some of the biggest names in nineteenth-century music, including Beethoven, Liszt, Meyerbeer, and Schubert. During these lessons, he usually focused on addressing vocal writing.

Sadly, Salieri’s mental and physical health declined in his later years. He attempted suicide in 1823 and suffered from dementia until his death in 1825. The monument at his grave is decorated with a poem written by one of his pupils, Joseph Weigl.

3) Dorothy DeLay

Pupils: Sarah Chang, Nigel Kennedy, Anne Akiko Meyers, Midori Goto, Shlomo Mintz, Itzhak Perlman, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Gil Shaham, Jaap van Zweden   

The last fifty years of violin playing would be unrecognisable without the pupils of Dorothy DeLay.

DeLay was born in small-town Kansas in 1917 to a musical family. She began playing the violin when she was four.

She studied at Oberlin Conservatory, Michigan State University, and Juilliard. In 1946, she began working at Juilliard as violin teacher Ivan Galamian’s assistant.

From there, she became an increasingly influential presence. She was deeply beloved for her curiosity, collaborative spirit, and willingness to let her students all develop their own unique creative voices.

Itzhak Perlman, arguably her most famous student, once described her teaching style:

I would come and play for her, and if something was not quite right, it wasn’t like she was going to kill me.

She would ask questions about what you thought of particular phrases—where the top of the phrase was, and so on. We would have a very friendly, interesting discussion about ‘Why do you think it should sound like this?’ and ‘What do you think of that?’

I was not quite used to this way of approaching things.

She died in 2002 at the age of eighty-four. She had led one of the most remarkable teaching careers in the entirety of classical music history.

Dorothy DeLay and Midori Goto

2) Mathilde Marchesi

Pupils: Suzanne Adams, Frances Alda, Emma Calvé, Ada Crossley, Emma Eames, Marie Fillunger, Mary Garden, Gabrielle Krauss, Blanche Marchesi, Nellie Melba, Emma Nevada, Sibyl Sanderson

Mathilde Marchesi was born Mathilde Graumann to a musically talented family in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1821.

Her pianist aunt Dorothea von Ertmann was one of Beethoven’s most beloved pupils and creative partners. After his death, Dorothea championed his music, helping to usher it into the canon.

When she was in her early twenties, Mathilde’s family lost their fortune, so she went to seek hers in Vienna and Paris as an opera singer. She made her debut in 1844, but never became a star.

Instead, she married baritone Salvatore Marchesi in 1852, retired from the stage, and shifted her attention to teaching.

Mathilde Marchesi

She began her teaching career working at the conservatories in Cologne and Vienna. In 1881, when she was sixty, she began her own school in Paris.

She specialised in teaching the bel canto style and valued a more natural attitude than was common at the time.

It is mind-boggling how many famous students she taught. Frances Alda (born 1879) became a famous onstage partner of Caruso. Emma Calvé (born 1858) was considered to be the greatest Carmen of her generation. Ada Crossley (born 1871) was the first recording artist hired by the Victor Talking Machine Company. Mary Garden (born 1874) premiered the role of Mélisande in Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande. Sibyl Sanderson became one of Jules Massenet’s favourite performers, and she created the role of Thaïs. Dame Nellie Melba (born 1861) was possibly the most famous singer of the Victorian era, period.

The depth and breadth of the accomplishments of her students, and the way they influenced late nineteenth and early twentieth century opera, makes Mathilde Marchesi one of the best teachers in classical music history.

1) Nadia Boulanger

Pupils: George Antheil, Daniel Barenboim, Marion Bauer, Lili Boulanger, Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Gian Carlo Menotti, Ginette Neveu, Astor Piazzolla, Julia Perry, Walter Piston, and countless others

How Nadia Boulanger Raised a Generation of Composers  

Nearly every classical music lover can agree: Nadia Boulanger has been the single most influential teacher in classical music history. It’s possible that she’s one of the most influential teachers of all time, period.

