Verdi

Between his first two operas his wife and both his children died, and the second opera failed badly; he decided to stop writing altogether. What brought him back was the libretto of Nabucco, whose chorus of Hebrew slaves became the unofficial anthem of Italian unification.

He wrote twenty-eight operas, and his lifelong direction was to make the music serve the drama rather than the other way round. Rigoletto, Il trovatore and La traviata came in a single run and turned the aria from a display of technique into a moment of a character's mind. At eighty he wrote Falstaff, a comedy, and ended it with a fugue on the words 'everything in the world is a joke'. Late in life he spent his royalties on a retirement home for musicians in Milan, and called it his finest work.