Gustav Holst was among those few classical composers to exert a major influence on rock music and popular music in the mid- to late- 20th century -- which is all rather ironic, since he passed away in 1934. Holst was part of the early- 20th century school of English composers usually referred to as post-Romantics -- along with his friend Ralph Vaughan Williams, with whom he shared a common interest in English folksong, he helped advance the cause of distinctly English orchestral music far beyond the boundaries of England; but much of Holst's music, as distinct from that of his contemporaries, was also steeped in Eastern influences that made it unique. Born in Cheltenham in 1874, Holst survived a childhood blighted by poor health (including painful neuritis in his right hand), the death of his mother when he was eight years old, and an overly demanding father. He studied at the Royal College of Music, and late in the 1890s took up the trombone as a means of earning a living. He also began composing during this period, and this, in turn, coincided with his discovery of the Hindu religion. He later became fascinated by its underlying philosophy (even learning Sanskrit), which would come to inspire some of his finest and most distinctive works. Mostly, however, he toiled in obscurity as a composer while earning his living as a teacher, until the first decade of the 20th century. It was during that time that he somewhat belatedly became fascinated by English folk songs. From that point on, his work would be built around the two distinct sources of inspiration, folk music and Eastern philosophy and music.

It was in the teens that Holst wrote the work that was to keep his name alive for decades after his death, and influence generations of film composers and even rock musicians. "The Planets" was a suite for large orchestra inspired by Holst's interest in astrology, and it became the first of his works to find a large and enthusiastic audience. Completed in 1917 and popularized just after the end of the First World War, it seemed to embrace a vast array of influences -- topical events (including the war just ended), 70 years of Romantic orchestral music traditions, English folk- and patriotic traditions, and a strange mix of mysticism and idealism. It was also one of the greatest orchestral showpieces ever written, and it became the most popular work in Holst's oeuvre, and one of the most popular orchestral pieces ever written -- the composer recorded it twice, once acoustically in the early 1920s and once electrically in the mid-'20s, and there were recordings from the 1930s onward; the advent of the LP made it even more attractive, and when stereo playback came along, the work's big orchestral sound made it an even more desirable sonic showpiece; the advent of the space program in the 1960s only raised interest further, and late in the decade, in the wake of heavily orchestrated pieces of psychedelic rock such as Days of Future Passed and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts' Club Band, college students also occasionally used parts of the piece to accompany their drug experimentation -- it all seemed to be of a piece in which Richard Strauss' orchestral music was identified with 2001: A Space Odyssey, billed in advertising as "the ultimate trip."

By the end of the 1960s, even some more ambitious rock bands had begun adapting parts of "The Planets" to their work -- King Crimson quoted the suite's bombastic opening movement, "Mars, Bringer Of War," in their suite "The Devil's Triangle" from their classic second album, In the Wake of Poseidon; actually, they'd been performing "Mars" in concert since early 1969, but could never get permission to adapt the piece officially. Holst had passed away in 1934, and his daughter Imogen, also a composer, teacher, and conductor, had fiercely guarded her father's legacy in tandem with her publisher, and wouldn't allow it to be demeaned by setting any part of the "The Planets" in a rock music context.

By the end of the 1970s, however, the rock audience for the piece had grown too big to ignore, and there followed two completely different adaptations of "The Planets" for Moog synthesizer. One, very ornate and flashy, and heavily laden with sound effects, was done by Isao Tomita on RCA, and so offended the publisher and Holst's daughter, that it was blocked from release in England. The other, a relatively straight, respectful interpretation, was done by Patrick Gleason on Mercury Records. It was around this same time that Holst's influence began reaching extensively into film music -- as far back as 1957, Bernard Herrmann's score for Alfred Hitchcock's black comedy The Trouble With Harry had shown some debt to "The Planets" (especially "Uranus, The Magician"); but in 1977, John Williams soared to stardom as a composer with his score for Star Wars, which borrowed in equal measure from Holst (especially "The Planets"), Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Max Steiner. As of 2004, there continue to be many dozens of recordings of the piece available, and one English composer has even added an eighth movement, "Pluto" (the planet hadn't been discovered at the time of the original composition).

Holst's influence has also manifested itself in the work of the Beatles. It's unlikely that any member of the group had ever heard of, much less heard, Holst's "St. Paul's Suite," but it's an equally safe bet that their producer, George Martin, knows the work in his sleep. In 1967, as they were completing work on "All You Need Is Love," Martin reached back to the St. Paul's Suite and its closing movement's use of "Greensleeves" as a counter-melody over the fade down of the song; he used the same folk song in the same way to complete "All You Need Is Love." ~ Bruce Eder

One of the best-known conductors of the last quarter of the 20th century, Zubin Mehta is known for his flamboyant, passionate style on the podium. A conductor of the New York Philharmonic and Israel Philharmonic Orchestras for many years, he has appeared with orchestras all over the world and has sought to use classical music as a force for peace in troubled regions.

