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Pianist Stephen Hough is prolific and adventurous, with a large repertory ranging from familiar works to obscurities to music of his own. He is an enthusiastic chamber music player, a writer, and an exhibited visual artist.

Hough (pronounced "huff") was born in Heswall in the English county of Merseyside and grew up in nearby Thelwall, where he took up the piano at the age of five after pestering his parents to acquire a piano from a secondhand shop. Hough's father was an Australian-born steel company representative, and Hough took Australian citizenship in 2005 in his honor. He made rapid progress but took a year off after being mugged when he was 12. Hough graduated from Chetham's School of Music in Manchester and the Royal Northern College of Music. In 1978, he was a finalist in the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition, and he went on for a master's degree at the Juilliard School in New York. In that city, he won the prestigious Naumburg International Piano Competition in 1983, and his career was launched. His repertory and his performing experience are vast, and he has been noted for championing less-often-heard composers such as Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Federico Mompou, and York Bowen in addition to works of the 18th and 19th century mainstream. Hough also often programs his own works, more than 30 of which have been published. Not all are for piano solo; his Trio for piccolo, contrabassoon, and piano ("Was mit den Tränen geschieht") was premiered by members of the Berlin Philharmonic in 2009. Hough is an award-winning poet, a newspaper columnist, a writer on such unusual subjects as perfume, and an artist whose paintings were shown at London's Broadbent Gallery in 2012.

Hough is especially noted for the depth and breadth of his recording catalog, which dates back to the late 1980s and numbers more than 60 items. His recordings include standard repertory works, unusual music from the past, contemporary pieces by the likes of Lowell Liebermann, and innovative thematic recordings such as New York Variations, which won Time magazine's Classical Album of the Year nod in 1998. Since the mid-1990s, Hough has recorded mostly for the Hyperion label, where he has issued complete cycles of the piano concertos of Beethoven and Saint-Saëns. In 2021, he released the recital Vida breve, featuring music by Bach, Chopin, and Liszt, as well as his own piano sonata by that title. Hough became the first classical pianist honored by a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in 2001, and in 2014, he was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire. He has taught at the Royal Academy of Music in London, the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, and the Juilliard School in New York. ~ James Manheim

Born Aloisius Ludwig Minkus to Czech parents in Vienna and spending most of his career as the most important ballet composer in Russia before Tchaikovsky, Léon Minkus returned to Vienna to die in obscurity. The same fate might have befallen his music; a few of his scores survive only because of the ballets they support. The very characteristics that made his music perfect for the dance theater of its time and place also render it too formulaic to hold much interest on its own, except for balletomanes who enjoy aural souvenirs of the late-19th century stage.

Minkus' earliest years are poorly documented, but his first notable appearance in the musical annals came in 1846 when, at age 20, he made a small contribution to the Paris-premiered ballet Paquita. He was actually a violinist, and in the early 1850s, he found his way to St. Petersburg, where he was engaged as concertmaster for Prince N.B. Yusupov's serf orchestra from 1853 to 1856. After a period of modestly successful work in Russia as a violin soloist and teacher, Minkus became concertmaster and conductor of Moscow's Bolshoi Theater Orchestra in 1862, where he remained until 1872. He simultaneously held posts as inspector of the Moscow Imperial Theater orchestras and violin professor at the Moscow Conservatory.

Minkus dabbled in composing all the while. In 1864, he produced the score for the short ballet Fiametta, first performed back in St. Petersburg with choreography by Arthur Saint-Léon. Thanks to his Paris ties, he was also able to collaborate with Delibes on the 1866 ballet La Source. Delibes, on his own, would soon be writing subtle, melodically generous, rhythmically engaging, and colorfully orchestrated ballet music, but Minkus was more of a traditionalist. Like the lesser Italian opera composers of the previous few decades, he relied on formulas and never risked overshadowing the performers on-stage with musical invention. This is exemplified by his first great success as a ballet composer, Don Quixote, which premiered at the Bolshoi in 1869 with choreography by Marius Petipa. The rhythms are regular and strongly marked, the melodies bright but generic, the orchestration serviceable, with only very few numbers evoking much of a Spanish atmosphere. By the standards of its time, though, the music offered the dancers some clues to character and excellently showed off the dancers and choreography without calling attention to itself. The entire package is sufficiently attractive that Don Quixote has remained in the Russian repertory ever since.

