Michael Andreas Gielen (born July 20, 1927) is an Austrian conductor and composer.

Gielen was born in Dresden, Germany, to opera director Josef Gielen. Through his mother, Rose, he is the nephew of Eduard Steuermann and Salka Steuermann Viertel. His father was Christian and his mother was Jewish. He began his career as a pianist in Buenos Aires, where he studied with Erwin Leuchter and gave an early performance of Arnold Schoenberg's complete piano works in 1949 (the South-American première). While serving as conductor and répétiteur at the Wiener Staatsoper (1950–60), he conducted much contemporary music outside the opera house. His next operatic appointment was as conductor of Royal Swedish Opera from 1960 to 1965, followed by posts at the Netherlands Opera and the Opern- und Schauspielhaus Frankfurt from 1977. He was principal conductor of the Belgian National Orchestra (1969–73), the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (1980–86) and of the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra (1986–99), which he has been closely associated with since.

Hélène Grimaud (born November 7, 1969) is a French pianist.

Grimaud was born in Aix-en-Provence, France. On her mother's side, she is descended from Italian-Sephardi Jews on Corsica; and, on her father's side, from Algerian Jews. She has stated that, as a child, she was often "agitated". She discovered the piano at seven. In 1982, she entered the Conservatoire de Paris, where she studied with Jacques Rouvier. In 1985, she won 1st Prize at the Conservatory and the Grand Prix du Disque of the Académie Charles Cros for her recording of the Sergei Rachmaninoff Piano Sonata No. 2. In 1987, she launched her professional career with a solo recital in Paris and a performance with the Orchestre de Paris under Daniel Barenboim.

In 1991, at age 21, Grimaud moved to Tallahassee, Florida, to be near a boyfriend who taught bassoon at Florida State University. In 1997, she settled in Westchester County, north of New York City. After some time spent in Berlin, she currently resides in Switzerland. She has a passion for wolves, which she studies and raises. She now divides her time between her musical career and the Wolf Conservation Center, which she co-founded with her former companion, photographer J. Henry Fair. She also experiences synesthesia, where one physical sense adds to another, in her case seeing music as color.

Stefan Anton George (12 July 1868 – 4 December 1933) was a German poet, editor, and translator.

George was born in Bingen in Prussia in 1868. He spent time in Paris, where he was among the writers and artists who attended the Tuesday soireés held by the poet Stéphane Mallarmé. He began to publish poetry in the 1890s, while in his twenties. George founded and edited an important literary magazine called Blätter für die Kunst. He was also at the center of an influential literary and academic circle known as the George-Kreis, which included many of the leading young writers of the day, (for example Friedrich Gundolf and Ludwig Klages). In addition to sharing cultural interests, the circle reflected mystical and political themes. George knew and befriended the "Bohemian Countess" of Schwabing, Fanny zu Reventlow, who sometimes satirized the circle for its melodramatic actions and views. George and his writings were identified with the Conservative Revolutionary movement. He was a homosexual, yet exhorted his young friends to lead a celibate life like his own.

 Arnold Schoenberg (help·info) (pronounced [ˈaːɐ̯nɔlt ˈʃøːnbɛɐ̯k]; 13 September 1874 – 13 July 1951) was an Austrian composer and painter, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. He used the spelling Schönberg until after his move to the United States in 1934 (Steinberg 1995, 463), whereupon he altered it to Schoenberg "in deference to American practice" (Foss 1951, 401), though one writer claims he made the change a year earlier (Ross 2007, 45).

Schoenberg's approach, both in terms of harmony and development, is among the major landmarks of 20th-century musical thought; at least three generations of composers in the European and American traditions have consciously extended his thinking or, in some cases, passionately reacted against it. During the rise of the Nazi Party in Austria, his music was labeled, alongside jazz, as degenerate art^{[citation needed]}.

Schoenberg was widely known early in his career for his success in simultaneously extending the traditionally opposed German Romantic styles of Brahms and Wagner. Later, his name would come to personify pioneering innovations in atonality (although Schoenberg himself detested the term "atonality" as inaccurate in describing his intentions) that would become the most polemical feature of 20th-century art music. In the 1920s, Schoenberg developed the twelve-tone technique, a widely influential compositional method of manipulating an ordered series of all twelve notes in the chromatic scale. He also coined the term developing variation, and was the first modern composer to embrace ways of developing motifs without resorting to the dominance of a centralized melodic idea.

Alfred Brendel KBE (born 5 January 1931) is an Austrian pianist, born in Czechoslovakia and a resident of the United Kingdom. He is also a poet and author.

Brendel was born in Wiesenberg, Czechoslovakia, now Loučná nad Desnou, Czech Republic, to a non-musical family. They moved to Zagreb when Brendel was six, and later to Graz, where they lived during World War II, towards the end of which the 14-year old Brendel was sent to Yugoslavia to dig trenches. However, he developed frostbite and was taken to hospital. Brendel began piano lessons when he was six with Sofija Deželić, and at 14 he studied piano with Ludovica von Kaan and composition in the Graz Conservatory for the next two years, but otherwise had little formal music education.

After the war, Brendel composed music, as well as continuing to play the piano and to paint. However, he never had more formal piano lessons and although he attended masterclasses with Edwin Fischer and Eduard Steuermann, he was largely self-taught.