100 Fun Facts About Famous Composers

Balanchine staged Stravinsky's 1942 Circus Polka for the Ringling circus; which animals danced it?

Fifty elephants and fifty ballerinas danced the Circus Polka, which Stravinsky wrote after Balanchine phoned him to ask for a piece 'for some elephants'.

Tournedos Rossini, a steak topped with foie gras and truffle, honours the composer of which opera?

The Barber of Seville's composer, Gioachino Rossini, wrote no operas after Guillaume Tell in 1829 and spent his last years in Paris hosting gourmet dinners; rich truffle and foie gras dishes bear his name.

Which planet, already known when Holst finished The Planets in 1917, has no movement in the suite?

Earth was skipped because Holst followed astrology rather than astronomy, and Pluto, found in 1930, got a movement only when Colin Matthews wrote one in 2000.

Which composer, afraid of 13, is said to have dropped an 'a' from Moses und Aron?

Arnold Schoenberg dreaded years that were multiples of 13, and 'Moses und Aaron' would have had 13 letters; he died on Friday, 13 July 1951.

Haydn's 1797 birthday hymn for Emperor Francis II is now the national anthem of which country?

Germany's Deutschlandlied sets words Hoffmann von Fallersleben wrote in 1841 to Haydn's 'Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser', an Austrian emperor's hymn.

Prokofiev died on 5 March 1953, the same day as which Soviet leader, whose mourners swamped Moscow?

Joseph Stalin's death the same day filled the streets around Prokofiev's home near Red Square with mourners for three days, blocking the way to the composer's own funeral service.

Which Scott Joplin rag from 1902 reached the Billboard top three in 1974 as the theme of The Sting?

The Entertainer climbed to No. 3 on the Billboard pop chart in Marvin Hamlisch's arrangement, and two years later Joplin, dead since 1917, was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.

Which film composer can be glimpsed in the Buggles' 1979 video for 'Video Killed the Radio Star'?

Hans Zimmer, then a young keyboard player, is seen in black at a synthesizer in the clip, which became the first video shown on MTV; his Oscars for The Lion King and Dune came decades later.

Which Gershwin work premiered at Paul Whiteman's 1924 concert 'An Experiment in Modern Music'?

Rhapsody in Blue was written in about five weeks, after Gershwin's brother read him a newspaper report that he was composing a jazz concerto for the concert; Whiteman's arranger Ferde Grofé orchestrated it.

The tune every can-can line kicks to comes from the climactic scene of which Offenbach operetta?

Orpheus in the Underworld climaxes with the gods throwing themselves into the 'Galop infernal', the tune the Moulin Rouge and Folies Bergère later adopted for their can-can.

Which organist did the young Bach travel hundreds of kilometres, reportedly on foot, to hear play in Lübeck?

Dieterich Buxtehude's playing kept Bach in Lübeck for months when his Arnstadt employers had granted him only four weeks' leave; the journey was more than 400 kilometres each way.

Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks accompanied a 1749 display in which London park, beside today's Buckingham Palace?

Green Park's display went badly: rain caused misfires and the right pavilion caught fire, though a crowd put at over 12,000 had paid to hear the rehearsal at Vauxhall Gardens days earlier.

John Taylor, a travelling surgeon who operated on Bach and reportedly on Handel, treated which part of the body?

The eyes of Bach were operated on twice in 1750 by Taylor, a self-promoting English oculist who claimed to have treated Handel too; Bach was left blind and died less than four months later.

Which part of Haydn, stolen by grave robbers after his 1809 burial, rejoined his body only in 1954?

His skull was taken by phrenologists hoping to study a genius's bumps, and Haydn's remains were made whole again only in 1954 in the Bergkirche's north-tower tomb.

Who, Leipzig's first choice in 1723, used the offer to get a raise in Hamburg, leaving the post to Bach?

Georg Philipp Telemann was Leipzig's first pick and Christoph Graupner its second; both used the offer to win better terms at home, so the job fell to Bach.

Monteverdi left the Mantua court in 1613 to run the music at which basilica for the rest of his life?

St Mark's in Venice, the basilica of San Marco, hired Monteverdi as maestro di cappella in 1613 after he auditioned with a Mass, and he stayed until his death in 1643.

Which Tudor composer wrote the 40-part motet Spem in alium, possibly to outdo an Italian visitor's piece?

Thomas Tallis wrote it for eight five-voice choirs; an early account says a duke asked whether no Englishman could match an Italian piece, thought to be one Alessandro Striggio brought to London in 1567.