Minkus' other lasting success was another Petipa collaboration, La Bayadère, which premiered in St. Petersburg in 1877. By this time (since 1870 or 1872; sources disagree), Minkus had been appointed composer of ballet music for the imperial theaters in St. Petersburg. Eventually, Ivan Vsevolozsky, the director of the theaters, realized that such composers as Tchaikovsky and Glazunov were capable of writing more sophisticated, symphonic music for the stage and pensioned Minkus off in 1886. He retired to Vienna in 1891 and kept a low profile thereafter, except for a brief success from 1896 to 1897 with the ballet Mlada, reusing material he'd contributed to an earlier unfinished collaboration with Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Borodin, and Cui. Minkus died in 1917, already so forgotten a figure that his date of death wasn't ascertained for nearly 60 years. ~ James Reel

Liszt was the only contemporary whose music Richard Wagner gratefully acknowledged as an influence upon his own. His lasting fame was an alchemy of extraordinary digital ability -- the greatest in the history of keyboard playing -- an unmatched instinct for showmanship, and one of the most progressive musical imaginations of his time. Hailed by some as a visionary, reviled by others as a symbol of empty Romantic excess, Franz Liszt wrote his name across music history in a truly inimitable manner.

From his youth, Liszt demonstrated a natural facility at the keyboard that placed him among the top performing prodigies of his day. Though contemporary accounts describe his improvisational skill as dazzling, his talent as a composer emerged only in his adulthood. Still, he was at the age of eleven the youngest contributor to publisher Anton Diabelli's famous variation commissioning project, best remembered as the inspiration for Beethoven's final piano masterpiece. An oft-repeated anecdote -- first recounted by Liszt himself decades later, and possibly fanciful -- has Beethoven attending a recital given by the youngster and bestowing a kiss of benediction upon him.

Though already a veteran of the stage by his teens, Liszt recognized the necessity of further musical tuition. He studied for a time with Czerny and Salieri in Vienna, and later sought acceptance to the Paris Conservatory. When he was turned down there -- foreigners were not then admitted -- he instead studied privately with Anton Reicha. Ultimately, his Hungarian origins proved a great asset to his career, enhancing his aura of mystery and exoticism and inspiring an extensive body of works, none more famous than the Hungarian Rhapsodies (1846-1885).

Liszt soon became a prominent figure in Parisian society, his romantic entanglements providing much material for gossip. Still, not even the juiciest accounts of his amorous exploits could compete with the stories about his wizardry at the keyboard. Inspired by the superhuman technique -- and, indeed, diabolical stage presence -- of the violinist Paganini, Liszt set out to translate these qualities to the piano. As his career as a touring performer, conductor, and teacher burgeoned, he began to devote an increasing amount of time to composition. He wrote most of his hundreds of original piano works for his own use; accordingly, they are frequently characterized by technical demands that push performers -- and in Liszt's own day, the instrument itself -- to their limits. The "transcendence" of his Transcendental Etudes (1851), for example, is not a reference to the writings of Emerson and Thoreau, but an indication of the works' level of difficulty. Liszt was well into his thirties before he mastered the rudiments of orchestration -- works like the Piano Concerto No. 1 (1849) were orchestrated by talented students -- but made up for lost time in the production of two "literary" symphonies (Faust, 1854-1857, and Dante, 1855-1856) and a series of orchestral essays (including Les préludes, 1848-1854) that marks the genesis of the tone poem as a distinct genre.

After a lifetime of near-constant sensation, Liszt settled down somewhat in his later years. In his final decade he joined the Catholic Church and devoted much of his creative effort to the production of sacred works. The complexion of his music darkened; the flash that had characterized his previous efforts gave way to a peculiar introspection, manifested in strikingly original, forward-looking efforts like Nuages gris (1881). Liszt died in Bayreuth, Germany, on July 31, 1886, having outlived Wagner, his son-in-law and greatest creative beneficiary.

