Employment within the court of Louis XIV allowed Jean-Baptiste Lully to lavish his talents on creating spectacular works for the stage, as Jan Smaczny explains.

Despite a lack of success in his own lifetime, notably with Carmen, Bizet soon became hailed as an operatic master, as George Hall explains.

Christopher Wiley traces the career of Ethel Smyth, who was the first woman to have an opera performed at the Metropolitan Opera, wrote the suffragette’s anthem, and developed a parallel career as an author.

For opera lovers the world over, Giacomo Puccini epitomises Italian opera. Phillip Sametz examines the life and career of one of opera’s most successful musical dramatists.

Australia’s greatest cultural loss from WWI finally gets to come home with the launch of his complete recording edition. Christopher Latham reports on the late-flowering fruits of a labour of love.

Feted in his own era, the French composer deserves to be remembered for more than the small handful of his works that are familiar today, says Roger Nichols.

While masterfully adaptable when his creativity was restricted by others, it was on being given a free rein that the Polish composer revealed his unique brilliance, as Adrian Thomas explains.

Many influences combined to make Grieg’s music so instantly memorable but, says Jessica Duchen, it took his immaculate sense of balance to make them all work together.

Richard Meale once stood alongside Peter Sculthorpe as a hero of Australian music. James Koehne examines why he fell from prominence and argues that he was the most Romantic of Modernist composers.

One of the finest violinists of his or any generation, Ysaÿe was also a composer of considerably greater talent than he himself was inclined to believe.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s duty to write music for the Easter period led to some of his most inspired and dramatically inventive masterpieces.

Hector Berlioz died 150 years ago this month. His music was largely ignored for more than 80 years after his death, his maverick style misjudged as eccentric, outlandish and even amateur. We pinpoint the event that led to a true appreciation of his genius.

He is regularly reviled as something of a monster, but as Michael Scott Rohan finds out, a closer look at Richard Wagner – and in particular his music – reveals a more genial side to the German composer.

While Schütz is best known today for his choral masterpiece The Christmas Story, he also played a vital role when it came to shaping German music (with a little help from abroad), says Paul Riley.

The master of miniature piano forms, Chopin was spurred on by his passion for the writer George Sand and a deep understanding of his Polish musical roots.

Few living composers have provoked more extreme reactions from their listeners than Harrison Birtwistle. Bayan Northcott reveals how the now octogenarian composer found a voice to be reckoned with.