Nadia was born in Paris in 1887 to a musical family. Her elderly father, Ernest Boulanger (she was born on his 72nd birthday), was a composer and pianist.

Nadia began studying music when she was five years old. When a sister named Lili arrived five years later, Nadia became devoted to her and her education, too.

Both sisters were incredibly gifted, but Lili was a once-in-a-generation talent. Accordingly, when Nadia began studying at the Paris Conservatoire when she was nine, Lili tagged along with her.

Nadia Boulanger

Nadia dreamed of winning the prestigious Prix de Rome prize: something her father had done in his youth, but which a woman had never done. She came close, but never actually won. Lili ended up breaking that particular glass ceiling in 1913.

Despite her promise, Lili’s health was extremely poor, and she died of Crohn’s disease at the end of World War I.

After her sister’s devastating death, Nadia began gravitating more and more toward teaching instead of composing. She also needed to focus on a field that would guarantee a steady income, in order to support herself and her mother. Consequently, in 1921, she began teaching harmony at the French Music School for Americans in Fontainebleu. One of her first students there would become one of her most famous: Aaron Copland.

Copland would later write of her:

Nadia Boulanger knew everything there was to know about music; she knew the oldest and the latest music, pre-Bach and post-Stravinsky.

All technical know-how was at her fingertips: harmonic transposition, the figured bass, score reading, organ registration, instrumental techniques, structural analyses, the school fugue and the free fugue, the Greek modes and Gregorian chant.

Nadia was blunt about her talent for analysis:

I can tell whether a piece is well-made or not, and I believe that there are conditions without which masterpieces cannot be achieved, but I also believe that what defines a masterpiece cannot be pinned down. I won’t say that the criterion for a masterpiece does not exist, but I don’t know what it is.

Her decades of teaching were not without controversy. She could be emotionally abusive and held ideas that today would be considered offensively sexist. She was also accused of advancing students whom she liked personally and making other students’ lives miserable.

Despite those and other shortcomings, she is unquestionably the most influential music teacher of all time. Classical music as we know it today would not exist without her, period.

Your Favorite Composers’ Favorite Composers

by Emily E. Hogstad 

Pop star Chappell Roan has adopted a slogan for herself that has become famous: “I’m your favourite artist’s favourite artist!”

Who’s the equivalent in the classical music world? Have you ever wondered who your favourite composer’s favourite composer was?

Sometimes it’s hard to tell from the historical record. Lots of great composers didn’t have a single favourite composer, or they never recorded their thoughts using those words exactly, so listeners are left to make educated guesses.

But even if we can’t always know their favourite, we can usually guess at their favourites. And a couple of names appear again and again… Read on to find out who!

© classicalregister.com

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

When he was twenty years old, Johann Sebastian Bach set off on a 400-kilometre (250-mile) hike to the city of Lübeck.

His object was to hear the nearly 80-year-old organist Dieterich Buxtehude. Bach met him, heard his music performed, and even copied out some of his musical manuscripts.

Bach had originally intended to return home within a month, but he found Buxtehude’s work so fascinating that he stayed away for multiple months.

Understandably, relations with his employer were frayed upon returning home!  

Bach also appreciated the work of Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi. He transcribed multiple Vivaldi violin concertos for organ. Read more about that: The “Harmonic Inspiration” of Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741): “L’estro armonico”.

Bach’s personal thoughts and opinions are not well-documented, so we will never know for sure who Bach’s favourite composers were. But he was clearly impressed by these two.

Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)

Joseph Haydn met Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart sometime in the early 1780s.

In 1785, Wolfgang’s father, Leopold, recorded that Haydn told him:

Before God and as an honest man, I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name; he has taste, and, furthermore, the most profound knowledge of composition.   

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

In London in the mid-1760s, when Mozart was a boy, he studied with Johann Christian Bach, Johann Sebastian’s composer son.

In later years, Mozart remembered J.C. Bach’s instruction fondly, and he continued to seek out his new works in the following years.

