← 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
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart21 decades - 2
Johann Sebastian Bach22 decades - 3
Antonio Vivaldi14 decades - 4
George Frideric Handel21 decades - 5
Joseph Haydn22 decades - 6
Antonio Salieri15 decades - 7
Madame du Barry22 decades - 8
Leopold Mozart20 decades - 9
Selim III18 decades - 10
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach15 decades - 11
Christoph Willibald Gluck9 decades - 12
Jean-Philippe Rameau11 decades - 13
Georg Philipp Telemann12 decades - 14
Maria Anna Mozart3 decades - 15
Domenico Scarlatti17 decades - 16
Count of St. Germain7 decades - 17
Johann Christian Bach12 decades - 18
Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle20 decades - 19
Constanze Mozart6 decades - 20
Farinelli22 decades - 21
Giovanni Battista Pergolesi8 decades - 22
Luigi Boccherini13 decades - 23
Tomaso Albinoni8 decades - 24
François Couperin14 decades - 25
Muzio Clementi17 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.