Johann Nepomuk Hummel was an Austrian composer and outstanding virtuoso pianist during the period of transition between the Classical and Romantic eras. He was a child-prodigy pianist who studied at an early age with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and later with Muzio Clementi. After touring through Europe from 1804 to 1811, he was a chapelmaster to the Esterházy family which once held by Joseph Haydn. He worked as a composer, conductor, and is also credited for assembling an archive of Haydn’s music. All of Hummel’s sacred compositions were written while he held this position. After that, he returned to Vienna as a pianist, composer, and teacher. Later, he became chapelmaster at Weimar in 1818 and died in this city in 1837. 

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Despite his great success, Hummel is said to have remained fundamentally a warm and simple person. Hummel’s great contemporary rival was Ludwig van Beethoven, with whom he maintained an uneasy friendship. Despite this, he was a pallbearer at Beethoven’s funeral. Like Beethoven, Hummel stands on the borderline between the Classical and Romantic periods. For more than a century his reputation has been that of a typical virtuoso specializing in piano music who influenced later generations of composers such as Frederic Chopin and Robert Schumann. Stylistically, Hummel’s music is among the finest of the last years of 18th-century Classicism, with basically homophonic textures, well-spun melodies, and ornamentation.