Musicologist Alfred Einstein notes that, aside from Haydn, J.C. Bach was the only musician whom Mozart never criticised in his letters.

Mozart once told musical patron and diplomat Gottfried van Swieten, “Bach is the father. We are the children!”   

Mozart also adored Haydn, writing six string quartets in his honour, known as the Haydn quartets. 

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

In 1817, English composer Cipriani Potter and Beethoven went on a walk in the woods together. Potter asked Beethoven, “Apart from yourself, who do you consider the greatest living composer?”

Beethoven’s answer was Italian composer Luigi Cherubini.

A few years later, Beethoven would write to Cherubini:

I am enraptured whenever I hear a new work of yours and feel as great an interest in it as in my own works – in brief, I honour and love you.

He also called him “Europe’s foremost dramatic composer.”

Learn more about Beethoven’s thoughts on Cherubini.   

Beethoven also once said, “Handel was the greatest composer that ever lived. I would uncover my head and kneel before his tomb.”

Handel died a decade before Beethoven’s birth. Perhaps Handel was his favourite dead composer and Cherubini his favourite living one.   

Richard Wagner (1813-1883)

Richard Wagner was just about to turn fourteen when Beethoven died. The loss shocked him to his core.

Richard would have dreams in which he spoke to Shakespeare and Beethoven, and wake up with his face wet with tears.

As a young composer, he was especially overwhelmed by the scale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He would later write:

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony became the mystical goal of all my strange thoughts and desires about music… It was considered the ‘non plus ultra’ of all that was fantastic and incomprehensible, and this was quite enough to rouse in me a passionate desire to study this mysterious work.

He even made a piano transcription of it when still a student.   

Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)

In his biography of Frédéric Chopin, author Alan Walker writes:

The two composers Chopin admired above all others were Bach and Mozart – although we must question just how much Bach he knew…

The one work of Bach with which we know Chopin to have been intimately acquainted was the 48 Preludes and Fugues, many of which he mastered during his youth and could still play from memory in later life…

Mozart was a different matter. Chopin was familiar with the piano sonatas and some of the chamber music (especially the E major Piano Trio, K. 542, which he played in public), and his love of the operas was unconditional.

Perhaps his favourite Mozart opera was Don Giovanni, which he had known since his youth. But he adored as well the Requiem, which he is known to have heard twice in Paris, including the performance arranged for the reburial of Emperor Napoléon in 1840. It appears to have been this latter performance that generated a desire within him to have the work played at his own funeral, a wish that was carried out by his friends, though not without difficulty.

Learn more about Chopin’s funeral and the performance of Mozart’s Requiem that happened at it.

Here’s Chopin’s Op. 2, variations on a theme from Don Giovanni:  

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)

Felix Mendelssohn’s great-aunt Sarah Itzig Levy studied harpsichord with Johann Sebastian Bach’s eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. She also commissioned work by another Bach son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.

Sarah Itzig Levy helped keep the flame of appreciation for Johann Sebastian’s music burning even as his music fell out of fashion.

Felix’s father also bought a number of Johann Sebastian Bach’s manuscripts when Felix was a child.

In 1823 or 1824, when he was fifteen, his grandmother gifted Felix a score of the St. Matthew Passion.

Mendelssohn became obsessed. Just five years later, he mounted a performance of the Passion (albeit with a few cuts), helping to pave the path for a Johann Sebastian Bach renaissance in Germany.   

Franz Liszt (1811-1886)

Toward the end of his long life, Franz Liszt claimed that in 1823, when he was still a boy, he performed for Ludwig van Beethoven. (At the time, Liszt was studying piano under Beethoven’s former student Carl Czerny.)

Liszt’s recounting of the details of the meeting was fuzzy, so his account has to be taken with a grain of salt. But supposedly he played a Bach fugue and the first movement of Beethoven’s C-major piano concerto.

When he finished, Beethoven kissed his forehead and declared:

Go! You are one of the fortunate ones! For you will give joy and happiness to many other people! There is nothing better or finer!

