Over the past few months, our Know the Score series introduced 20 great composers. But what of the many we couldn’t write about? Martin Kettle suggests some other names whose music is well worth exploring

For the last of this series, we turn to one of the greatest of all composers for the human voice, a man who lived through the Third Reich and two world wars, and whose gorgeously expressive music helped create one of cinema’s most famous moments

The Czech composer found inspiration in the New Worlds of the US, and his music has been to the moon, but it was in his native Bohemia that his heart lay.

Hallelujah! This week, the composer whose music illuminated Georgian London, and who refined the art of bringing emotion alive in works that still resonate for us today

From the elegiac Nimrod to the poignant Cello Concerto and his magnificent choral works, there is far more to this British composer than pomp and circumstance

This week we turn to the Russian composer who poured his passion and his pain into a body of works - from ballets to symphonies - that put his country on the international musical map

Humorous, earnest, prolific and always deeply humane, the Austrian composer is credited with inventing the symphony and the string quartet. Even if that’s not strictly true, his creativity shaped western classical music

He created a new world of ravishing instrumental colour and constantly shifting sensations and images. He brought new breath to the art of music, said Boulez. Did modern music start with Debussy?

The most poetic musician who ever lived? It’s hard to disagree with Liszt’s appraisal of Schubert, who, in his short life, used his astonishing gift for melodic and harmonic invention to create many enduring masterpieces

In the eye of Russia’s revolutionary storm, he wrote some of the most powerful – and cryptic – music of the 20th century. Whether he is judged a Soviet lackey or heroic dissident, the wealth of his musical legacy is beyond doubt

The man who put British opera on an international stage and changed the UK’s musical map for ever, his pacifism and his sense of being an outsider inspired much of his most memorable writing

His music is seeped in the myths and the natural marvels of his homeland and helped articulate the struggle for Finnish independence, but it is his seven symphonies that confirmed his place as one of the most original symphonic composers since Beethoven

With religious music so involving he could inspire faith in non-believers, the German composer’s sense of harmony makes him a shared reference point for all classical composers

He composed nothing that did not involve a piano and died tragically young. Yet the Polish composer’s imagination and melodic beauty left a huge imprint on music – just ask Barry Manilow

The German composer was the most influential musician of his era after Beethoven, reinventing opera and leading the way to musical modernism – yet his music’s association with the Third Reich leaves him with a complex legacy

He was a child prodigy who excelled in every genre to which he turned his hand, his music combining melodic beauty and the most daring formal perfection – all coloured by his remarkable gift for emotional ambiguity

Conceived on a massive scale, Gustav Mahler’s seismic symphonies draw on the folk poetry of his native Bohemia and include the longest ever written by a major composer

His music started a riot and was chosen by Disney to create the world. He collaborated with Picasso and Auden and influenced composers from Boulez to Tavener. Twentieth-century music is unimaginable without Stravinsky

This week we turn to the Shakespeare of opera, a composer whose glorious gift for melodies and compassionate gaze celebrates life in all its variety