Born Today! 02.11.2024

Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf (2 November 1739 – 24 October 1799) was an Austrian composer, violinist, and silvologist. He was a friend of both Haydn and Mozart. His best-known works include the German singspiel Doktor und Apotheker and a number of programmatic symphonies based on Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Charlotte Caroline Wilhelmine Bachmann, née Stöwe (2 November 1757 – 19 August 1817) was a German soprano, harpsichordist and composer. She was born in Berlin, the daughter of musician Wilhelm Heinrich Stöwe, and studied singing and harpsichord as a child. At the age of nine, she made her debut in the Liebhaberkonzerte (Amateur Concerts) which had been established by Friedrich Benda, son of Franz Benda. She married Berlin violist Karl Ludwig Bachmann on 20 September 1785. She was one of twenty founding members of the Berlin Singakademie in 1791, and was instrumental in establishing annual performances of C. H. Graun’s Der Tod Jesu between 1797 and 1806, a tradition that continued at the Berlin court until 1884. She was well regarded as a performer in Berlin. One of her songs was published in Rellstab's Clavier-Magazin in 1787. She died in Berlin.

Friedrich Wilhelm Michael Kalkbrenner (7 November 1785 – 10 June 1849), also known as Frédéric Kalkbrenner, was a pianist, composer, piano teacher and piano manufacturer. German by birth, Kalkbrenner studied at the Conservatoire de Paris, starting at a young age and eventually settled in Paris, where he lived until his death in 1849. Kalkbrenner composed more than 200 piano works, as well as many piano concertos and operas. When Frédéric Chopin came to Paris, Kalkbrenner suggested that Chopin could benefit by studying in one of Kalkbrenner's schools. It was not until the late 1830s that Kalkbrenner's reputation was surpassed by the likes of Chopin, Thalberg and Liszt. Author of a famous method of piano playing (1831) which was in print until the late 19th century, he ran in Paris what is sometimes called a "factory for aspiring virtuosos" and taught scores of pupils from as far away as Cuba. His pupils included Marie Pleyel, Marie Schauff, and Camille-Marie Stamaty. Through Stamaty, Kalkbrenner's piano method was passed on to Louis Moreau Gottschalk and Camille Saint-Saëns. He was one of the few composers who through deft business deals became enormously rich. Chopin dedicated his first piano concerto to him. Kalkbrenner created transcriptions of Beethoven's nine symphonies for solo piano which were published by Giovanni Canti from 1842-1844; decades before Liszt did the same. He was the first to introduce long and rapid octave passages in both hands – today so familiar from 19th century piano music – into his piano texture; however it could be argued that he was preceded by Beethoven with this particular technique.

Paul Abraham (Hungarian: Ábrahám Pál; 2 November 1892 – 6 May 1960) was a Jewish-Hungarian composer of operettas, who scored major successes in the German-speaking world. His specialty – and own innovation – was the insertion of jazz interludes into operettas. Abraham was born in Apatin, Austria-Hungary (today Serbia), and studied at the Royal National Hungarian Academy of Music in Budapest from 1910 to 1916. He studied cello with Adolf Schiffer and composition with Viktor Herzfeld.

Louise-Justine Messiaen (née Delbos; 2 November 1906 – 22 April 1959), more commonly known under her pseudonym Claire Delbos, was a French violinist and composer, and first wife of the composer Olivier Messiaen.

Vieri Tosatti (born Rome, 1920 - died there, 1999) was an Italian composer. He is best known for his operas, among them Il sistema della dolcezza (1948), after Edgar Allan Poe's "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether", and Partita a pugni (1953), about a boxing match. His output also includes chamber music, as well as some symphonic and choral works. He studied at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia under Ildebrando Pizzetti.

Giuseppe Sinopoli (Italian pronunciation: [dʒuˈzɛppe siˈnɔːpoli]; 2 November 1946 – 20 April 2001) was an Italian conductor and composer.

Dmitri Nikolaevich Smirnov (Russian: Дми́трий Никола́евич Смирно́в; 2 November 1948 – 9 April 2020) was a Russian-British composer and academic teacher, who also published as Dmitri N. Smirnov and D. Smirnov-Sadovsky. He wrote operas, symphonies, string quartets and other chamber music, and vocal music from song to oratorio. Many of his works were inspired by the art of William Blake.

Richard Durrant Dip RCM, ARCM, FLCM (born Brighton, Sussex, 2 November 1962) is an English guitarist and composer. He studied guitar, cello, and composition at the Royal College of Music in London between 1981 and 1986. Since his debut at the Purcell Room, London in July 1986. Richard Durrant has gained an international reputation as one of the great guitarists of his generation. He has pursued both performance and composition in an unconventional career that has avoided categorisation and he has built a faithful, ever expanding audience who warm to his unpretentious manner and natural skills of communication. He is one of the only classical guitar virtuosi who performs standing up.