📚 Composers

30 works · ordered by editions in print

The people who wrote the music: lives, works, methods, and the letters and sketchbooks left behind.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject composers in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Title	Author	First published	Editions
Correspondence	Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart	1865	74
Correspondence	Ludwig van Beethoven	1867	61
J. S. Bach	Albert Schweitzer	1905	34
Giuseppe Verdi	Giuseppe Verdi	1929	26
Haydn	Rosemary Hughes	1950	26
Mein Leben	Richard Wagner	1911	21
Beethoven	Romain Rolland	1903	20
Johann Sebastian Bach	Philipp Spitta	1899	17
The life of Johannes Brahms	Florence May	1900	17
Life of Chopin	Franz Liszt	1800	16
Mozart	Marcia Davenport	1909	16
Testimony	Dmitriĭ Dmitrievich Shostakovich	1979	16
Conversation books	Ludwig van Beethoven	1923	15
Haydn	H. C. Robbins Landon	1966	15
Bach (Great Composers)	Tim Dowley	1980	15
Bach	Charles Francis Abdy Williams	1900	14
Mémoires	Hector Berlioz	1947	14
Richard Wagner	Houston Stewart Chamberlain	1894	13
Life of Mozart	Edward Holmes	1912	13
Gustav Mahler, Erinnerungen und Briefe	Alma Mahler	1940	13
Mozart	Maynard Solomon	1995	13
Johannes Brahms	Johannes Brahms	1909	11
Rimsky-Korsakov	Gerald Abraham	1945	11
Richard Strauss	Norman Del Mar	1962	11
Mozart	Bernhard Paumgartner	1927	10
Tchaikovsky	Alexander Poznansky	1991	10
I'm your man	Sylvie Simmons	2012	10
Biographie von Ludwig van Beethoven	Anton Felix Schindler	1840	9
The letters of Robert Schumann	Robert Schumann	1887	9
The Complete Book of Great Musicians	Scholes, Percy Alfred	1920	9

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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