Wilhelm Richard Wagner (22 May 1813 – 13 February

1883) was a German composer, theatre

director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known
for his operas (or, as some of his later works were later
known, "music dramas"). Unlike most opera composers,
Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of
his stage works. Initially establishing his reputation as a
composer of works in the romantic vein of Carl Maria von
Weberand Giacomo Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionised
opera through his concept of theGesamtkunstwerk ("total
work of art"), by which he sought to synthesise the poetic,
visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to
drama. He described this vision in a series of essays
published between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realised these
ideas most fully in the first half of the four-opera cycle Der
Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung).

Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi (9 or 10 October

1813 – 27 January 1901) was an Italian opera composer.In
his early operas, Verdi demonstrated a sympathy with
the Risorgimento movement which sought the unification of
Italy. He also participated briefly as an elected politician. The
chorus "Va, pensiero" from his early opera Nabucco (1842),
and similar choruses in later operas, were much in the spirit
of the unification movement, and the composer himself
became esteemed as a representative of these ideals. An
intensely private person, Verdi however did not seek to
ingratiate himself with popular movements and as he became
professionally successful was able to reduce his operatic
workload and sought to establish himself as a landowner in
his native region. He surprised the musical world by returning,
after his success with the operaAida (1871), with three late
masterpieces: his Requiem (1874), and the
operasOtello (1887) and Falstaff (1893).
 Georges Bizet (25 October 1838 – 3 June 1875), registered at birth
as Alexandre César Léopold Bizet, was a French composer of
the romantic era. Best known for his operas in a career cut short by his
early death, Bizet achieved few successes before his final
work, Carmen, which has become one of the most popular and
frequently performed works in the entire opera repertoire.During a
brilliant student career at the Conservatoire de Paris, Bizet won many
prizes, including the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1857. He was
recognised as an outstanding pianist, though he chose not to capitalise
on this skill and rarely performed in public. Returning to Paris after
almost three years in Italy, he found that the main Parisian opera
theatres preferred the established classical repertoire to the works of
newcomers. His keyboard and orchestral compositions were likewise
largely ignored; as a result, his career stalled, and he earned his living
mainly by arranging and transcribing the music of others. Restless for
success, he began many theatrical projects during the 1860s, most of
which were abandoned. Neither of his two operas that reached the
stage in this time—Les pêcheurs de perles and La jolie fille de Perth—
were immediately successful.
Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini
(22 December 1858 – 29 November 1924) was an
Italian opera composer who has been called "the greatest
composer of Italian opera after Verdi".
Puccini's early work was rooted in traditional late-19th-century
romantic Italian opera. Later, he successfully developed his work
in the realistic verismo style, of which he became one of the
leading exponents. Puccini's most renowned works are La
bohème (1896), Tosca (1900), Madama Butterfly (1904),
and Turandot (1924), all of which are among the important
operas played as standards.

Franz Peter Schubert (31 January 1797 – 19 November 1828) was an

Austrian composer.Schubert died at age 31, but was extremely prolific
during his lifetime. His output consists of over 600 secular vocal works
(mainly Lieder), seven completesymphonies, sacred
music, operas, incidental music and a large body of chamber and piano
music.Appreciation of Schubert's music while he was alive was limited to
a relatively small circle of admirers in Vienna, but interest in his work
increased significantly in the decades following his death. Felix
Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt,Johannes Brahms and
other 19th-century composers discovered and championed his works.
Today, Schubert is ranked among the greatest composers of the
lateClassical and early Romantic eras and is one of the most frequently
performed composers of the early 19th century.