Isaac Albéniz is best known for piano music that brilliantly evokes the spirit of Spain. As a composer-virtuoso, Albéniz successfully melded composition and performance to create a bravura style reminiscent of the music of Liszt and seasoned with Spanish folk idioms. The work that most convincingly represents this synthesis of virtuosity and tradition is the enchantingly colorful and atmospheric Iberia, a suite of 12 pieces recalling Spanish (particularly Andalusian) places and dances. Albéniz used folklore as his inspiration, but created a singular melodic style that eventually influenced Debussy and Ravel. Believing that artistic originality and an interest in one's national musical tradition do not exclude each other, Albéniz likewise was largely the creator of the Spanish musical idiom that would be adopted and developed by Granados and de Falla.

Born in 1860, the child prodigy Albéniz was accepted, at the age of seven, as a private pupil by Antoine-François Marmontel, the celebrated piano pedagogue whose students included Bizet and Debussy. Back in Spain within a year, he gave a concert tour and eventually entered the Madrid Conservatory. He soon ran away, concertized around Spain, and in 1872 stowed away on a ship sailing for Latin America. Upon his return to Europe the following year, he entered the Leipzig Conservatory, where he briefly studied with Carl Reinecke. Soon thereafter, a patron enabled him to enter Brussels Conservatory to study piano and composition. Albéniz won the conservatory's first prize in 1879; the following year, he obtained an audience with Franz Liszt in Budapest; he joined the master's entourage for a spell and continued to work on his technique as a pianist. After more wandering through Europe and South America, he settled in Barcelona in 1883, married, and started a family. By that time, he already had a reputation as a composer of brilliant salon music for the piano. Many of these pieces are just as frequently played on guitar by modern performers. Selections from the Suite Española No. 1, Op. 47, written between 1882 and 1889, continue to charm and appear often on classical greatest-hits collections. They also demonstrate his nascent appreciation for Spanish folk music. Around 1890, he met Felipe Pedrell, a prominent musicologist, composer, and collector of folk songs. Following the encounter with Pedrell, Albéniz re-examined his work as a composer, deciding to seek new inspiration in the rich musical traditions of Spain. Not yet satisfied with his craftsmanship, Albéniz moved to Paris to study with Paul Dukas and Vincent d'Indy. The restless Albéniz somehow hung on to a job teaching piano at Paris' Schola Cantorum from 1893 to 1900; then he undertook further peregrinations while working on his masterpiece, Iberia. An immensely popular work, Iberia has also been transcribed for orchestra; successful orchestral versions include Leopold Stokowski's "Fête-Dieu à Seville." Another work which gained wide popularity as an orchestral transcription is the "Tango in D" from the 1890 España for piano, Op. 165. Albéniz also wrote for the stage; his lyric comedy Pepita Jiménez and several other works were produced in the 1890s. He died in 1909. ~ TiVo Staff

Manuel Ponce was a Mexican pianist and composer whose style underwent a profound change in midlife; his works are clearly divisible into two types. The earlier style was derived primarily from the brilliant salon style of Moszkowski and Chaminade, and is represented by numerous light works for the piano and a huge quantity of sentimental songs. After studying with Dukas, Ponce developed a style that combined French Impressionism and neo-Classical contrapuntal techniques. Most of his guitar music and the majority of his more serious and larger works were written in this style. In addition to the songs and early piano works, Ponce composed a piano concerto, several large symphonic works for orchestra, the Concierto del sur for guitar and orchestra, which was premiered by Segovia, some chamber music, two piano sonatas, and a large quantity of guitar music.