Mehta was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), in British-controlled India, on April 29, 1936. His first language was Gujarati, and the family adhered to the Parsi religion. His father, Mehli Mehta, was a violinist and conductor who co-founded the Bombay Symphony Orchestra. Part of the key to Zubin's later confidence and success as a conductor is that he began very early; his father taught him to play violin and piano and to conduct, and from his early teens, he was leading sectional rehearsals with the Bombay Symphony; he took rehearsals with the entire ensemble at 16. Mehta's mother wanted him to study medicine, and he enrolled at St. Xavier's College, Bombay, with that aim, but after two years, he dropped out and moved to Vienna, Austria. Living on a shoestring, he took conducting lessons from Hans Swarowsky at the Vienna Academy of Music and learned the double bass so he could find orchestral work. After winning a contest, he received a one-year appointment as the assistant conductor with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. This led to prestigious guest conducting posts with the Vienna Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra and then, in 1960 and 1962, respectively, to music director posts with the Montreal Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. For the former post, he had help from Charles Munch, whom he had impressed at a contest at the Tanglewood Music Festival. The jet-setting conductor who holds posts in far-flung cities has become commonplace, but Mehta was one of the first whose career followed the pattern. He built the Los Angeles Philharmonic into one of the major U.S. orchestras.

Mehta resigned his Montreal post in 1967, beginning a long association with the Israel Philharmonic that came to an end only in 2017. He left the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1978, succeeding Pierre Boulez as the music director of the New York Philharmonic. He remained in New York until 1991. Mehta also became the music director of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, entering into the musical life of Florence and later becoming an honorary citizen of that city. The tendency to engage with an orchestra's surroundings rather than simply flying in to conduct could be seen especially clearly in his work with the Israel Philharmonic, which he conducted during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the 1982 Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon (where he conducted for both Israeli and Arab audiences, with the latter receiving him enthusiastically), and the 1991 Gulf War.

Conducting the internationally televised Three Tenors concerts featuring Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, and José Carreras, Mehta gained wide public exposure for his outsized style, perfectly suited to these concerts. After leaving his New York Philharmonic post, Mehta assumed the music directorship of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in 1998, remaining in that post until 2006. He also became the music director of the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia in Valencia, Spain, in 2005. During the 1990s and 2000s, Mehta took the opportunity to conduct orchestras and operas in large, one-of-a-kind events. In 1992, he conducted a performance of Puccini's opera Tosca, starring Domingo as Cavaradossi, at the actual places specified in the score in real time. Mehta conducted a similar production of Puccini's Turandot in China in 1998, directed by filmmaker Zhang Yimou with 300 soldiers and 300 extras.

Mehta's recording catalog is one of the most extensive of any contemporary conductor's, comprising well over 200 albums and beginning with a 1973 recording of Tosca, starring Leontyne Price and recorded for RCA. His output focuses on Romantic orchestral repertory, most often from the second half of the 19th century, but encompasses a startling variety of music, from early American composer John Knowles Paine to Schoenberg, to opera and film soundtracks (he led the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Frank Zappa's film 200 Motels in 1971), to Vienna's Summer Night and New Year's concerts. He has rarely recorded contemporary music. Mehta remained active into old age, releasing a new recording of Haydn's oratorio Die Schöpfung, Hob. 21/2, with the Munich Philharmonic in 2021, when he was 85. ~ James Manheim

