Active Years: 1858-1924
Position: Composer of Opera
Career Highlights: Manon Lescaut, La Boheme, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, La Fanciulla del West, Turandot.
Career Totals: 12 operas
Scouting Report: Although considered the greatest of all opera composers next to Verdi for his distinct artistry and international success, his questionable compositional merits have led him to be labeled “the best of the [...]

Active Years: 1810-1856
Position: German composer.
Career Highlights: Manfred, Album for the Young, and Kreisleriana.
Career Totals: 1 opera, 4 symphonies, several overtures, various chamber music, over 100 works for piano, and hundreds of songs and choral pieces.
Scouting Report: Born to a bookseller, he had virtually no musical training until the age of twenty. He injured himself practicing [...]

Active Years: 1927-today
Position: Soprano
Career Highlights: Bess, Blanche in Dialogues des Carmelites, Aida, Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, Tosca, Ariadne auf Naxos, Madama Butterfly, Leonora in Il Trovatore, Leonora in La Forza del Destino, Cleopatra (Barber).
Career Totals: First stage appearance on Broadway in Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts (1952); two-year world tour of Porgy and [...]

Active Years: 1797-1828
Position: Great Viennese composer.
Career Highlights: Unfinished Symphony, “Death and the Maiden” String Quartet, and “Trout” Quintet.
Career Totals: 7 operas, 6 operettas, 8 (almost, see above) symphonies, 15 string quartets, miscellaneous chamber music, dozens of works for piano, both solo and four hands, and six hundred or so songs and other works for voice.
Scouting [...]

Active Years: October 12, 1935 to present
Position: Tenor
Career Highlights: Rodolfo in La Boheme, Duke in Rigoletto, Idomeneo in Idomeneo, Elvino in La Somnambula, Edgardo in Lucia de Lammermoor, Tonio in Daughter of the Regiment, Arturo in I puritani, Nemorino in L’elisir d’ amore, Manrico in Il Trovatore, Riccardo in Un Ballo in Maschera, Rhadames in [...]

Active Years: 1861-1908 (born 1844)
Position: Russian Composer
Career Highlights: Scheherezade
Career Totals: Seventeen operas, thirteen choral works, four symphonies, over twenty other orchestral works, five string quartets, eight other chamber works, twenty-five piano pieces, over eighty songs.
Scouting Report: Rimsky-Korsakov is another composer who is primarily known for one pieces — the Scheherezade Suite. He was a self-taught [...]

Active Years: 1875-1937
Position: French composer.
Career Highlights: Bolero, Daphnis and Chloe.
Career Totals: Six theater pieces and ballets, several orchestral works, dozens of pieces for solo piano, various chamber music, and scores of songs and other vocal works.
Scouting Report: Like so many others, Ravel was rebuffed during his early career: some criticized his music by calling it [...]

Active Years: 1873-1943
Position: Russian composer, pianist and conductor
Career Highlights: Rachmaninoff is best known for his piano pieces.
Career Totals: Rachmaninoff wrote 77 songs, 3 symphonies and other orchestral works, 3 operas, 4 piano concertos, dozens of solo piano pieces, and a variety of chamber music works.
Scouting Report: Born a rich kid from a powerful and distinguished [...]

Active Years: 1680-1695 (born 1659)
Position: England’s greatest composer
Career Highlights: The Fairy Queen, The Masque from Dioclesian, Dido and Aeneas, Hail Bright Cecilia, The Golden Sonata.
Career Totals: Six dramatic works, sixty-five anthems, twenty-four odes, over fifty songs, twenty-two fantasies for viols, twenty-two trio sonatas, eight suites for harpsichord, songs and music for over forty plays, other [...]

Active Years: 1935-today
Position: Baritone
Career Highlights: Valentin in Faust, Hamlet, Escamillo in Carmen, Tonio in Pagliacci, Don Giovanni, Jack Rance in Girl from the Golden West, Scarpia in Tosca, Sir Ricardo Forth in I Puritani, Amonasro in Aida, Carlo (Ernani and La Forza del Destino), Simon Boccanegra, Rigoletto, Iago in Otello, Montfort in Les Vespres Siciliennes, [...]