Year 1787 (MDCCLXXXVII) was a common year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar and a common year starting on Friday of the 11-day slower Julian calendar.

Giovanni Paisiello (or Paesiello) (9 May 1740 – 5 June 1816) was an Neapolitan composer of the Classical era.

Paisiello was born at Taranto and educated by the Jesuits there. He became known for his beautiful singing voice and in 1754 was sent to the Conservatorio di S. Onofrio at Naples, where he studied under Francesco Durante, and eventually became assistant master. For the theatre of the Conservatorio, which he left in 1763, he wrote some intermezzi, one of which attracted so much notice that he was invited to write two operas, La Pupilla and Il Mondo al Rovescio, for Bologna, and a third, Il Marchese di Tidipano, for Rome.

His reputation now firmly established, he settled for some years at Naples, where, despite the popularity of Niccolò Piccinni, Domenico Cimarosa and Pietro Guglielmi, of whose triumphs he was bitterly jealous, he produced a series of highly successful operas, one of which, L'ldolo cinese, made a deep impression upon the Neapolitan public.

In 1772 Paisiello began to write church music, and composed a requiem for Gennara di Borbone, of the reigning dynasty. In the same year he married Cecilia Pallini, and the marriage was a happy one. In 1776 Paisiello was invited by the empress Catherine II of Russia to St Petersburg, where he remained for eight years, producing, among other charming works, his masterpiece, Il barbiere di Siviglia, which soon attained a European reputation. The fate of this opera marks an epoch in the history of Italian art; for with it the gentle suavity cultivated by the masters of the 18th century died out to make room for the dazzling brilliance of a later period.

Domenico Cimarosa (17 December 1749, Aversa, Province of Caserta – 11 January 1801, Venice) was an Italian opera composer of the Neapolitan school. He wrote more than eighty operas during his lifetime, including his masterpiece, Il matrimonio segreto (1792).

Cimarosa was born in Aversa in Campania.

His parents were poor, but, anxious to give their son a good education, they sent him to a free school connected with one of the monasteries in Naples after moving to that city. The organist of the monastery, Padre Polcano, was struck by the boy's intellect, and voluntarily instructed him in the elements of music and also in the ancient and modern literature of his country. Because of his influence, Cimarosa obtained a scholarship at the musical institute of Santa Maria di Loreto in Naples, where he remained for eleven years, chiefly studying with great masters of the old Italian school; Niccoló Piccinni, Antonio Maria Gaspare Sacchini, and other musicians of repute are mentioned among his teachers.

Joseph Martin Kraus (20 June 1756 – 15 December 1792), was a composer in the classical era who was born in Miltenberg am Main, Germany. He moved to Sweden at age 21, and died at the age of 36 in Stockholm. He is sometimes referred to as "the Swedish Mozart", and had a life span which was very similar to that of Mozart's.

Kraus was born in the central German town of Miltenberg in Franconia, the son of Joseph Bernhard Kraus, a County clerk in the Archbishopric of Mainz, and Anna Dorothea née Schmidt. His father's family, originally from Augsburg, had a small restaurant in Weilbach near Amorbach, while his mother was a daughter of the master-builder at Miltenberg Johann Martin Schmidt. Joseph had 13 brothers and sisters, but seven of them died during their childhood.

After a short stay in Osterburken, the Kraus family moved to Buchen (Odenwald) (in Baden-Württemberg) in 1761, where the father Joseph Bernhard Kraus found a position as a clerk; Amtsschreiber. In Buchen, Kraus started his earliest formal education. His first music teachers were rector Georg Pfister (1730–1807) and cantor Bernhard Franz Wendler (1702–1782), giving him mainly piano and violin lessons. Kraus showed his musical talent at a very early stage. At the age of 12, Kraus joined the Jesuit Gymnasium and Music Seminar at Mannheim, where he studied German and Latin literature and music. He received a rigorous musical education, especially in violin technique, from P. Alexander Keck (1724–1804) and P. Anton Klein (1748–1810).

Martin Krause (June 17, 1853 – August 2, 1918) was a German concert pianist, piano teacher, music critic, and writer.

Martin Krause was born in Lobstädt, Saxony as the youngest son of the choirmaster and church schoolmaster Johann Carl Friedrich Krause in Lobstädt. He initially attended the teacher training college in Borna, then he became a pupil of Franz Liszt and later established himself as a piano teacher and writer on music in Leipzig, where he founded the Franz-Liszt-Verein (Association). From 1901 Krause worked as a professor at the Royal Academy of Arts in Munich, and from at least 1896 to 1911 at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin. A victim of the flu epidemic, he died on August 2, 1918.