Which Purcell work, his only all-sung opera, ends with the lament 'When I am laid in earth'?

Dido and Aeneas survives in no score in Purcell's hand, and its first known staging, by the end of 1689, was at a girls' boarding school in Chelsea.

Which composer's lost manuscripts were bought for Turin's library by two fathers mourning their sons?

Antonio Vivaldi's scores reached Turin's National University Library because businessmen Roberto Foà and Filippo Giordano paid for them in memory of their sons; the Gloria was revived from them in 1939.

Which composer wrote 555 keyboard sonatas, mostly for his pupil Queen Maria Barbara of Spain?

Domenico Scarlatti taught the Portuguese princess from her childhood, followed her to Spain when she married the Spanish heir, and stayed in her service until his death in 1757.

Whose Marche funèbre, the third movement of his Piano Sonata No. 2, was played at his own Paris burial in 1849?

Frédéric Chopin wrote the march at least two years before the rest of the sonata, and it has since been played at state funerals around the world, from Poland to Egypt.

Liszt's 1840 concert at London's Hanover Square Rooms was the first billed by what now-common term?

Recital was the word first applied to Liszt's solo concert on 9 June 1840; a year earlier he had boasted in a letter, 'Le concert, c'est moi', and he is credited with inventing the solo piano recital.

Wagner's second wife Cosima, who outlived him by 47 years, was the daughter of which pianist-composer?

Franz Liszt fathered Cosima with the writer Marie d'Agoult, and Cosima left her first husband, the conductor Hans von Bülow, for Wagner.

In 1859 Italian nationalists took up the slogan 'Viva VERDI' as an acronym for long live whom?

Vittorio Emanuele Re D'Italia — Victor Emmanuel II, King of Italy — hid inside the composer's name, turning Verdi into a password for unification.

Conductor Hans von Bülow ranked which composer with Bach and Beethoven as the 'three Bs'?

Johannes Brahms took a place first given to Berlioz: Peter Cornelius coined the cheer 'Bach, Beethoven, Berlioz!' in 1854, and von Bülow swapped in Brahms decades later, calling him the greatest after the other two.

Dvořák wrote his 'American' Quartet in summer 1893 in Spillville, a Czech-speaking town in which US state?

Iowa's Spillville was the home town of Dvořák's secretary Josef Kovařík, whose father taught school there, and his talk of its Czech-speaking community led the composer to spend the summer of 1893 in the town.

Grieg said 'In the Hall of the Mountain King' reeked of what, though he hoped the irony would show?

Cowpats, 'ultra-Norwegianism' and 'to-thyself-be-enough-ness' were Grieg's own verdict on the troll-king march he wrote for Ibsen's play in 1875, and he said he could not bear to hear it.

Which composer finished seven symphonies and, in three decades of near-silence, reportedly burned his eighth?

Jean Sibelius gathered manuscripts in a laundry basket in the 1940s and burned them in the dining room of his home, Ainola, his wife Aino recalled; his family later said the Eighth went with them.

Mahler composed only in his summer holidays because his year-round living came from which job?

Opera conductor was Mahler's living, in Budapest, Hamburg and then at Vienna's Court Opera, so he wrote his symphonies each summer in small composing huts in the Austrian countryside.

Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune is a 'free illustration' of a poem by which French symbolist?

Stéphane Mallarmé was unhappy that his poem had been set, until he heard the premiere at Debussy's invitation and wrote to thank him.

Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand was commissioned by Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm how?

In the First World War Wittgenstein was shot in the elbow and lost the arm; he later altered Ravel's concerto to suit himself, which left the composer beside himself with indignation.

Which newspaper's 1936 editorial 'Muddle Instead of Music' denounced Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk?

Pravda's unsigned attack of 28 January 1936, now credited to the journalist David Zaslavsky, condemned the opera as coarse and confused and became the turning point of Shostakovich's career.

Which 1942 Copland piece did Emerson, Lake & Palmer turn into a 1977 rock hit?

Fanfare for the Common Man was one of the wartime fanfares Eugene Goossens commissioned for Cincinnati; its title surprised him, and they premiered it in March 1943 to honour the common man at income tax time.

Britten's War Requiem premiered in 1962 at the consecration of which bombed-and-rebuilt English cathedral?

Coventry's new cathedral stood beside the bombed ruins of the old one, and Britten wanted soloists from three wartime nations as a sign of unity, but Soviet officials stopped the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya from travelling.

Bernstein's 1971 Mass, commissioned by the widow of a US president, opened which Washington venue?

