← Fame through time1700-1799
The 18th century
Whose working lives fell in the 18th century. Books are measured from 1800 and readers from 2015, so for this period we can say who lived then, not who was talked about then.
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 18th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Johann Sebastian Bach22 decades - 2
George Frideric Handel21 decades - 3
Leopold Mozart20 decades - 4
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach15 decades - 5
Christoph Willibald Gluck9 decades - 6
Georg Philipp Telemann12 decades - 7
Johann Christian Bach12 decades - 8
Constanze Mozart6 decades - 9
Wilhelm Friedemann Bach13 decades - 10
Anna Magdalena Bach10 decades - 11
Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach6 decades - 12
Maria Antonia Walpurgis of Bavaria0 decades - 13
Maria Barbara Bach0 decades - 14
Johann van Beethoven12 decades - 15
Johann Joachim Quantz7 decades - 16
Carl Stamitz6 decades - 17
Friedrich Wilhelm Bülow von Dennewitznot measured- - 18
Johann Mattheson9 decades - 19
Ernest Louis, Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadtnot measured- - 20
Carl Heinrich Graun8 decades - 21
Christoph Graupner6 decades - 22
Georg Benda0 decades - 23
Sylvius Leopold Weiss0 decades - 24
Reinhard Keiser17 decades - 25Johann David Heinichen4 decades
How to read these rankings
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record. It is not a judgement on the life.
- Fame in print. The curves show how often a name appeared in the books of each decade from 1800 to 2019, drawn from the Google Books Ngram corpus.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, we would rather show nothing than guess.