Born in 1882, Ponce had no important teachers during his childhood in Mexico. In 1895 he was made organist of Saint Diego, Aguascalientes, and in 1900 he went to Mexico City to study piano with Vicente Mañes. From 1901 until 1904 he supported himself as an organist, teacher and music critic back in Aguascalientes. Ponce left for Europe in 1904, giving his first recital abroad in St. Louis on the way. He stayed in Berlin, teaching and concertizing until his return to Mexico City in 1909 to succeed Castro as the piano instructor at the Mexico City Conservatory. During this time, his compositions became fairly popular in Latin countries, and his renown grew; he became conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra from 1917-1919. In 1925, Ponce moved to Paris and edited a music periodical; it was during this period that he studied with Dukas and reformulated his compositional style. He returned to Mexico in 1933, and remained there until his death. Many of Ponce's earlier works have faded into obscurity, but some of his songs, particularly Estrellita (1914), became enormously popular, and are still occasionally performed. Although most of his guitar pieces have become part of the standard repertory, his major works are seldom performed outside of Mexico.

Finland's Jean Sibelius is perhaps the most important composer associated with nationalism in music and one of the most influential in the development of the symphony and symphonic poem.

Sibelius was born in southern Finland, the second of three children. His physician father left the family bankrupt, owing to his financial extravagance, a trait that, along with heavy drinking, he would pass on to Jean. Jean showed talent on the violin and at age nine composed his first work for it, Rain Drops. In 1885 Sibelius entered the University of Helsinki to study law, but after only a year found himself drawn back to music. He took up composition studies with Martin Wegelius and violin with Mitrofan Wasiliev, then Hermann Csillag. During this time he also became a close friend of Busoni. Though Sibelius auditioned for the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, he would come to realize he was not suited to a career as a violinist.

In 1889 Sibelius traveled to Berlin to study counterpoint with Albert Becker, where he also was exposed to new music, particularly that of Richard Strauss. In Vienna he studied with Karl Goldmark and then Robert Fuchs, the latter said to be his most effective teacher. Now Sibelius began pondering the composition of the Kullervo symphonic poem, based on the Kalevala legends. Sibelius returned to Finland, taught music, and in June 1892, married Aino Järnefelt, daughter of General Alexander Järnefelt, head of one of the most influential families in Finland. The premiere of Kullervo in April 1893 created a veritable sensation, Sibelius thereafter being looked upon as the foremost Finnish composer. The Lemminkäinen suite, begun in 1895 and premiered on April 13, 1896, has come to be regarded as the most important music by Sibelius up to that time.

In 1897 the Finnish Senate voted to pay Sibelius a short-term pension, which some years later became a lifetime conferral. The honor was in lieu of his loss of an important professorship in composition at the music school, the position going to Robert Kajanus. The year 1899 saw the premiere of Sibelius' First Symphony, which was a tremendous success, to be sure, but not quite of the magnitude of that of Finlandia (1899; rev. 1900).

In the next decade Sibelius would become an international figure in the concert world. Kajanus introduced several of the composer's works abroad; Sibelius himself was invited to Heidelberg and Berlin to conduct his music. In March 1901, the Second Symphony was received as a statement of independence for Finland, although Sibelius always discouraged attaching programmatic ideas to his music. His only concerto, for violin, came in 1903. The next year Sibelius built a villa outside of Helsinki, named "Ainola" after his wife, where he would live for his remaining 53 years. After a 1908 operation to remove a throat tumor, Sibelius was implored to abstain from alcohol and tobacco, a sanction he followed until 1915. It is generally believed that the darkening of mood in his music during these years owes something to the health crisis.

Sibelius made frequent trips to England, having visited first in 1905 at the urging of Granville Bantock. In 1914 he traveled to Norfolk, CT, where he conducted his newest work The Oceanides. Sibelius spent the war years in Finland working on his Fifth Symphony. Sibelius traveled to England for the last time in 1921. Three years later he completed his Seventh Symphony, and his last work was the incidental music for The Tempest (1925). For his last 30 years Sibelius lived a mostly quiet life, working only on revisions and being generally regarded as the greatest living composer of symphonies. In 1955 his 90th birthday was widely celebrated throughout the world with many performances of his music. Sibelius died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1957. ~ Robert Cummings

