At some point over the next couple of weeks, we will be heading to some where in Bristol that serves nice beer and raising a pint or two to 30 years of BBC Music Magazine. That’s 378 issues, 46,872 pages (or thereabouts) and Lord-know-show-many words and pictures in the can. But before we go slapping ourselves on the collective backs, maybe we should put our achievement into context with a look back over history. By the time of their 30th birthdays, where along life’s path had some of the best known composers got to? Here are 15 notable examples…
1 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
By the time he reached his 30th birthday on 27 January 1786, Mozart had already racked up, among many other works, 37 symphonies, 22 piano concertos, 19 string quartets and a fistful of operas. And for his 31st year, he had something special up his sleeve: . The opera was widely appreciated at’s reviewer enthusing that ‘It contains so many beauties, and such a wealth of ideas, as can be drawn only from the source of innate genius’. Today, many would still deem it the greatest opera of all time.
