Rentarō Taki

Rentarō Taki is one of those figures you encounter and immediately feel a pang of loss for what might have been. Born in 1879 and gone by 1903 at just twenty-three — tuberculosis taking him right as his talent was fully blooming — he still managed to leave Japan some of its most enduring melodies. "Kōjō no Tsuki" alone would have been a career. He trained at the Tokyo Music School, absorbed Western classical forms with serious discipline, and then turned around and used them to capture something distinctly Japanese. There's a bittersweet quality to his music that feels almost self-aware in retrospect, like he somehow knew time was short. A pianist-composer whose whole catalog fits in a few pages yet echoes through Japanese culture well over a century later — that's not a footnote, that's a legacy.

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Name (English)

Rentarō Taki

Name (Japanese)

瀧廉太郎

Reading

たき れんたろう

Born

August 24, 1879 – June 29, 1903

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Virgo / Rabbit

Origin

Tokyo, Japan

Active years

1896 - 1903

Occupation

pianist / composer

Works summary

Appearances

54 (1952–2016)

By year

1952: 1, 1960: 1, 1967: 1, 1970: 2, 1990: 1, 1991: 1, 1993: 1, 1998: 1, 2002: 1, 2012: 3, 2013: 1, 2014: 2, 2016: 1

Debut work

忘れえぬ人々 滝廉太郎

Filmography / notable works

• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rentar%C5%8D%20Taki
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%80%A7%E5%BB%89%E5%A4%AA%E9%83%8E
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q717957

Tags

• pianist
• composer

Last updated

2026-08-26

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. Works and profile fields sourced from Wikipedia reflect content as of 2026-08-26. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.