Andrew Lloyd Webber

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• Top 6 Broadway Composers of All Time

  Currently #2 · score 0

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• Stephen Sondheim

  Stephen Sondheim is widely regarded as the most significant composer and lyricist in the history of the American musical theater's more artistically ambitious "concept musical" tradition, and his shows, including Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods, and Company, are celebrated for their psychologically complex characters and structurally sophisticated compositions. His mentorship began under Oscar Hammerstein II as a teenager, and Sondheim's early career as lyricist for West Side Story and Gypsy, working with other composers before establishing his own composing career, gave him a direct generational link connecting the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein era to the more artistically experimental musicals he later pioneered himself. Sondheim's willingness to write musicals built around morally ambiguous characters and unresolved, sometimes deliberately unsatisfying endings distinguished his work from the more conventionally uplifting Broadway tradition, and his shows are frequently cited as bridging musical theater and more serious dramatic literature. His combination of genuine compositional sophistication and his significant mentorship of subsequent generations of musical theater writers has made Sondheim the composer most universally cited as the single most important figure in modern American musical theater.

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• Rodgers and Hammerstein

  Rodgers and Hammerstein, the songwriting partnership of composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, revolutionized American musical theater with their 1943 show Oklahoma!, which integrated songs directly into the plot and character development rather than treating musical numbers as separate entertainment interludes. Their subsequent shows, including South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music, established what became known as the "integrated musical" format, in which songs advance character and plot rather than functioning as standalone entertainment set pieces disconnected from the surrounding story. The duo's willingness to address serious social themes within mainstream musical entertainment, including South Pacific's direct confrontation of racial prejudice, gave their shows a substantive thematic ambition that helped elevate musical theater's broader cultural standing beyond pure escapist entertainment. Their combined catalog established the foundational template for the modern American musical, and Rodgers and Hammerstein's direct mentorship of Stephen Sondheim gave their influence a direct generational continuity into the more artistically experimental musical theater that followed their own era's dominance.

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• Lin-Manuel Miranda

  Lin-Manuel Miranda's 2015 musical Hamilton, blending hip-hop, R&B, and traditional Broadway composition to tell the story of American founding father Alexander Hamilton, became one of the most commercially and culturally significant musicals in Broadway history, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and multiple Tony Awards. His decision to cast the musical's Founding Fathers using a predominantly Black and Latino cast, deliberately reframing America's founding story through contemporary racial representation, made Hamilton a significant cultural and political talking point well beyond typical theater criticism. Miranda's earlier musical In the Heights, depicting a Latino neighborhood in Washington Heights, established his interest in bringing underrepresented communities and musical styles into mainstream Broadway theater years before Hamilton's massive breakthrough success. His combination of genre-blending musical innovation and Hamilton's massive commercial and cultural impact has made Miranda one of the most significant American musical theater composers of the 21st century, and his work has meaningfully expanded Broadway's mainstream audience demographics.

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• Cole Porter

  Cole Porter, writing both music and lyrics for his own shows, an unusual dual role for his era, became one of the most sophisticated songwriters of Broadway's golden age, known for witty, sexually sly lyrics that pushed against the era's more conservative mainstream entertainment conventions. His songs, including "Anything Goes" and "Night and Day," combined genuinely complex musical compositions with clever, urbane wordplay that distinguished Porter's material from more straightforwardly sentimental contemporaries, reflecting his own background as a wealthy, cosmopolitan Yale-educated socialite. Porter continued composing hit shows despite a severe 1937 horseback riding accident that crushed both his legs and left him in chronic pain for the remainder of his life, ultimately requiring one leg's amputation, a personal struggle largely hidden from his public audience during his most productive later years. His combination of sophisticated musical composition and his distinctively witty lyrical voice has made Porter one of the most celebrated songwriters of Broadway's golden age, and his catalog remains a foundational part of the American musical theater standard repertoire.

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• Irving Berlin

  Irving Berlin, a Russian-Jewish immigrant who arrived in America as a child and never learned to formally read or write musical notation, composed more than 1,500 songs across his career despite that unconventional technical limitation, dictating his compositions to trained musicians who transcribed them. His song "White Christmas," from the 1942 film Holiday Inn, remains the best-selling single of all time according to Guinness World Records, and Berlin's catalog includes numerous songs that became deeply embedded in American cultural identity, including "God Bless America" and "There's No Business Like Show Business." Berlin's 1946 musical Annie Get Your Gun became one of the most successful Broadway shows of its era, and his combined catalog across popular song, film, and musical theater made him one of the most commercially significant American composers of the 20th century across multiple entertainment mediums simultaneously. His combination of an extraordinarily prolific catalog and his songs' deep integration into mainstream American cultural identity, despite his unconventional lack of formal musical training, has made Berlin one of the most historically significant songwriters in American musical history.

