Who taught whom: composers and their teachers

Every composer had a teacher, and some of those teachers were famous composers themselves. Follow the lessons from one to the next, and a chain appears. Haydn taught Beethoven. Beethoven taught Czerny. Czerny taught Liszt. The chain runs on from there into the 1900s.

One chain, six musicians

Teacher	Student	Where and when
Joseph Haydn	Ludwig van Beethoven	Vienna, in the early 1790s
Ludwig van Beethoven	Carl Czerny	Vienna, from about 1800. Czerny was about ten.
Carl Czerny	Franz Liszt	Vienna, in the early 1820s. Liszt was about ten.
Franz Liszt	Alexander Siloti	Germany, in the 1880s
Alexander Siloti	Sergei Rachmaninoff	Moscow, in the late 1880s. The two were cousins.

Haydn was born in 1732. Rachmaninoff died in 1943. Five handshakes cover more than 200 years of music.

Read Haydn, Beethoven, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff.

The teacher in the middle

Carl Czerny is the link that holds the chain together. He was a child when he played for Beethoven, who took him as a student. As a grown man, Czerny taught the young Liszt and refused to be paid for it.

Czerny wrote hundreds of piano exercises, and students still play them. Read Czerny for kids. He also taught a pianist named Theodor Leschetizky, who became one of the best-known piano teachers in Europe. Some piano teachers today can trace their own teachers back along these lines to Beethoven.

A second chain, from Paris to New York

Teacher	Student
Camille Saint-Saëns	Gabriel Fauré
Gabriel Fauré	Nadia Boulanger
Nadia Boulanger	Aaron Copland

Saint-Saëns taught Fauré at a school in Paris, and the two became friends for life. Fauré taught at the Paris Conservatory. Nadia Boulanger went on to teach many of the best-known American composers of the 1900s.

Read Saint-Saëns, Fauré, and Copland.

A third chain, in Bach’s family

Teacher	Student
Johann Pachelbel	Bach’s oldest brother
Bach’s oldest brother	Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach	His sons

Pachelbel wrote the Canon in D. He taught the oldest of the Bach brothers. After their parents died, that brother took in the young Johann Sebastian and taught him the keyboard.

Read Pachelbel and Bach.

Famous teachers and their students

Teacher	Students	A note
Antonio Salieri	Beethoven, Schubert, and Liszt	He gave many of his lessons for free.
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov	Stravinsky and Prokofiev	He taught in St. Petersburg for most of 37 years.
Gabriel Fauré	Ravel and Nadia Boulanger	He led the Paris Conservatory.
Charles Villiers Stanford	Holst and Vaughan Williams	He taught at the Royal College of Music in London.
Friedrich Wieck	Clara Schumann and Robert Schumann	Clara was his daughter.
Leopold Mozart	Wolfgang and Nannerl Mozart	He was their father.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky	Sergei Taneyev	Taneyev went on to teach Rachmaninoff.

Salieri is better known today for a story that he poisoned Mozart. He did not. Read how did Mozart die?

Lessons that went wrong

Haydn and Beethoven. The story goes that Beethoven thought Haydn was too busy to correct his exercises. He is said to have taken extra lessons from another teacher in secret.

Ravel and Vaughan Williams. At 35, the English composer Vaughan Williams went to Paris for lessons with Ravel, who was younger than he was. The lessons went well, and the two stayed friends.

Rimsky-Korsakov and his own class. At 27, he was hired to teach composition. He later admitted that he knew less than his students were supposed to learn, and he studied in private to stay ahead of them.

Composers who taught themselves

Not every composer had a famous teacher.

• Haydn learned a great deal on his own, from books and from other composers’ music.
• Elgar taught himself to compose, with the scores in his father’s music shop as his school.

Trace your own chain

Your child is on a chain too.

1. Ask your child’s teacher who their teacher was.
2. Ask who taught that teacher.
3. Go back as far as anyone can remember.
4. Draw the chain, with your child’s name at the end.

Things to do together

Draw the chain. Draw the six musicians from Haydn to Rachmaninoff as links in a paper chain.

Listen down the chain. Play one short piano piece by each of Haydn, Beethoven, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff. Ask how the piano writing changes.

Teach something. Your child teaches you one thing they learned in a lesson this week.

Find them in time. Slide the composer timeline to 1800 and to 1900. See which teachers and students were alive.

Thank a teacher. Write a note to a music teacher, past or present.

Questions to ask

• What makes a good teacher?
• Can a student become better than the teacher?
• What would you ask Beethoven in a lesson?

Print and play

Use the lesson notes page to write down what a teacher says each week. Read did Mozart and Beethoven ever meet? and musical families.

For more composers by era, see classical composers for kids.