Born Today! 24.01.2024

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (born Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann; 24 January 1776 – 25 June 1822) was a German Romantic author of fantasy and Gothic horror, a jurist, composer, music critic and artist. His stories form the basis of Jacques Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann, in which Hoffmann appears (heavily fictionalized) as the hero. He is also the author of the novella The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, on which Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker is based. The ballet Coppélia is based on two other stories that Hoffmann wrote, while Schumann's Kreisleriana is based on Hoffmann's character Johannes Kreisler. Hoffmann's stories highly influenced 19th-century literature, and he is one of the major authors of the Romantic movement.

Max Wilhelm Carl Vogrich (24 January 1852 – 10 June 1916) was an Austrian pianist and composer. His most popular pieces are the "Passpied", "Staccato Caprice", and "Valse Brilliante".

Alexander Alexandrovich Ilyinsky (Russian: Алекса́ндр Алекса́ндрович Ильи́нский; 24 January [O.S. 12 January] 1859 – 23 February 1920) was a Russian music teacher and composer, best known for the Lullaby (Berceuse), Op. 13, No. 7, from his orchestral suite "Noure and Anitra", and for the opera The Fountain of Bakhchisaray set to Pushkin's poem of the same name. Alexander Ilyinsky was born in Tsarskoye Selo in 1859. His father was a physician in the Alexander Cadet Corps. His general education was in the First Cadet Corps at St Petersburg, and he served in the Artillery from 1877 to 1879. His music studies were in Berlin, under Theodor Kullak and Natanael Betcher at the Berlin Conservatory, and under Woldemar Bargiel at the Neue Akademie der Tonkunst. He returned to Russia in 1885, graduated from the St Petersburg Conservatory and taught at the Moscow Philharmonic Society School of Music and Drama. He resigned in 1899 and started giving private lessons. In 1905 he joined the staff of the Moscow Conservatory. His students included Vasily Kalinnikov, Anatoly Nikolayevich Alexandrov, Nikolai Roslavets, Elena Stanekaite-Laumyanskene, and the Finnish composer Väinö Raitio.His major work, the 4-act opera The Fountain of Bakhchisaray, to a libretto based on Alexander Pushkin's poem, was produced in Moscow in 1911. He also wrote a symphony, a Concert Overture, a string quartet, three orchestral suites, a set of orchestral Croatian Dances, a symphonic movement called Psyche, two cantatas for female chorus and orchestra (Strekoza (The Dragonfly) and Rusalka), incidental music to Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Philoctetes, and to Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy's Tsar Fiodor Ioannovich, piano pieces, church music, songs, etc. His name is perhaps most familiar to music students for his Lullaby from the third orchestral suite (sometimes described as a ballet), "Noure and Anitra", Op. 13, which excerpt has appeared in many different arrangements. Alexander Ilyinsky also wrote "A Short Guide to the Practical Teaching of Orchestration" (1917), which remained in use long after his death. In 1904 there appeared under his editorship "Biographies of all Composers from the Fourth to the Twentieth Century". He edited the complete piano works of Beethoven for a commercial publication.He died in 1920 in Moscow. Orgy of the Spirits, an excerpt from The Fountain of Bakhchisaray, was used in the scores of the film East of Java (1935) and the adventure serials Tim Tyler's Luck (1937) and Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars (1938). It was also used as the theme music for the radio serial The Witch’s Tale.

Ferdinand Hellmesberger (24 January 1863 – 15 March 1940) was an Austrian cellist and conductor.

Stanyslav Pylypovych Lyudkevych (Ukrainian: Станіслав (Станислав) Пилипович Людкевич; 24 January 1879 – 10 September 1979) was a Soviet and Ukrainian composer, theorist, teacher, and musical activist. People's Artist of the USSR (1969) and Hero of Socialist Labour (1979). He earned a Doctor of Philosophy in musicology in Vienna, 1908. His name may alternatively be spelled as Stanislaw Ludkiewicz (Polish) or Stanislav Filipovich Ludkevich (Russian).

Vladimir Vladimirovich Shcherbachov (Shcherbachyov, Shcherbachev) (Russian: Влади́мир Влади́мирович Щербачёв; 24 January 1889, in Warsaw – 5 March 1952, in Leningrad) was a Soviet composer. He studied with Maximilian Steinberg, Anatoly Lyadov, and Jāzeps Vītols (Joseph Wihtol) at the St. Petersburg Conservatory from 1908 to 1914. While there he also worked as a pianist for Sergey Diaghilev and taught theory. He served in World War I and then worked in Soviet government music positions. In 1918-1923 he worked as a lecturer and ran the musical department of the Narkompros. He later became a professor at the Leningrad Conservatory (1923-1931 and 1944-1948) and the Tbilisi Conservatory. He counted Boris Arapov, Vasily Velikanov, Evgeny Mravinsky, Valery Zhelobinsky, Gavriil Popov, Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky, Pyotr Ryazanov, and Mikhail Chulaki among his pupils, as well as various others.

Norman Dello Joio (January 24, 1913 – July 24, 2008) was an American composer active for over half a century. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1957.

Vítězslava Kaprálová (Czech pronunciation: [ˈvi:cɛslava ˈkapra:lova:]; 24 January 1915 – 16 June 1940) was a Czech composer and conductor of 20th-century classical music.

Gottfried von Einem (24 January 1918 – 12 July 1996) was an Austrian composer. He is known chiefly for his operas influenced by the music of Stravinsky and Prokofiev, as well as by jazz. He also composed pieces for piano, violin and organ.

Leon Kirchner (January 24, 1919 – September 17, 2009) was an American composer of contemporary classical music. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he won a Pulitzer Prize for his String Quartet No. 3.

Simeon ten Holt (24 January 1923 – 25 November 2012) was a Dutch contemporary classical composer. Ten Holt was born in Bergen, North Holland, and studied with Jakob van Domselaer, eventually developing a highly personal style of minimal composition. Van Domselaer's influence on ten Holt's musical philosophy was considerable, with the younger composer picking up van Domselaer's interests in the links between music and visual art, in music's relationship with mathematics, and in the use of the piano as a principal instrument in his compositions. Ten Holt generally used consonant, tonal materials and his works are organized in numerous cells, made up of a few measures each, which are repeated ad libitum according to the player's preference. Many of his works are for piano or ensembles of multiple pianos. His most famous work is Canto Ostinato, which he wrote in 1976 and is considered one of the most famous works in contemporary classical Dutch music history. Ten Holt died 25 November 2012 in Alkmaar, the Netherlands, aged 89.

Ib Nørholm (24 January 1931 in Søborg, Gladsaxe Municipality – 10 June 2019) was a Danish composer and organist.

Masato Hatanaka (畑中 正人, Masato Hatanaka, born in 1975 in Hamatonbetsu-cho, Hokkaido, Japan) is a Japanese musician, composer, sound artist, sound designer and producer.