File:Beethoven grave at Central Cemetery Wiener Zentralfriedhof (34430488051) (cropped).jpg

While on a recent walkabout in Vienna i stumbled across the graves of the above musicians.. To cut a long story short i basically put together these 4 images and some info about them They are all buried pretty close together in the central Vienna cemetery with numerous other famous and not so famous people there were some pretty amazing gravestones etc.. lots of walking.

Johannes Brahms Johannes Brahms ( 7 May 1833 – 3 April 1897 ) was a German composer and pianist of the Romantic period. Born in Hamburg into a Lutheran family, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna, Austria. His reputation and status as a composer is such that he is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the "Three Bs" of music, a comment originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow.

Brahms composed for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, piano, organ, and voice and chorus. A virtuoso pianist, he premiered many of his own works. He worked with some of the leading performers of his time, including the pianist Clara Schumann and the violinist Joseph Joachim (the three were close friends). Many of his works have become staples of the modern concert repertoire. An uncompromising perfectionist, Brahms destroyed some of his works and left others unpublished en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Brahms

Ludwig van Beethoven Ludwig van Beethoven had the dubious pleasure of three burials. He died on the 26th of March, 1827 in Vienna and was buried a couple of days later in the Währinger Ortsfriedhof (a cemetery in one of Vienna’s outlying districts). Then in 1863 the authorities decided to repair his burial site. They exhumed the body and put it in a new and better metal coffin before burying him again.

Unfortunately, the cemetery shut in 1873, eventually converting to a park in the mid-1920s. In the meantime, it was decided to move Beethoven’s remains to a better site.

So in 1888, he was dug up again and reburied in one of the honorary graves at the Zentralfriedhof, Vienna’s main cemetery. Third time lucky, one might say, as he’s been left to rest there since. Schubert suffered the same fate, but at least both fared better than Mozart.

Grave of Beethoven Beethoven’s gravestone His gravestone (see photo) is a copy of the original from the first cemetery. Written on it are the following words (in German of course)…

This gravestone was built to the same design as the original in the Währinger Ortsfriedhof and erected by the Association of Friends of Music in 1888 with financial help from the Imperial City Development Fund of Vienna and the Philharmonic Association Info found here.

Johann Strauss II Johann Strauss II (October 25, 1825 – June 3, 1899), also known as Johann Strauss Jr., the Younger, the Son , Johann Baptist Strauss, was an Austrian composer of light music, particularly dance music and operettas. He composed over 500 waltzes, polkas, quadrilles, and other types of dance music, as well as several operettas and a ballet. In his lifetime, he was known as "The Waltz King", and was largely then responsible for the popularity of the waltz in Vienna during the 19th century. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Strauss_II

Franz Peter Schubert Franz Peter Schubert . ( 31 January 1797 – 19 November 1828) was an Austrian composer. Schubert died before his 32nd birthday, but was extremely prolific during his lifetime. His output consists of over six hundred secular vocal works (mainly Lieder), seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music and a large body of chamber and piano music. Appreciation of his music while he was alive was limited to a relatively small circle of admirers in Vienna, but interest in his work increased significantly in the decades following his death. Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms and other 19th-century composers discovered and championed his works. Today, Schubert is ranked among the greatest composers of the late Classical and early Romantic eras and is one of the most frequently performed composers of the early nineteenth century. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Schubert