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More in Music

• Naftule's Dream

  Naftule's Dream grew out of the Shirim Klezmer Orchestra, a Boston-area group that had already been playing traditional klezmer for 14 years before Newton, Massachusetts-born clarinetist Glenn Dickson and accordionist-songwriter Michael McLaughlin spun off a more adventurous, improvisation-focused outlet from within it. The band released two records on their own, "Search for the Golden Dreydl" in 1997 and "Smash, Clap" in 1998, before going on to record three further albums for composer John Zorn's Tzadik label under its Radical Jewish Culture series, a significant marker of downtown-avant-garde credibility. The Boston Globe praised the group for fusing "klezmer music, Phish-like improvisation, and radical Yiddish poetry," a description that captured how directly the band pushed past traditional acoustic klezmer instrumentation and arrangement. Their combination of their roots in a 14-year-old traditional klezmer orchestra and their three albums on John Zorn's boundary-pushing Tzadik label has made Naftule's Dream one of the most musically adventurous bands in the klezmer revival movement.

• Brave Old World

  Brave Old World formed in 1989 with members drawn from California, Chicago, New York, and Berlin, an unusually international lineup for a klezmer band, originally featuring clarinetist Joel Rubin, drummer Ben Bazyler, multi-instrumentalist Stu Brotman (a former member of 1960s rock band Kaleidoscope and a sideman for Canned Heat), keyboardist Alan Bern, and violinist Michael Alpert. Rubin was later replaced by Kurt Bjorling, musical director of the Chicago Klezmer Ensemble since 1984, bringing another deeply credentialed klezmer specialist into the lineup. The Washington Post called Brave Old World "the revival's first supergroup," noting that "every player is a virtuoso," and the band won first prize at the 1992 International Klezmer Festival in Safed, Israel, a significant early validation from within the genre's own community. Their combination of their genuinely international, virtuoso-level lineup and their 1992 Safed festival win has made Brave Old World one of the most artistically respected bands in the klezmer revival.

• Kapelye

  Kapelye was assembled in 1979 when ethnomusicologist Henry Sapoznik organized a group of musicians to perform at a klezmer lecture at Temple Beth-El in Providence, Rhode Island; the November 18, 1979 debut went well enough that the musicians agreed on the spot to keep performing together as a full-time band. The group took its name from the Yiddish word for "a band" and began actively researching and collecting turn-of-the-century klezmer recordings, drawing several members, including fiddler and vocalist Michael Alpert, from the overlapping Balkan music community. Their 1981 debut album, "Future & Past," mixed traditional Yiddish folk ballads with labor and political anthems and songs pulled directly from Yiddish theater, and the band followed it with "Levine & His Flying Machine" in 1985 and "Chicken" in 1987, before "Old-Time Jewish American Radio" became their most successful release. Their combination of Sapoznik's foundational archival research and their genre-launching 1981 debut album has made Kapelye one of the most historically significant bands in klezmer's modern revival movement.

• Andy Statman

  Andy Statman, born in New York City in 1950, started on banjo and guitar at 12 before switching to mandolin, which he studied briefly under lifelong friend David Grisman, and by 1970 he was playing in the experimental bluegrass group Country Cooking, followed by stints with David Bromberg's band. In 1975, Statman sought out klezmer clarinet legend Dave Tarras and became his protégé; Tarras wrote melodies specifically for him and eventually bequeathed Statman four of his own clarinets, deliberately passing the older master's living klezmer lineage directly to him. His late-1970s album "Jewish Klezmer Music" became a touchstone recording for that decade's klezmer revival, released alongside his mandolin-focused "Flatbush Waltz," and the National Endowment for the Arts later named him a National Heritage Fellow, the nation's highest honor in the traditional arts. His combination of his direct mentorship under Dave Tarras and his rare parallel mastery of klezmer clarinet and bluegrass mandolin has made Statman one of the most historically important figures in klezmer's modern revival.

• Giora Feidman

  Giora Feidman was born in 1936 in Buenos Aires to a family of klezmer musicians spanning his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, and by 18 he was already leading clarinetist of the orchestra at Argentina's Teatro Colón before joining the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in 1957 on the recommendation of conductor Paul Kletzki. He played with the Israel Philharmonic until 1974, then launched a solo career and was crowned "the King of Klezmer" in New York already in the 1970s, well before klezmer's broader American revival movement took hold in subsequent decades. In the early 1990s, Steven Spielberg invited Feidman to record alongside violinist Itzhak Perlman on the score for "Schindler's List," and Feidman's solo clarinet became a defining voice on that soundtrack, which went on to win the Academy Award. His combination of a multi-generational klezmer family lineage and his solo clarinet performance on the Oscar-winning "Schindler's List" score has made Feidman one of the most significant ambassadors for klezmer music worldwide.