One of the pillars of film scoring and the most popular film composer of his era, John Williams has created music for some of the most successful motion pictures in Hollywood history -- Star Wars, E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, Jurassic Park, and Harry Potter are just a handful of selections from an extensive catalog that has included over 50 Academy Awards nominations. After getting his start in television in the late '50s, Williams worked more steadily on feature films by the early '70s, impressing with his stirring orchestral scores for blockbuster disaster films like The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Earthquake (1974), and The Towering Inferno (1974), as well as through his work with such emerging directors as Robert Altman (1973's The Long Goodbye) and Steven Spielberg (1974's The Sugarland Express). His recurring partnership with Spielberg would span six decades. Williams' ominous, encroaching "Shark Theme" for Spielberg's Jaws in 1975 and his five-note spacecraft melody from 1977's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (penned with Spielberg's note that it should convey "hello" in mind) would have likely cemented his stature as the go-to Hollywood composer for sci-fi-adventure-thriller fare even without the colossal success of 1977's Star Wars, his most iconic score. His instrumental themes from Jaws, Close Encounters, and Star Wars all charted on the Billboard Hot 100, with Star Wars' cracking the Top Ten. Over time, he was recognized for his prowess with more poignant material as well, such as Best Song Oscar nominee "Somewhere in My Memory" from Home Alone and his mournful violin theme (performed by Itzhak Perlman) from his Oscar-winning score for Schindler's List (1993). However, he has remained associated across generations for his lush, exciting, romantic music for other worlds, including the first two Jurassic Park films in the '90s, the first three Harry Potter films in the 2000s, and the episodic Star Wars prequels and sequels. In the early 2020s, as he entered his nineties, Williams set to work on his fifth straight entry in the Indiana Jones film franchise. While not quite as prolific in the concert hall realm, he has composed concertos for no fewer than ten different instruments, among dozens of other orchestral and chamber works.

Born February 8, 1932, in Floral Park, New York, Williams was the son of a movie studio musician, and he followed in his father's footsteps by studying music at UCLA and Juilliard. Initially, he pursued a career as a jazz pianist, later working with Henry Mancini to compose the score for the hit television series Peter Gunn. Williams then went solo to pen a number of TV soundtracks for series including Playhouse 90, Wagon Train, and Bachelor Father. In 1959, he ventured into film with Daddy-O, and spent the majority of the 1960s alternating between the silver screen (The Killers, The Plainsman) and its smaller counterpart (Gilligan's Island, Lost in Space, Kraft Suspense Theatre).

In 1968, Williams earned his first Academy Award nomination for his work on Valley of the Dolls. In 1970, he garnered nods for both The Reivers and Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and two years later finally won for Fiddler on the Roof. A slew of Oscar nominations followed, for features including The Poseidon Adventure, Tom Sawyer, and The Towering Inferno. By 1974, he had received his first nomination for best original song, for Cinderella Liberty's "Nice to Be Around," a collaboration with Paul Williams (lyrics).

Over much of his career, two major relationships helped secure Williams' iconic legacy in film and music. In 1974, he teamed with a young filmmaker named Steven Spielberg for the first time on a crime drama titled The Sugarland Express. Over the coming decades, the two frequently re-teamed, often with stunning results, including 1975's Jaws and 1977's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. His thrilling score for Jaws won an Oscar for original score; Close Encounters was nominated. Williams' other frequent collaborator was George Lucas, beginning with 1977's Star Wars -- another best score Oscar winner. Star Wars' rousing, orchestral opening theme even went to number ten on the Billboard singles chart. He and Lucas soon reunited for 1980's The Empire Strikes Back, the same year Williams took over for the late Arthur Fiedler as the conductor of the Boston Pops.

Back with Spielberg, Williams delivered more of his memorably triumphant melodies for 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark and the next year's E.T. His soaring music for the latter resulted his fourth Academy Award trophy. He was back atop the box office rankings with 1983's Return of the Jedi, the third Star Wars feature. In the meantime, he composed for other filmmakers, turning out scores for films like 1978's Superman and 1983's Yes, Giorgio, which included another Oscar-nominated song ("If We Were in Love"). Among his vast output later in the '80s were contrasting Oscar-nominated scores for Spielberg: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), the World War II drama Empire of the Sun (1987), and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989).

The '90s saw Williams work on franchises old and new, beginning with the inaugural Home Alone family comedy in 1990. It resulted in nominations for both score and song ("Somewhere in My Memory, with lyricist Leslie Bricusse). Following a score nomination for Oliver Stone's JFK and a song nod (again with Bricusse) for "When You're Alone" from Spielberg's Hook, he won an Oscar for his next Spielberg collaboration, 1993's Schindler's List, whose haunting theme was performed by violinist Itzhak Perlman. That year also saw the first Jurassic Park film hit theaters featuring a ubiquitous Williams score, as he passed the Boston Pops baton to Keith Lockhart following a 13-year stay. The composer agreed to score George Lucas' Star Wars prequel trilogy as they went into production just before the release of his Oscar-nominated scores for the Spielberg historical dramas Amistad (1997) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace broke the single-day box office record on its opening day in May of 1999.