The Kennedy Center opened with Bernstein's Mass on 8 September 1971, choreographed by Alvin Ailey; President Nixon stayed away, saying the night should be Mrs Onassis's.

Which composer of Einstein on the Beach drove a New York cab and worked as a plumber into his forties?

Philip Glass worked as a plumber and cab driver from 1973 to 1978, years that included the premiere of Einstein on the Beach, and ran a moving company with his cousin.

Arvo Pärt, who invented the bell-like 'tintinnabuli' style, was born in which country?

Estonia was under Soviet rule when Pärt found the style in the 1970s, and after repeated clashes with officials he left with his family for Vienna in 1980.

Ennio Morricone won his only competitive Oscar in 2016, at 87, for which Quentin Tarantino film?

The Hateful Eight brought Morricone the Best Original Score award after five losing nominations going back to Days of Heaven in 1978; he had received an honorary Oscar in 2007.

Clara Wieck and Robert Schumann had to win a court case in 1840 against whom before they could marry?

Her father, Friedrich Wieck, who had trained Clara into a touring virtuoso, refused his permission; the judge allowed the wedding, held the day before her 21st birthday.

Queen Victoria praised Felix Mendelssohn's song 'Italien' to his face in 1842; who actually wrote it?

His sister Fanny wrote Italien, one of six of her songs published under Felix's name in his Op. 8 and Op. 9 because of family reservations about a woman composing.

Whose lost scores, two violin concertos among them, turned up in 2009 in a derelict Illinois summer house?

Florence Price, the first African-American woman to have a symphony played by a major US orchestra, left papers that a couple found while renovating the house; the two concertos have since been recorded.

Hildegard of Bingen, 12th-century abbess and composer, was given which title by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012?

Doctor of the Church made Hildegard only the fourth woman among the Catholic Church's official teachers; Benedict XVI had declared her a saint just five months earlier, by decree rather than the usual process.

Nadezhda von Meck bankrolled Tchaikovsky for 13 years on one strict condition — what was it?

They must never meet was her rule, yet the two exchanged over 1,200 letters of extraordinary intimacy before she abruptly ended the allowance in 1890.

Flight of the Bumblebee, where a prince becomes an insect, comes from an opera by which Russian composer?

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov wrote it for The Tale of Tsar Saltan, where a magic Swan-Bird changes Prince Gvidon into a bee so he can stow away on a ship and visit his father, the tsar.

Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1, the US graduation processional, has a trio tune known as what?

Land of Hope and Glory is what the tune became when Elgar reused it in his 1902 Coronation Ode for Edward VII, and the march is a fixture of every Last Night of the Proms.

Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time was written and first performed in January 1941 in what kind of place?

A prisoner-of-war camp, Stalag VIII-A at Görlitz, held Messiaen after his 1940 capture, and a sympathetic guard found him the paper and pencil to write the quartet.

Which composer died three months after the 1875 premiere of his opera Carmen, convinced that it had failed?

Georges Bizet died of heart disease at 36, the day after Carmen's 33rd performance, unaware that the opera would win worldwide acclaim within ten years.

Robert Schumann threw himself into which river in 1854 before two final years in an asylum at Endenich?

The Rhine gave him up to fishermen who pulled him out; Schumann asked to be admitted to the Endenich sanatorium himself and died there at 46.

On a cut budget, Bernard Herrmann scored Psycho for which ensemble rather than the jazz Hitchcock wanted?

Strings only, muted except in the shower scene, gave Herrmann a black-and-white sound to match the film; Hitchcock said '33% of the effect of Psycho was due to the music'.

Who became the first female composer to win an Oscar for a film score, for the 1996 Jane Austen film Emma?

Rachel Portman won in the short-lived Musical or Comedy Score category; Anne Dudley took the same award a year later, and no woman won a scoring Oscar again until Hildur Guðnadóttir in 2020.

Which pet bird did Mozart buy in 1784 and note down singing a near-copy of his own piano concerto theme?

A starling shared Mozart's home for three years, and when it died he buried it in the garden with a funeral procession and a poem written for the occasion.

Lully, court composer to Louis XIV, died of gangrene in 1687 after striking his own foot with what?

His conducting staff came down on his foot during a Te Deum celebrating the king's recovery from surgery, and Lully then refused to have the infected toe amputated.

Which American composer wrote 4′33″, a 1952 piece whose score tells the performers not to play their instruments?

John Cage held that the room's ambient noises were the music, and at the premiere the pianist marked the start of the piece simply by closing the keyboard lid.

