THE BEATLES. The Beatles were and remain to this day, the world's most astonishing rock'n'roll band.

The four boys started the boom called "Beatlemania" in British pop music.

They hailed from Liverpool, a seaport on the north-western coast of England. John Lennon, born there in 1940, never knew theseagoing father who had deserted his mother; mainly a doting aunt raised the boy. He grew up arty and angry — and musical, it turned out after his mother bought him the traditional cheap kid guitar, and he quickly worked out the chords to the hit That'll Be the Day.

Paul McCartney, was born in 1942 and destined to become Lennon's songwriting soul mate.

In 1957 Lennon formed a band called "The Quarrymen". By the following year, the group had been joined by McCartney and his school friend George Harrison, then just 14. In 1960, calling themselves the "Silver Beatles", and with drummer Pete Best in tow,they sailed to Germany.

In 1962 Best was replaced by another Liverpool drummer, Ringo Starr (born Richard Starkey in 1940). The group cut its first single, Love Me Do, a moderate hit. In January 1963 a second single, Please Please Me, went to No. 1, and Beatlemania was born.

By 1965 the world had been forced to take notice of this all-conquering cultural force. The Beatles had become such a huge British export that they were given a royal award: the Member of the Order of the British Empire, or M.B.E.

Having scored a break-through with their chart-topping 1965 album Rubber Soul the Beatles, exhausted, decided to stop touring. After a final concert in San Francisco in 1966, they would come together again as a group only in recording studios. But there they spun out ever more elaborate masterpieces.

For millions of fans world-wide, their albums mapped a path through the puzzling and sometimes scary 60s. The paths of Lennon and McCartney, however, were diverging drastically. Each took a wife (John married Japanese avant-garde artist Yoko Ono, and Paul wed American rock photographer Linda Eastman) and drifted even farther apart, Lennon growing bitter, McCartney adopting the air of the contented family man.

By 1969 Lennon was ready to quit the group. McCartney is said to have talked him out of going public with this desire; but then in April 1970 McCartney himself announced that the group was disbanding. When the other three Beatles dropped their appeal of this action in 1971, the most fabulously successful band of all time (with more than 100 million records sold to date) came to an end.

And so it was over. McCartney began making records with his wife in a new band. Harrison followed his Indo-mystical inclinations as far as he could until fans lost interest. Ringo made occasional records, movies and television commercials. And Lennon moved to New York City, where he had always wanted to be. He was shot down in 1980, and the Beatles were nevermore. Except for their music, which is eternal.

MY FAVOURITE COMPOSER

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Wilhelm Richard Wagner ( 22 May1813 – 13 February 1883) was a German composer, conductor, theatre director and polemicist primarily known for his operas (or "music dramas", as he later called them). Wagner's compositions, particularly those of his later period, are notable for their complex texture, rich harmonies and orchestration, and the elaborate use of leitmotifs: musical themes associated with individual characters, places, ideas or plot elements. Unlike most other opera composers, Wagner wrote both the music and libretto for every one of his stage works. Perhaps the two best-known extracts from his works are the Ride of the Valkyries from the opera Die Walküre, and the Wedding March (Bridal Chorus) from the opera Lohengrin.

Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works such as The Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser which were broadly in the romantic vein of Weber and Meyerbeer, Wagner transformed operatic thought through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work of art"). This would achieve the synthesis of all the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts and was announced in a series of essays between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realized this concept most fully in the first half of the monumental four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. However, his thoughts on the relative importance of music and drama were to change again, and he reintroduced some traditional operatic forms into his last few stage works, including Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.

Wagner pioneered advances in musical language, such as extreme chromaticism and quickly shifting tonal centres, which greatly influenced the development of European classical music. His Tristan und Isolde is sometimes described as marking the start of modern music. Wagner's influence spread beyond music into philosophy, literature, the visual arts and theatre. He had his own opera house built, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, which contained many novel design features. It was here that the Ring and Parsifal received their premieres and where his most important stage works continue to be performed today in an annual festival run by his descendants. Wagner's views on conducting were also highly influential. His extensive writings on music, drama and politics have all attracted extensive comment in recent decades, especially where they have antisemitic content.

Wagner achieved all of this despite a life characterized, until his last decades, by political exile, turbulent love affairs, poverty and repeated flight from his creditors. His pugnacious personality and often outspoken views on music, politics and society made him a controversial figure during his life, which he remains to this day. The effect of his ideas can be traced in many of the arts throughout the twentieth century.

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BENJAMIN BRITTEN B. Britten was an outstanding English composer of our time. He was born in England in 1913. He was, in fact, a remarkable child. At the age of five he began to compose. Soon it became evident enough that his musical gifts would have to be taken very seriously indeed.

His earliest compositions were inspired by his daily adventures. Everything from a storm at sea to a storm in the family teacup, was grist to his mill. For the youthful Britten it was a normal thing to express himself in music as in ordinary everyday speech. By the time he was 14 he had written ten sonates, six string quartets, and oratorio, and a number of songs and piano pieces. His "Simple Symphony", though written in 1934, is based on ideas from the music of his childhood.

His career as a professional composer began in earnest in 1934. He began to produce the works that were to bring him the taste of fame. The set of choral variations "A Boy Was Born", which received its first performance in a BBC broadcast early in 1934, advanced his reputation as a composer of serious intent. There was a special feature of Britten's genius: the capacity to write charming and effective music that is within the reach of amateur performers.

He loved children and wrote many works for them. A book of songs "Friday Afternoon", his children's opera "Let's Make an Opera" are simple and very nice.

Britten followed the musical traditions of realism. Two of his most important compositions are the opera "Peter Grimes" and the "War Requiem".

Benjamin Britten often appeared as conductor and pianist in England and abroad. He often came to Russia.

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Johann Sebastian Bach was one of the greatest composers in Western musical history. More than 1,000 of his compositions survive. He came from a family of musicians. There were over 53 musicians in his family over a period of 300 years. Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, Germany in 1685. His father was a talented violinist. When his parents died, he was only 10 years old. He went to stay with his older brother, Johann Christoph, who was a professional organist, and continued his younger brother's musical education. After several years in this arrangement, Johann Sebastian won a scholarship to study in Luneberg, Northern Germany. A master of several instruments while still in his teens, Johann Sebastian first found employment at the age of 18 as a 'lackey and violinist' in a court orchestra in Weimar; and soon after he took the job of an organist at a church in Arnstadt.

He married his cousin Maria Barbara Bach and assumed the post of organist and concertmaster in the ducal chapel in Weimar. He remained there for nine years, and composed his first major works, including organ showpieces and cantatas. By this stage in his life, Bach had developed a reputation as a brilliant musical talent. His proficiency on the organ was unequaled in Europe, and he toured regularly.

His growing mastery of compositional forms, like the fugue and the canon, was already attracting interest from the musical establishment which, in his day, was the Lutheran church. But, like many people of uncommon talent, he was never very good at playing the political game, and therefore suffered periodic setbacks in his career. When his wife died, he remarried and had 11 children in both marriages. Several of these children would become fine composers. After conducting and composing for the court orchestra at Cothen for seven years, Bach was offered the highly prestigious post of cantor (music director) of St. Thomas' Church in Leipzig. Bach remained at his post in Leipzig until his death in 1750.

He was creatively active until the very end, even after cataract problems virtually blinded him in 1740. His last musical composition, a chorale prelude entitled 'Before Thine Throne, My God, I Stand', was dictated to his son-in-law only days before his death.