John Field

The Irish pianist and composer John Field was one of the most popular and well-travelled performers of his day, but it's for his romantic virtuoso piano music that he's remembered – and in particular his Nocturnes, a form which he is believed to have invented. Certainly, he knew how to charm an audience, whether as a child prodigy in Dublin, where he made his debut in 1792, or in London, where his family settled in 1793 and where he met Haydn and studied piano with Muzio Clementi. In 1803 Field relocated to St Petersburg, where as performer, teacher and composer, he became a fashionable and popular figure in the city's aristocratic salons (he even makes a cameo appearance in Tolstoy's War and Peace). It was here, from 1812 onwards, that he published the first of his series of Nocturnes – miniatures whose combination of song-like melody and atmospheric accompaniment had a profound effect on Chopin, Liszt and many other Romantic composer-pianists. He composed seven piano concertos, and as a teacher he encouraged the young Russian composer Mikhail Glinka before his own career was interrupted in the late 1820s by a painful battle with cancer. Field continued to give concerts until ten months before his death at the age of 54. He was buried in Moscow.