Life is resplendent! We have excuses to celebrate every day of the year! Let us celebrate each composer’s birthday by playing their music at home! If you have photos of your own composer’s birthday celebration to share, we would love to post them here!
It is also a powerful exercise to print color copies of your child’s favorite composers e.g. off this page, note their birthdays and make a “scrap book” page of pictures of these composers surrounding a current photo of your child joyfully at the piano (with his or her birthday noted). We put one of these “scrap book photo album style page” in the front page of our little one’s piano practice binder.
Images of composers when they were children, or composers doing routine things are fun for children to look at and relate to the musicians.
This page is alive and growing, as I take frequent breaks to go practice piano with my little one. Do click “join this site” on the left panel above and follow my blog to see what updates my daily life allows me to make on this website!
January Babies
February Babies
March Babies
Alexander Goedicke: 4 March 1877. Born in Moscow, Russia.
Johann Sebastian Bach birthday: March 21, 1685. Born in Eisenach, Saxe-Eisenach
Frédéric Chopin
Franz Joseph Haydn birthday: March 31, 1732. Born in Rohrau, Austria, a village near the border with Hungary.
April Babies
May Babies
Anatoly Konstantinovich Lyadov or Liadov (Russian: Анато́лий Константи́нович Ля́дов; May 11 [O.S. April 29] 1855 – August 28 [O.S. August 15] 1914) was a Russian composer, teacher and conductor.
Anatoly Lyadov
June Babies
July Babies
August Babies
Sergei Slonimsky (Russian: Серге́й Миха́йлович Слони́мский, born August 12, 1932, Leningrad) is a Russian and Soviet composer, pianist and musicologist.
September Babies
Dimitri Shostakovich birthday: September 25th, 1906. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia
Mitya, in the middle, sandwiched by his sisters.
October Babies
Franz Liszt birthday: October 22, 1811. Born in village of Doborján,in the Kingdom of Hungary
Young Franz Liszt
November Babies
December Babies
Ludvig van Beethoven
Beethoven
Wikipedia Entry regarding Beethoven’s birthday: … There is no authentic record of the date of Beethoven’s birth; however, the registry of his baptism, in a Roman Catholic service at the Parish of St. Regius on 17 December 1770, survives. As children of that era were traditionally baptised the day after birth in the Catholic Rhine country, and it is known that Beethoven’s family and his teacher Johann Albrechtsberger celebrated his birthday on 16 December, most scholars accept 16 December 1770 as Beethoven’s date of birth.
Leopold Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Franz Schubert
Franz at 16. Source
Joseph M.
What is the source of this sketch (artist, year, etc.)? Are you 100% sure it’s a portrait of Franz Schubert? (I have encountered it (mis?)attributed as Schumann.) What’s striking is how handsome Schubert(?) appears here, compared with his facial features (not merely pudginess & hair loss) by his late 20s.)
jzinius
I don’t know, sometimes white folks all rook same to me. I need a historian to jump in here with references for me. Sorry! Handsome and exuberating with life, I agree with you. Ah! The fleeting nature of youthful beauty…