the stacked column will work.
set up one series with thr birth date and a second with the age at death

"Tom Gettys" wrote:

My high-level goal is to compare visually the life-times of many famous
composers.

I have a sheet with a column containing the year of birth and the next
column has the year the person died. Each row is a different person.

I think what I want is a "column" chart in which the start and end of a
column coresponds to the year of birth and death of a person; each column
would corespond to a different person.

Can this be done with the chart wizard?