Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western art music, he remains one of the most famous and influential of all composers. His best-known compositions include nine symphonies, five piano concertos, one violin concerto, 32 piano sonatas, 16 string quartets, his great Mass the Missa solemnis, and one opera, Fidelio. Together with Mozart and Haydn, he was part of the First Viennese School. Born in Bonn, then the capital of the Electorate of Cologne and part of the Holy Roman Empire, Beethoven displayed his musical talents at an early age and was taught by his father Johann van Beethoven and by composer and conductor Christian Gottlob Neefe. At the age of 21 he moved to Vienna, where he began studying composition with Joseph Haydn, and gained a reputation as a virtuoso pianist. He lived in Vienna until his death. By his late 20s his hearing began to deteriorate, and by the last decade of his life he was almost totally deaf. In 1811 he gave up conducting and performing in public but continued to compose; many of his most admired works come from these last 15 years of his life.

If you would open any biography of Franz Liszt, you would probably mostly read about his disquiet life as a piano virtuoso, his passionate love life, and the return to his catholic roots at the end of his life. Although all of this might be true, it only scratches the surface of his comprehensive musical personality. Liszt was a pianist, conductor, teacher and organiser, but above all he was a composer of a voluminous, capricious body of work. Even though his piano works formed his core business, he gave rise to the symphonic poem, got rid of the organ's stuffy appearance, and reinvigorated the oratorio. Moreover, with his piano transciptions of Bach's organ works and Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, he was an advocate of both old and new music.
Together with his son-in-law Richard Wagner, he was in the forefront of the Romantic movement and anticipated the musical revolutions of the early 20th century with his new composition techniques.

Busoni was a man with many faces. He was born in Tuscany from a German mother and Italian father, and settled down in Berlin, after visiting Leipzig, Helsinki and Moscow. There he established himself as a composer, but above all a phenomenal pianist. His music shows some discrepancies. On the one hand, he looks back on the Romantic period with his giant pianoconcerto with male choir as the absolute pinnacle. On the onder hand, he looks forward to the future and found that music had to be freed of the chains of outdated ideas. In his much-read manifest 'Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst’ (1907), Busoni sketches his ideal image of music, and in his Six Sonatinas for piano he presented these ideas musically. In his unfinished opera Doctor Faust, all discrepancies come together as the main character himself is a curious mix of seemingly incompatible elements, just like Busoni.