Decades later, Liszt would tell a student of the encounter, “This event in my life has remained my greatest pride—the palladium of my whole career as an artist.”

One thing we know for sure: Beethoven’s bravura style rubbed off on Liszt, and Liszt made landmark transcriptions of all nine Beethoven Symphonies for piano.  

Liszt was also a major supporter of the music of his contemporary, Richard Wagner, who ended up marrying his daughter, Cosima. Liszt wrote transcriptions of Wagner’s works.

Liszt’s transcription of Wagner’s Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde  

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

In the Cambridge Companion to Mozart, there’s a passage about Johannes Brahms’s relationship with Mozart’s music.

[Brahms’s] documented remarks on Mozart include stereotypical references to the perfection of Figaro and the beauty of the string quartets, but they also speak to a broader appreciation of Mozart’s stylistic range.

In conversation late in his life with the critic and composer Richard Heuberger, Brahms mentioned in passing that Mozart was more daring in his handling of form than Beethoven, and added: “It’s a good thing most people don’t know that.”

Pyotr Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

Tchaikovsky and Brahms didn’t care for each other, but they both loved Mozart.

In his 1889 autobiography, Tchaikovsky wrote about hearing Don Giovanni as a teenager:

It was a pure revelation to me. It is impossible for me to describe the enthusiasm, the delight and intoxication which I was seized by.

During several weeks, I did nothing but play this opera through from the piano score; even as I fell asleep, I could not part with this divine music, which pursued me long into my happy dreams…

Amongst the great masters, Mozart is the one to whom I feel most attracted; it has been so ever since that day, and it will always be like that.

He wrote to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck in 1878:

I not only love Mozart – I worship him…

It is to Mozart that I am obliged for the fact that I have dedicated my life to music. He gave the first impulse to my musical powers and made me love music more than anything else in the world.

He later went on to write his fourth orchestral suite (nicknamed Mozartiana) to celebrate the centenary of Don Giovanni.   

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)

Gustav Mahler adored Beethoven so much that he took it upon himself to reorchestrate some of his symphonies.  

Not surprisingly, the project was controversial!

But Mahler’s favourite composer may have been Richard Wagner. He spent much of his musical career as an opera conductor and spent years poring over and advocating for Wagner’s operas.

As a young composer, he famously said, “When Wagner has spoken, let others hold their tongues.”

Conclusion

It seems pretty clear that in the classical music world, Mozart and Beethoven would claim the crown of your favourite composers’ favourite composer! But the runners-up definitely include Wagner and members of the Bach family.

Max Steiner, the Movie Composer Injected With Amphetamines

By Emily E. Hogstad

  

Max Steiner, hailed as the “father of film music,” is one of the most influential composers in the history of Hollywood.

Over the course of a career that spanned half a century, Steiner crafted some of the most iconic scores in cinematic history.

Steiner was no stranger to the world of classical music. In fact, he took massive inspiration from Richard Wagner, his tutor Gustav Mahler, and even his godfather, Richard Strauss.

Today, we’re looking at the life of Max Steiner and his impact on the world of cinema…including the taxing work assignment with a deadline so tight, it required twenty-hour workdays and amphetamines to meet.

Max Steiner

Max Steiner’s Family Background

Max Steiner was born on 10 May 1888 in Vienna.

His family’s roots in Viennese arts and culture ran deep. He was named after his grandfather Maximilian Steiner, the theater director who popularised Viennese operetta and convinced Johann Strauss II to write for the genre.

Later, Maximilian’s son Gábor followed in his father’s footsteps and became an impresario himself.

Gábor’s wife Marie was also a music-lover and was a dancer early in her career, before giving birth to her only child, Max.

Max’s godfather was none other than composer Richard Strauss!

A Musically Precocious Childhood

Max’s voracious love of music was obvious from an early age. By the age of six, he was taking multiple music lessons a week.

He also started improvising on the piano, and with his father’s encouragement, writing the improvisations down.

