Fifteen composers at 30

What were the great composers getting up to as they reached three decades? Jeremy Pound looks at some notable examples

- Jeremy Pound

At some point over the next couple of weeks, we will be heading to somewhere 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-knows-how-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 Marriage of Figaro. The opera was widely appreciated at its first performance in Vienna, with Haydn declaring himself a major fan and the Wiener Realzeitung'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.

2 Ludwig van Beethoven

Beethoven spent much of his time as a 30 year-old bathed in the glow of C sharp minor, as he worked on his Moonlight Sonata. C sharp? No problem. Hear sharply? This, alas, was proving more of a problem. While it would be a year later (1802) that he wrote his Heiligenstadt Testament outlining his despair at the onset of deafness, other correspondence shows that he had started to notice it from his late twenties. With his First Symphony only recently completed and the other eight yet to be begun, it's safe to assume he heard none of them in crystal clarity.

3 Franz Schubert