Born Today! 11.02.2024

Egidio Romualdo Duni (or Egide Romuald Duny; 11 February 1708 – 11 June 1775) was an Italian composer who studied in Naples and worked in Italy, France and London, writing both Italian and French operas.

Giovanni Pacini (11 February 1796 – 6 December 1867) was an Italian composer, best known for his operas. Pacini was born in Catania, Sicily, the son of the buffo Luigi Pacini, who was to appear in the premieres of many of Giovanni's operas. The family was of Tuscan origin, living in Catania when the composer was born. His first 25 or so operas were written when Gioachino Rossini dominated the Italian operatic stage. But Pacini's operas were "rather superficial", a fact which, later, he candidly admitted in his Memoirs. For some years he held the post of "director of the Teatro San Carlo in Naples." Later, retiring to Viareggio to found a school of music, Pacini took time to assess the state of opera in Italy and, during a five-year period during which he stopped composing, laid out his ideas in his Memoirs. Like Saverio Mercadante, who also reassessed the strength and weaknesses of this period in opera, Pacini's style did change, but he quickly became eclipsed by the rising influence of Giuseppe Verdi on the Italian operatic scene, and many of his operas appeared to be old fashioned and rarely, if ever, appeared outside of Italy." Pacini's work is largely forgotten today, although some recordings do exist.

Loïsa Puget (11 February 1810 – 24 October 1889) was a French composer.

Hans Bronsart von Schellendorf (11 February 1830 – 3 November 1913) was a classical musician and composer who studied under Franz Liszt.

Peter Heise (11 February 1830 – 12 September 1879) was a Danish composer, best known for the opera Drot og Marsk (King and Marshal). Heise's parents tried to press him into becoming a lawyer, but he scored highly in music at school, so he changed direction. He began writing songs at the age of 19. As a young man he collected several hundred folk songs directly from ordinary people. He used these tunes in Tornerose (Sleeping Beauty) and Bergliot (A Danish historical romance). He studied under Niels Wilhelm Gade, who was a major influence on his style. From 1857 to 1865 he was a teacher and organist at Sorø Academy. He did a setting of Hans Christian Andersen's poem Jylland mellem tvende Have (Jutland between two seas) in 1860. The opera Drot og Marsk tells the story of the murder of a medieval king, and contains some folk ballads. It shows a Wagnerian influence. His setting of the Shakespeare song When I was and a little tiny boy and Five Erotic songs are also in print. Many of his songs, usually for soprano and piano, concern dreams, folk-tales and the Middle Ages. Although his instrumental works are almost uniformly excellent, because of the tremendous popularity of his songs, they were overlooked. Among his chamber music works are 6 string quartets, a piano trio, a piano quintet, and a number of instrumental sonatas His Piano Quintet in F Major, composed in 1869, was widely regarded as a major work. Unfortunately, the work remained in manuscript for 140 years. However, in 2009, the world premiere edition of the parts to the Quintet was published by Edition Silvertrust. They have also reprinted his Cello Sonata (1867) and his Two Fantasy Pieces for Cello and Piano.

Antony Choudens (11 February 1849 – 15 July 1902) was a French music publisher and occasional composer.

Adele (Adelheit Johanne Auguste Hermine) aus der Ohe (11 February 1861 – 8 December 1937) was a German concert pianist and composer. Her compositions were published by G. Schirmer Inc.

Abel-Marie Alexis Decaux (11 February 1869 – 19 March 1943) was a French organist, composer, and pedagogue, best known for his piano suite Clairs de lune, some of the earliest pieces of dodecaphony. A student of Théodore Dubois, Jules Massenet, and Charles-Marie Widor, among others, he was the titular organist of the grand organ of the Sacré-Cœur basilica. Decaux was more renowned as a player and professor during his lifetime than a composer. He is popularly known as the "French Schoenberg".

Paul August von Klenau (11 February 1883 in Copenhagen – 31 August 1946 in Copenhagen) was a Danish-born composer who worked primarily in Germany and Austria.

Eric Lees Wild (11 February 1910 – 29 April 1989) was a Canadian conductor, trumpeter, arranger, and composer. He was the youngest child of Isaac Ashton Wild (1871–1963) and Sarah Ann Wild (née Brooks) (1874–1971) who emigrated from Lancashire, England in 1901.

Eleonora Grigor'yevna Eksanishvili (Yeksanishvili) (February 11, 1919 – January 5, 2003) was a Georgian pianist, music educator and composer. Her compositions include two children's operas, a concerto for piano and orchestra, and a Piano Quintet. She has published an article which is featured in the book Sergei Rachmaninoff: a bio-bibliography on Rachmaninoff's visit to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. Eksanishvili died in January 2003 at the age of 83.

Leonard Gregory Kastle (February 11, 1929 – May 18, 2011) was an American opera composer, librettist, and director, although he is best known as the writer/director of the 1970 film The Honeymoon Killers, his only venture into the cinema, for which he did all his own research. He was an adjunct member of the SUNY Albany music faculty.Following his high school education in Mount Vernon, New York, Kastle began his musical training at the Juilliard School of Music (1938–40). From 1940 to 1942, he attended the Mannes School of Music and later studied composition at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia (1944–50), earning a B.A. in 1950. While at the Curtis Institute, he held scholarships in composition with Rosario Scalero, Gian-Carlo Menotti and Samuel Barber, and a piano scholarship with Isabelle Vengerova. He attended Columbia University from 1947 to 1950.In 1956, Kastle composed a thirteen-minute "made-to-measure" opera, titled The Swing, for two singers, a speaking part, and piano accompaniment. It was commissioned by and broadcast on the NBC television network on Sunday, June 10, 1956, at noon. He also wrote The Pariahs, about the sinking of the whaler Essex, a trilogy of operas about the Shakers known under the collective title The Passion of Mother Ann: A Sacred Festival Play, a children's opera called Professor Lookalike and the Children, a piano concerto, sonatas for piano and violin, and three unproduced screenplays, Wedding at Cana, Change of Heart, and Shakespeare's Dog.In a 2003 interview for the Criterion Collection, he said that no producer wanted Wedding at Cana, just another Honeymoon Killers, which he did not want to do. After The Honeymoon Killers, Kastle returned to teaching and composing. After the Criterion release of the film, he was rediscovered by a new generation of cult film enthusiasts and occasionally attended film-related events such as the Ed Wood Film Festival in 2007, where he served on the panel of judgesKastle died May 18, 2011, at his home in Westerlo, New York, at the age of 82.

Pierre Estève (born February 11, 1961, in Cahors, in the French Pyrenees, is an eclectic singer-songwriter and composer with a wide range of styles, a musician, a contemporary artist acclaimed for his digital installations and sound sculptures, as well as a researcher and a journalist writing for the French musical press. After benefiting from classical music and orchestra conducting training within the French Conservatoire de Musique institution), he is a specialist in virtual symphonic orchestras and world instruments. He is especially well known by the public for composing the music for the soundtrack to various video games, ads, documentaries and films. A multi-instrumentalist, he collects instruments from the five continents but also all kinds of natural and sonorous materials. Estève also creates installations based on interactions between the public with natural acoustic materials and technologies, using materials that he creates himself.