As a child Saint-Saens showing Mozartian precocity as both a pianist and composer studied at the Paris Conservatoire; his dazzling gifts won him the admiration of Gounod, Rossini, Berlioz and especially Liszt, who hailed him as the world’s greatest organist.
The symphonic poem Danse Macabre composed in 1874 is in waltz style inspired by a poem of Henry Cazalis which same composer had set as a song and which was in turn obviously inspired by some of the many earlier series of pictures by such as that of Holbein (1538).

Schubert was the son of a schoolmaster who spent most of his life in Vienna. He enjoyed the company of friends but never holding any position in the musical establishment or attracting the kind of patronage that Beethoven had twenty years earlier. He composed some five hundred or so songs, settings of verses ranging from Shakespeare to Goethe.
His final years were clouded by illness as a result of a syphilitic infection and he died in 1828 leaving much work unfinished.
The Unfinished Symphony was written in 1822, but no addition was made to the two movements of the work. Other symphonies of the eight are more or less completed include the Great C Major Symphony and classical Fifth Symphony.

Mozart produced 27 concerti, more piano concerti than any other important composer. The first composed when he was only eleven; the last appeared less than one year before his death. But it was in March of 1785 that Mozart composed his Concerto no.21, completing it in one month after his previous concerto. This concerto is amongst the most technically demanding of all Mozart’s concerti. His father Leopold described concerto no. 21 as “astonishingly difficult”.
Mozart did not bother to write out the solo cadenzas. As a solo performer he preferred to improvise on the spot.