George Philipp Telemann was a composer whose creative powers continued undiminished through his old age of eighty six years. The last decade of his life witnessed an astonishing creative surge, perhaps comparable only to that of Verdi. It was then that the eighty-year-old, with all the benefits of mature mastery at his command, penned some of his most beautiful vocal works. The oratorio "The Delivered Israel" is a work from this period.
Though held in high regard by many of his colleagues as being worthy of a pedestal next to Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven in the pantheon of Western music’s great composers, Ludwig (Louis) Spohr (1784–1859), along with Christoph Read more Le nozze di Figaro and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde were composed during Spohr’s lifetime. Eight years younger than Rossini and 13 years Schubert’s junior, Spohr wrote music that is Janus-like, specifically it looks to the formalism and clarity of the Classicists and at the same time sows the seeds of Romanticism via its harmonic and structural experimentation.