At twelve, again with the support of his father, he conducted a performance of composer Gustave Kerker’s operetta The Belle of New York.

Max Steiner’s Musical Education

In 1904, he began attending the Imperial Academy of Music. While there, he was tutored by Gustav Mahler.

He breezed through four years of curriculum in one, studying composition, harmony, counterpoint, and a veritable orchestra’s worth of instruments.

Around this time, he also composed his first operetta, The Beautiful Greek Girl. No doubt to his disappointment, his father passed on staging it, claiming it wasn’t up to his standards.

Max rebelled by offering Greek Girl to another impresario. To his satisfaction, it was a success, running for a year.

Max Steiner’s London Career

The success of The Beautiful Greek Girl led to a number of conducting opportunities abroad.

A British production invited him to conduct The Merry Widow, an operetta by his father’s former colleague Franz Lehár.

Steiner moved to London and stayed there for eight years, conducting The Merry Widow and other operettas.

Escape to New York

Max Steiner

However, the onset of World War I brought his career to a screeching halt. Britain declared war on Austria in August 1914. Steiner was twenty-six years old.

Because of his nationality, he was interned in Britain as an enemy alien. He was only released because of his friendship with the Duke of Westminster.

Despite that friendship, he was ultimately ejected from Britain and his scores compounded, ending up in New York City with just $32 to his name.

A Broadway Career, and a Start in Film

Steiner soon found work on Broadway, orchestrating, arranging, and conducting. He conducted works by George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Victor Herbert, and others.

He began watching the development of the nascent movie industry with great interest, speaking to studio founders and directors about the potential of music to accompany silent films.

In 1927, he orchestrated and conducted a Broadway musical by composer Harry Tierney. When Tierney was hired by RKO Pictures, he urged the studio to hire Steiner, too.

At the time, the potential of movie music was yet to be fully understood. It was thought by studio heads that soundtracks should come from a library of cheap pre-recorded tracks, as opposed to being written for specific films (an idea that Steiner would push back hard against). Steiner was hired as the head of the music department at RKO, but only on a month-to-month contract.

He scored Dixiana, the Western Cimarron, and Symphony of Six Million. Symphony of Six Million, with its extensive score, was a landmark in cinema history, and it helped to convince film executives of the impact that a soundtrack could have on a movie. 

Max Steiner’s Hollywood Career

King Kong

Throughout the 1930s, Steiner was on the front lines of establishing the language of movie music, influenced by figures like Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss.

He scored King Kong in 1933, finishing the iconic score in a jaw-dropping two weeks. It has often been called the most influential soundtrack of all time, demonstrating for executives, producers, and audiences once and for all what exactly a custom-written score could do for a movie.

Steiner relied on the Wagnerian idea of leitmotif, i.e., playing specific themes during the appearance of specific characters or ideas.

King Kong (1933) – Beauty Killed the Beast Scene  

He also composed for and conducted many of the Astaire/Rogers musicals.

In 1937, Steiner was hired by Warner Bros, where he continued his extremely productive output.

Scoring Gone With the Wind

Gone With the Wind

In 1939, Steiner was hired by Selznick International Pictures to score Gone With the Wind.

He composed the score to the nearly four-hour film in three months. At the same time, in the year 1939, he composed the score for twelve other films.

Producer David O. Selznick had concerns that Steiner wouldn’t be able to finish in time, so he hired Franz Waxman to write a backup score.

However, it wasn’t needed. Steiner ended up delivering by working twenty-hour days, aided by prescribed injected amphetamines. He also had the assistance of four orchestrators.

Today, it’s widely regarded as one of the greatest film scores of all time. 

Max Steiner’s Academy Awards

Gone With the Wind didn’t win an Academy Award for best score (it lost out to The Wizard of Oz), but over the course of his career, Steiner would win multiple Oscars.

In 1936, he won for his score to the thriller The Informer. In 1943, he won another for the drama Now, Voyager, and yet another in 1945 for the wartime drama Since You Went Away.