One of the relatively few women composers of her time to achieve great popularity, Cécile Chaminade was a child prodigy; she began playing the piano very early, and her first compositions date from the age of eight. Her father wouldn't allow her to attend the Paris Conservatoire, but she did work privately with many instructors, including Benjamin Godard, with whom she studied composition. She gave her first public recital at age 18, and from then on appeared frequently as a pianist in France and Belgium, often playing her own music. She was a regular on British concert stages from the early 1890s, and was a guest of Queen Victoria during one of her British tours. Chaminade made her American debut in 1908, playing her Concertstück, Op. 40 (written around 1896) with the Philadelphia Orchestra. She was a big hit in America, and within a few years many Chaminade clubs sprang up around the country. In 1913 she was the first woman to receive the Legion of Honor from the French government. A large percentage of Chaminade's nearly 400 compositions were published during her lifetime. About half of those are short piano pieces, some of which, like The Scarf Dance and The Flatterer, were once quite popular. She also wrote about 125 songs, as well as a few larger, more ambitious pieces like the ballet Callirhoë (1888), the comic opera La Sevillane, and the dramatic symphony Les ÍøÆغÚÁÏes, Op. 26, for chorus and orchestra (1888). She also composed two orchestral suites and a handful of chamber works, including two trios.

Eric Coates was perhaps the most important composer of symphonic light music in the first half of the twentieth century outside the Viennese sphere. He took the music genre and made it into as bona fide and influential an art form as that created by any member of the Strauss family. He is often regarded as the Mozart of a music world whose generally light emotional expression is colored by splashy orchestration and perky rhythms. Yet, his music featured an elegance and aristocratic air and could capture moods and, in stage works, story lines with deftly vivid imagery. Among his important compositions are the 1930 ballet Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, revised eight years later and re-titled The Enchanted Garden; and Springtime Suite from 1937. Even though Coates composed music in a less serious genre, he must be regarded nearly as highly as England's other important figures from his time, Vaughan Williams, Sir Arnold Bax, and Gustav Holst.

The youngest of five children, whose physician father was an amateur flutist and whose mother was an accomplished pianist, Eric began study on the violin at age six. Later on he took up the viola. He showed no serious interest in composing until age 20 when he entered the Royal Academy of Music, where he studied viola with Lionel Tertis and composition with Frederick Corder.

In the period between 1908 and 1909, he wrote his first vocal works: Four old English Songs and Stonecracker John. In 1910 he began playing the viola in the Beecham Symphony Orchestra and shortly afterward got a similar post in the Queen's Hall Orchestra, under Sir Henry Wood. He turned out his first orchestral work, the Miniature Suite, in 1911. Two years later, Coates married 18-year-old Phyllis Black, who would write lyrics for him and be of immense help to him throughout his career. Because of a progressive neuritis in his left hand and arm, Coates was exempt from military service during the war years. By 1919, however, the condition forced him to give up his first-chair viola post in the Queen's Hall Orchestra.

In 1927, Coates composed his orchestral suite Four Ways, which achieved considerable popularity. Perhaps his greatest success, though, came with the 1933 London Suite, which contained a section called "Knightsbridge," a march that took on a life apart from the suite when it was used to introduce the BBC radio program In Town Tonight, which became familiar to virtually every British listener during its 27-year run.

When his wife began working for the Red Cross in 1940, Coates was moved to write Calling All Workers, whose theme was subsequently used by the BBC for another radio show, Music While You Work. The orchestral suites Four Centuries (1942) and Three Elizabeths (1944) merely solidified his position now as the composer of the most familiar British music of all time.

In the postwar years, Coates continued to turn out popular scores, like Music Everywhere (1949). The composer continued to be active as a conductor in his last years, taking up the baton at one notable Promenade concert in August 1956, after Sir Malcolm Sargent had led the orchestra in a Tchaikovsky work. The 70-year-old Coates led the ensemble in his Four Centuries Suite and drew an enthusiastic response from the audience. Coates suffered a stroke and died on December 23, 1957.

