Bach

He never travelled more than a few hundred kilometres from central Germany. Court musician, church organist, and for his last twenty-seven years cantor at St Thomas's in Leipzig, delivering a new cantata most weeks. In his lifetime he was known chiefly as an organist; his music was largely forgotten after his death until Mendelssohn revived the St Matthew Passion in 1829.

His music is counterpoint at its limit — several independent lines running at once, with nothing in the space between them left to chance. The Well-Tempered Clavier is called the Old Testament of keyboard music; The Art of Fugue breaks off partway through on the notes B-A-C-H and was never finished. If you hear only one thing, hear the Goldberg Variations: an aria, thirty variations, and the aria returning unchanged — one of the most perfectly closed structures in music.