Other classics that he scored during this time include Casablanca, The Big Sleep, Mildred Pierce, and others.  

Max Steiner’s Late Career

During the 1950s, changing tastes in movie music meant that Steiner’s lush, operatic style began to fall out of fashion.

He had one last major triumph with the theme for A Summer Place in 1959, which spent nine weeks at number one in 1960. It beat out Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald, Elvis Presley, and Frank Sinatra at the Grammys for Record of the Year.   

Sadly, his health and vision began deteriorating later in life. He died of congestive heart failure in 1971 at the age of 83.

Max Steiner’s Innovations   

Steiner was one of the first composers to employ a measuring machine to guarantee exact timings in a score. Before him, most composers just used a stopwatch, but Steiner felt it was important to sync his score with the film more closely than a watch’s second hand would allow.

He was also among the first to embrace click tracks. A click track consists of a series of holes punched into soundtrack film, creating a metronomic effect. Headphones can then be used and instruments played along to an exact tempo.

Throughout his career, he was on the cutting edge of developing ideas and principles about what scenes should and shouldn’t have music in them, as well as how loud music should be relative to dialogue.

He was also fascinated by the power of diegetic music (i.e., music that is played within the scene, that the characters also hear). Think of the famous renditions of “La Marseillaise” or “As Time Goes By” in Casablanca.   

Max Steiner’s Modern Influence

Max Steiner conducting the score of King Kong

Steiner’s influence continues even today.

John Williams has cited him (as well as Steiner’s compatriot Erich Wolfgang Korngold) as a major influence, as has James Newton Howard, who scored the 2005 remake of King Kong.

He also pushed for film composers to earn residuals, helping to create an expectation that composers would be fairly compensated for their work.

It’s clear that for as long as movies exist, Max Steiner’s influence will continue to be felt.

Which Composer Wrote the Most Symphonies Ever?

 by Emily E. Hogstad  

Today we’re going to talk about symphonies.

What exactly is a symphony? Is it different from a sinfonia?

And, depending on your answer to that question, which composer has written the most symphonies of all time? And how many symphonies did that person write?

Keep reading to find out. The answers might surprise you!

Joseph Haydn (1732–1809)
104 Symphonies

Joseph Haydn

If you love classical music, you know Haydn would be on this list!

Joseph Haydn was born in rural Austria in 1732. He went on to become one of the most celebrated composers of the Classical era.

A major part of his reputation rests on his output of symphonies.

He wrote his first surviving symphony in 1759. Haydn’s First is in three movements: a slow movement bracketed by two fast movements. A typical performance takes about fifteen minutes. 

He wrote his final symphony, numbered 104 and nicknamed the London, in 1795. This symphony demonstrates how far Haydn pushed the boundaries of the genre over his career.

The work has four movements (Adagio-Allegro, Andante Minnuet and Trio, and a finale marked “Spiritoso”) and takes about half an hour to perform. 

Nowadays, we think of a symphony as a four-movement work for orchestra, at least half an hour in length. Haydn’s creative evolution over the course of writing a hundred-plus symphonies contributed to that perception.

Christoph Graupner (1683–1760)
113 Sinfonias

Christoph Graupner

Of course, Haydn’s development also leaves us with the question: should early orchestral sinfonias that aren’t as long as later symphonies count?

Music historians can argue the question, but for the purposes of this article, we’re going to say yes!

That’s why the next figure on our list is Christoph Graupner, who was born in 1683 (three years after Bach) in Saxony. He studied law in Leipzig, then music with Johann Kuhnau. Kuhnau was the music director of the renowned Leipzig-based Thomanerchor choir before Bach took the job.

Graupner spent most of his career at the court in Hesse-Darmstadt, where he worked between 1709 and 1754, when he went blind.

He wrote 113 sinfonias.

Here’s a recording of a particularly striking example. It’s a six-movement work composed for orchestra and six timpani. 