Widely regarded as the most distinguished of Czech composers, Antonin Dvorák produced attractive and vigorous music possessed of clear formal outlines, melodies that are both memorable and spontaneous-sounding, and a colorful, effective instrumental sense. Dvorák is considered one of the major figures of nationalism, both proselytizing for and making actual use of folk influences, which he expertly combined with classical forms in works of all genres. His symphonies are among his most widely appreciated works; the Symphony No. 9 ("From the New World," 1893) takes a place among the finest and most popular examples of the symphonic literature. Similarly, his Cello Concerto (1894-1895) is one of the cornerstones of the repertory, providing the soloist an opportunity for virtuosic flair and soaring expressivity. Dvorák displayed special skill in writing for chamber ensembles, producing dozens of such works; among these, his 14 string quartets (1862-1895), the "American" Quintet (1893) and the "Dumky" Trio (1890-1891) are outstanding examples of their respective genres, overflowing with attractive, folk-like melodies set like jewels into the solid fixtures of Brahmsian absolute forms.

Dvorák's "American" and "New World" works arose during the composer's sojourn in the United States in the early 1890s; he was uneasy with American high society and retreated to a small, predominantly Czech town in Iowa for summer vacations during his stay. However, he did make the acquaintance of the pioneering African-American baritone H.T. Burleigh, who may have influenced the seemingly spiritual-like melodies in the "New World" symphony and other works; some claim that the similarity resulted instead from a natural affinity between African-American and Eastern European melodic structures.

By that time, Dvorák was among the most celebrated of European composers, seen by many as the heir to Brahms, who had championed Dvorák during the younger composer's long climb to the top. The son of a butcher and occasional zither player, Dvorák studied the organ in Prague as a young man and worked variously as a café violist and church organist during the 1860s and 1870s while creating a growing body of symphonies, chamber music, and Czech-language opera. For three years in the 1870s he won a government grant (the Viennese critic Hanslick was among the judges) designed to help the careers of struggling young creative artists. Brahms gained for Dvorák a contract with his own publisher, Simrock, in 1877; the association proved a profitable one despite an initial controversy that flared when Dvorák insisted on including Czech-language work titles on the printed covers, a novelty in those musically German-dominated times. In the 1880s and 1890s Dvorák's reputation became international in scope thanks to a series of major masterpieces that included the Seventh, Eighth, and "New World" symphonies. At the end of his life he turned to opera once again; Rusalka, from 1901, incorporates Wagnerian influences into the musical telling of its legend-based story, and remains the most frequently performed of the composer's vocal works. Dvorák, a professor at Prague University from 1891 on, exerted a deep influence on Czech music of the 20th century; among his students was Josef Suk, who also became his son-in-law. ~ Rovi Staff

Edward Elgar, one of the pre-eminent musical figures of his time, bridged the 19th and 20th centuries as the finest English composer since the days of Handel and Purcell. His compositions have been recorded countless times, and many have become mainstays in the classical repertoire throughout the world.

Elgar was born in Broadheath, England, on June 2, 1857. His father owned a music shop and was a church organist who taught his son piano, organ, and violin; apart from this instruction, Elgar was practically self-taught as a musician. At the age of 16, the composer became a freelance musician, and for the remainder of his life, he never took a permanent job. He conducted locally, performed, taught, and composed, scraping by until his marriage to Caroline Alice Roberts, a published novelist of some wealth, in 1889. Elgar had by this time achieved only limited recognition. He and his wife moved to London, where he scarcely fared better in advancing his career. The couple eventually retreated to Worcester, Elgar suffering from bitter self-doubt and depression. Alice stood by him the entire time, her unfailing confidence restoring his spirits. He was further buoyed by the success of his Imperial March, Op. 32, which earned him a publisher and a vital friendship with August Jaeger, his editor and confidant. In 1899, Elgar composed one of his best-known works, the "Enigma" Variations, Op. 36, which catapulted him to fame. The work is a cryptic tribute to Alice and to the many friends who stood behind the composer in the shaky early days of his career. Conductor Hans Richter proclaimed it a masterpiece, and his performances of the work in Britain and Germany established the composer's lasting success.

Elgar's most fruitful period was the first decade of the 20th century, during which he wrote some of his noblest, most expressive music, including the Symphony No. 1 in A flat major, Op. 55 (1907-1908), and the Violin Concerto in B minor, Op. 61 (1909-1910). His best-known works from this period, however, are the first four of his Pomp and Circumstance Marches (1901-1907); the first of these, subtitled "Land of Hope and Glory," became an unofficial second national anthem for the British Empire.