Williams began work on yet another blockbuster franchise in 2001 with the release of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (aka Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone). Mixing winding, aerial melodies with a darkly majestic palette, Williams' initial contribution to that magical universe was nominated for best original score. He followed that with a string of consecutive hits: Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002), Spielberg's Minority Report (2002), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can (2002), and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2003). The composer of multiple Olympic themes, he received the Olympic Order award from the International Olympic Committee in 2003. Films including Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and Spielberg's War of the Worlds and Munich followed in 2005, with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull arriving before the end of the decade. Williams was awarded the National Medal of Arts at the White House in 2009.

Regular appearances on the Oscar nominee list continued in the 2010s, with Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin (2011), War Horse (2012), and Lincoln (2013) among them. He received three more Oscar nominations for the Star Wars sequel trilogy, beginning with 2015's The Force Awakens. In 2016, Williams became the first composer to receive the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award. He finished the decade with movies including the Spielberg projects The BFG (2016) and The Post (2017). In 2017, their partnership was anthologized with John Williams & Steven Spielberg: The Ultimate Collection. Two years later, he also collaborated with celebrated violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter on the album Across the Stars, which featured Mutter playing a selection of Williams' film themes; the composer both arranged the music and conducted the Recording Arts Orchestra of Los Angeles for the Deutsche Grammophon release. The ninth episode of the Star Wars saga, The Rise of Skywalker, saw release in 2019. 2022's A Gathering of Friends saw Williams working with cellist Yo-Yo Ma on a set of two concert works, as well as selections from his scores for Schindler’s List, Lincoln, and Munich.

During their first 50 years of working together, John Williams scored all but five of Steven Spielberg's films (1983's Twilight Zone: The Movie, 1985's The Color Purple, 2015's Bridge of Spies, 2018's Ready Player One, and 2021's West Side Story). In 2023, Williams returned to the Indiana Jones film series with his score for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. ~ Marcy Donelson & Jason Ankeny

Though the long career of Richard Strauss spanned one of the most chaotic periods in political, social, and cultural history of the world, the composer retained his essentially Romantic aesthetic even into the age of television, jet engines, and atom bombs.

Born in Munich in 1864, Strauss was the son of Franz Joseph Strauss, the principal hornist in the Munich Court Orchestra. Strauss demonstrated musical aptitude at an early age, and extensive training in piano, violin, theory, harmony, and orchestration equipped him to produce music of extraordinary polish and maturity by the time he reached adulthood. His primary teachers had been his father, who was a musical conservative, and Ludwig Thuille, a Munich School composer and family friend. Strauss' Serenade for 13 Winds, Op. 7 (1881), written when he was 17, led conductor Hans von Bülow to pronounce him "by far the most striking personality since Brahms." Bülow was able to give Strauss his first commission and an assistant conductor position. Through new friendships, Strauss learned to admire the writings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and the music of Wagner and Liszt. He embarked on a long career of conducting and composing, which took him all over Europe and the U.S.

From the beginning of Strauss' career as a composer, it was evident that the orchestra was his natural medium. With the composition of the "symphonic fantasy" Aus Italien in 1886, Strauss embarked on a series of works that represents both one of the pivotal phases of his career and a body of music of central importance in the late German Romantic repertoire. Though he did not invent the tone poem per se, he brought it to its pinnacle. In such works as Don Juan (1888-1889), Ein Heldenleben (1897-1898), and Also sprach Zarathustra (1895-1896) -- of which first minute or so, thanks to its use in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, is the composer's most readily recognizable music -- Strauss displayed his abundant gift for exploiting the coloristic possibilities of the orchestra as a dramatic device like few composers ever had (or have since).

With the arrival of the 20th century, after becoming conductor at Berlin's Hofoper, Strauss' interest turned more fully to opera, resulting in a body of unforgettable works that have long been fixtures of the repertoire: Salome (1903-1905), Elektra (1906-1908), and Der Rosenkavalier (1909-1910) are just a few of his best-known efforts for the stage. In 1919, Strauss became co-director of the Vienna Staatsoper, but was forced to resign five years later by his partner, Franz Schalk, who resented being left with many of the operational duties while Strauss was frequently away guest conducting or being feted as a great composer. When the political situation in Europe became malignant in the 1930s, profound political naïveté led to Strauss' confused involvement the Nazi propaganda machine, and the composer eventually alienated both the Nazis and their opponents. With the end of World War II, however, he was permitted to resume his professional life, although it would be a mere echo of his previous fame. He began to have serious health problems, his financial situation had been compromised, and the monuments that embodied great German art for him -- Goethe's Weimar house; the Dresden, Munich, and Vienna opera houses -- had been destroyed. Throughout his last years, works such as the Oboe Concerto (1945) and the expressive Four Last Songs (1948) attest to Strauss' unwavering confidence in his singular musical voice.