Top 34 biggest classical music composers

1906 - 1975Dmitri Shostakovich

He is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century, with a unique harmonic language and a historic importance due to his years of work under Stalin. His music is characterized by sharp contrasts, elements of the grotesque, and ambivalent tonality; he was also heavily influenced by the neoclassical style pioneered by Igor Stravinsky, and (especially in his symphonies) by the late Romanticism of Gustav Mahler.

1898 - 1937George Gershwin

American composer and pianist whose compositions spanned both popular and classical genres.

1891 - 1953Sergei Prokofiev

Russian Soviet composer, pianist and conductor.

1882 - 1971Igor Stravinsky

Russian-born composer, pianist, and conductor. He first achieved international fame with three ballets commissioned by the impresario Serge Diaghilev and first performed in Paris by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.

1881 - 1945Béla Bartók

Hungarian composer, pianist, and ethnomusicologist. Through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of comparative musicology, which later became ethnomusicology.

1875 - 1937Maurice Ravel

French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. Many of his works exist in two versions - first, a piano score and later an orchestration.

1873 - 1943Sergei Rachmaninoff

Russian composer, virtuoso pianist, and conductor of the late Romantic period.

1866 - 1925Erik Satie

French composer and pianist, an influential artist in the late 19th- and early 20th-century Parisian avant-garde.

1862 - 1918Claude Debussy

French composer, sometimes seen as the first Impressionist composer, although he vigorously rejected the term.

1860 - 1911Gustav Mahler

Austro-Bohemian Romantic composer, and one of the leading conductors of his generation. Mahler's œuvre is relatively limited; for much of his life composing was necessarily a part-time activity while he earned his living as a conductor.

1858 - 1924Giacomo Puccini

Italian opera composer.

1841 - 1904Antonín Dvořák

Czech composer, one of the first to achieve worldwide recognition. He frequently employed rhythms and other aspects of the folk music of Moravia and his native Bohemia.

1840 - 1893Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Russian composer of the Romantic period. First Russian composer whose music made a lasting impression internationally. He was honored in 1884 by Tsar Alexander III and awarded a lifetime pension.

1838 - 1875Georges Bizet

French composer of the Romantic era.

1833 - 1897Johannes Brahms

German composer, pianist, and conductor of the Romantic period.

1819 - 1880Jacques Offenbach

1813 - 1901Giuseppe Verdi

1813 - 1883Richard Wagner

1811 - 1886Franz Liszt

1810 - 1856Robert Schumann

1810 - 1849Frédéric Chopin

1809 - 1847Felix Mendelssohn

1803 - 1869Hector Berlioz

1797 - 1828Franz Schubert

1792 - 1868Gioachino Rossini

1782 - 1840Niccolò Paganini

1770 - 1827Ludwig van Beethoven

1756 - 1791Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

1732 - 1809Joseph Haydn

1685 - 1759George Frideric Handel

1685 - 1750Johann Sebastian Bach

1668 - 1741Sergei Rachmaninoff

1632 - 1687Jean-Baptiste Lully

1567 - 1643Claudio Monteverdi