Elgar suffered a blow when Jaeger (the "Nimrod" of the "Enigma" Variations) died in 1909. The composer's productivity dropped, and the horrors of World War I deepened his melancholy outlook. His music became more intimate, even anguished. Still, he wrote some of his best chamber music during this period, as well as the masterly Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85 (1919), whose deep feeling of sadness and impending loss surely relates to the final illness of his faithful Alice, who died in 1920.

For some time after her death, Elgar wrote little of significance, but he made a historical foray into the recording studios when new electrical recording processes were developed. The fortunate result was a number of masterly interpretations of his orchestral music that have survived for posterity. In the early 1930s, Elgar set to work on a third symphony, left unfinished at his death in Worcester on February 23, 1934. The work was brought to a generally well-received realization by Anthony Payne in the late 1990s and was subsequently recorded. ~ Rovi Staff

Mompou was a Catalan composer of lyric songs and piano miniatures whose music is characterized by Impressionist elegance, simple and direct melody, and the haunting, deep emotions of folk music.

Mompou studied piano at the Conservatorio del Liceo in Barcelona and gave his first concert at the age of 15. Three years later, with a letter of recommendation from composer Granados, he went to Paris to study piano and harmony. While there, he wrote his first piano pieces, the Impresiones intimas (1911-1914).

He became very taken with Debussy and the modern French composers, especially the spare melodiousness of Erik Satie. Mompou characterized this Satie quality in his music as "recomençament" (starting over at the beginning), a return to a kind of fundamental, basic state of realization. In emulation of Satie, Mompou adopted his method of scoring (in many of the piano works) by eliminating bar lines and key signatures, and (like Bartók and other composers) placing accidentals only before the notes to which they immediately apply. He also picked up the idea of inserting unusual and often illogically humorous comments, directions, and surreal images in the score, which actually serve to suggest the mood of a passage more adequately than the normal emotional and articulation markings -- some of Mompou's directions were "Chantez avec le fraîcheur de l'herbe humide" and "Donnez des excuses."

When World War I broke out, Mompou returned to Barcelona, where he continued composing from 1914-1921. His works at that time include the song L'hora grisa (1915) to words by Blancafort, and the piano sets Pessebres (1914-1917), Scènes d'enfants (1915-1918), Cants mágìcs (1917-1919), Fêtes lointaines (1920), and Charmes (1920-1921). Suburbis (1916-1917) contains musical portraits of people encountered during Mompou's long walks. They were richly orchestrated by Manuel Rosenthal in 1936. In El carrer, el guitarrista i el cavall (The road, the guitarist and the old horse) a trumpet tune suggests the slow progress of a cart loaded with stone drawn by a weary horse "with large, sad eyes." An old man grinds a (wonderfully imitated) barrel organ. Gitane I and Gitane II draw portraits of two female gypsy friends, La Fana and La Chatuncha, through teasing dance music. La cegueta expresses gentle empathy for "the little blind girl" whose slow, uncertain walk is expressed by mirrored patterns. In L'home de l'Aristó (The ariston player) we hear a jolly pieces played again by the wandering beggar musician.

In 1921 Mompou returned to Paris where he remained 20 years, and then returned permanently to Barcelona. He was made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, and elected to the Royal Academy of San Jorge in Barcelona and of San Fernando in Madrid.

The creation of many piano sets extended over large time spans: the 12 Cançons i dansas (1921-1928, 1942-1962), the ten Préludes (1927-1930, 1943-1951), Variaciones sobre un tema di Chopin (1938-57), the brilliant and evocative Paisajes (1942-1960), and Música callada (1959-1967).

Several of his significant songs include the Comptines I-VI (1931, 1943), Combat del somni (1942-1948), and Llueve sobre el rio, Pastoral (1945). His works for chorus are the Cantar del alma (1951) with text from St. John of the Cross, and Improperios (1963) for chorus and orchestra.