Classics For Kids

Plenty of composers wrote more symphonies than Beethoven, but few did more to change the way the symphony sounded. Beethoven's First Symphony reflects the fact that he learned from Mozart and Haydn. At the time he composed his Third, it was the longest symphony ever written, and Beethoven's Ninth was the first symphony to use voices. Beethoven's 5th Symphony may be the most famous piece of music ever written.

Beethoven was a pianist. During his lifetime, the piano changed quite a bit, and those changes were reflected in the music Beethoven composed for the intstrument. William Black, head of the piano department at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, talks with Naomi Lewin about how Beethoven's music followed the development of the piano.

Ludwig van Beethoven was a uniquely talented composer and musician. But by the time Beethoven was 30, his increasing deafness put an end to his career as a pianist. That did not stop him from continuing to compose some of the most beautiful music the world has ever known. As a composer, Beethoven was a revolutionary. He took the Classical forms he learned from Mozart and Haydn, and pushed them into the next period of musical history -- the Romantic era.

Depicting a thunderstorm in music was one of Rossini's specialties. Here are some more examples of musical thunderstorms.

Usually, an overture is a piece of music played at the beginning of a play, opera or ballet in order to set the mood. But there are also other kinds of overtures.

The William Tell Overture was written to open an opera by Gioachino Rossini. The opera is based on a legend about the Swiss hero William Tell. According to the legend, William Tell was an expert with a bow and arrow who shot an apple off his son's head. You can hear the political turmoil in William Tell's Switzerland in Rossini's music.

Italian composer Gioachino Rossini was born in 1792 and died in 1868, so you might think that he celebrated 76 birthdays. But Rossini was born in a leap year, on February 29th, so he only had 18 official birthdays! Rossini was the most successful opera composer of his day.

In celebration of the Christmas season, some classical compositions that have Christmas carols in them.

Ralph Vaughan Williams arrived on the scene just as a definite English classical music sound was being established. His three main teachers at the Royal Academy of Music were Arthur Sullivan, Hubert Parry, and Charles Stanford. Edward Elgar and Gustav Holst also had an influence on Vaughan Williams. Other contemporaries of his were George Butterworth, Percy Grainger, and Peter Warlock.

Originally, a musical fantasy was a piece that instrumentalists made up as they went along. Eventually, fantasies evolved into pieces that composers built out of various melodies they liked -- like the Scottish folk tunes that Max Bruch put into his Scottish Fantasy for violin and orchestra.