Derek Bourgeois (1941–2017)
116 Symphonies

Derek Bourgeois

Derek Bourgeois was a British composer born in 1941. He studied at Cambridge and the Royal College of Music.

Early in his career, he worked as a lecturer, youth orchestra conductor, and director of music at St. Paul’s Girls School in London. He also composed extensively and was especially noted for his works for brass and wind band.

He wrote his first symphony when he was eighteen, in 1959. He had seven to his name by 2001, when he retired.

However, during retirement, he kept composing. By 2009, he revealed in an interview with The Guardian that he was up to 44 symphonies. That marked him as the most prolific symphony writer in British history.

And these works weren’t short, either. That Guardian article reported: “The average length of a Bourgeois symphony is 47 minutes.”

Remarkably, as he grew older, he only became more prolific. Between 2009 and his death in 2017, he added a shocking 72 more to his tally, for a grand lifetime total of 116!  

Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf (1739–1799)
120+ Symphonies

Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf

Composer Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf was born Johann Carl Ditters in Vienna in 1739.

As a child, he studied the violin and eventually became a professional violinist. In 1771, he became the court composer at Château Jánský Vrch, in the present-day Czech Republic.

He was eventually promoted and received the noble title that transformed his name to Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf.

Dittersdorf wrote around 120 symphonies. Interestingly, he wrote twelve programmatic symphonies before the concept was popular, all inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Unfortunately, only half of them survive today.  

Johann Melchior Molter (1696–1765)
140+ Symphonies

Johann Melchior Molter

Johann Melchior Molter was born near Bach’s hometown of Eisenach, sixteen years after Bach.

Much like Bach, records about Molter’s early training are scarce. Historians do know that by his early twenties, he had left Eisenach to take a job as a violinist in Karlsruhe.

Soon after, he decided to travel to Italy to continue his music studies. He lived there for two years, then returned to Karlsruhe, where he became Kapellmeister at the court there. In 1734, he accepted a job as Kapellmeister at the court of Duke Wilhelm Heinrich of Saxe-Eisenach.

Over the course of his career, he wrote 140+ symphonies and sinfonias.

These were written before Haydn and his generation revolutionised the genre, so most of them are only around ten minutes long and don’t adhere to the symphonic form as codified in the Classical era.

Still, this is exciting, attractive, striking music.  

František Xaver Pokorný (1729–1794)
140 Symphonies

František Xaver Pokorný

František Xaver Pokorný was born in the town now known as Stříbro, Czech Republic.

He left to take lessons in Regensburg in present-day Germany. During the 1750s, he worked and studied in the cities of Wallerstein and Mannheim (where the virtuosity of the court orchestra would inspire a variety of eighteenth-century composers).

In the later part of his life, Pokorný returned to work at the court of Regensburg.

It is believed that over the course of his career, he wrote over 140 symphonies. However, after Pokorný died in Regensburg, fellow composer and court orchestra intendant Theodor von Schacht erased Pokorný’s name from his works and reattributed them to other composers, making certain identification difficult.  

And without further ado, here is the composer who has written the most symphonies ever, by far…

Leif Segerstam (1944–2024)
371 Symphonies

Leif Segerstam

Leif Segerstam was born in Vaasa, Finland, in 1944. His family moved to Helsinki when he was a boy, and he studied violin and conducting at the Sibelius Academy there. He then finished his studies at Juilliard in the United States.

Between 1995 and 2007, he served as conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra. He also enjoyed an international conducting career.

Segerstam also composed and became famous for his 371 symphonies.

His first symphony – subtitled “Symphony of Slow Movements” – was written in the late 1970s. Beginning in 1998 with his 23rd symphony, he started writing multiple symphonies a year until 2023, ending with a grand total of 371.

Most of these symphonies last for around twenty minutes and are one movement long. Many feature unusual titles like “Symphonic Thoughts after the Change of the Millenium No. 1”, “Listening to the tree clapping your shoulder…”, and “Calling the 112 in woody galaxies of the multiverses….”