In which Haydn symphony do the players stop one by one and snuff out the candles on their music stands?

The Farewell Symphony was Haydn's tactful hint that the musicians, kept late at Prince Esterházy's summer palace, missed their wives; the court went home the day after the performance.

Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, a Fourth of July fireworks staple, calls for which real weapons in its score?

Cannons fire sixteen shots in all, yet Tchaikovsky told his patron the piece would be very loud and noisy but lacking artistic merit, because he had written it without warmth or love.

Steven Spielberg laughed when John Williams first played him the main theme of which film, assuming it was a joke?

Jaws needed only two alternating notes for its shark, and Spielberg, who had expected something more melodic, later said the film would have been only half as successful without the score.

Which part of Chopin did his sister Ludwika take home to Poland in 1850, preserved in alcohol at his request?

His heart was examined in 2014 without the jar being opened, and the experts concluded that complications of tuberculosis had probably killed him.

When Bach pushed too stubbornly to leave his post at the Weimar court in 1717, how did his employer respond?

The court jailed him for almost a month before dismissing him in disfavour; Bach walked out of detention and into a job as music director for Prince Leopold at Köthen.

Beethoven tore the title page of his Third Symphony in half on hearing that which leader had declared himself emperor?

Napoleon had been the symphony's intended hero, but Beethoven raged that he was no more than a common mortal who would now become a tyrant; the work was published as the Eroica.

Ethel Smyth, held in Holloway Prison as a suffragette, led fellow inmates' singing from a window by waving what?

A toothbrush kept time for the women marching in the yard below; Smyth, who also composed the suffragette anthem The March of the Women, had been sentenced to two months for breaking a window.

Which Ravel piece, one long crescendo over a repeated snare-drum rhythm, carried Torvill and Dean to 1984 Olympic gold?

Boléro was dismissed by Ravel himself as orchestral tissue without music, nothing but one very long, gradual crescendo; the ice dancers won perfect artistic marks from every judge.

By a famous story, Mozart at 14 wrote out Allegri's guarded Miserere from memory after one hearing in which building?

The Sistine Chapel had kept the piece for its own Holy Week services since about the 1630s; the tale rests on a single letter Leopold Mozart wrote to his wife in April 1770.

Which Johann Strauss II waltz accompanies a space plane docking with a space station in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey?

The Blue Danube began life as a choral number for the Vienna Men's Choral Association in 1867, with words supplied afterwards by the choir's own poet.

Which Puccini opera, left unfinished when he died in 1924, includes the tenor aria 'Nessun dorma'?

Turandot was completed by Franco Alfano from Puccini's sketches, and its showpiece aria became a worldwide hit after Luciano Pavarotti sang it for the 1990 FIFA World Cup.

Which Stravinsky ballet, in which a chosen girl dances herself to death, startled Paris at its 1913 premiere?

The Rite of Spring so unsettled its very first audience that the evening is often called a riot, though that word only turned up in reviews more than a decade later.

Mendelssohn's Wedding March, chosen by a British princess in 1858, was written for which Shakespeare play?

A Midsummer Night's Dream uses the march as an interlude before its final act; the bride who made it fashionable was Queen Victoria's eldest daughter, marrying a Prussian prince.

In Prokofiev's children's tale Peter and the Wolf, which instrument plays the duck that the wolf swallows?

Oboe is the duck's voice, and the narrator ends by telling careful listeners they can hear her quacking inside the wolf's belly, because she was swallowed whole.

Which Mozart work, ordered by a count who likely meant to pass it off as his own, was unfinished when Mozart died?

The Requiem was commissioned by Count Franz von Walsegg to commemorate his young wife, and Franz Xaver Süssmayr filled in what was missing, imitating Mozart's handwriting as he went.

Which Italian violin virtuoso, widely rumoured to be in league with the devil, was refused a Catholic burial?

Niccolò Paganini had also turned away the priest sent to give him the last rites, thinking it premature, and his body was not finally reinterred in a Parma cemetery until 1896.

Which Viennese composer began his Symphony No. 8 in 1822 but left only two movements, though he lived six more years?

Franz Schubert sent the two finished movements of the Unfinished Symphony to his friend Anselm Hüttenbrenner, and a nearly complete piano sketch of a third movement also survives.

Neil Armstrong took a tape recording of which Dvořák symphony to the Moon on the Apollo 11 mission in 1969?

New World, in full From the New World, was written while Dvořák was director of the National Conservatory of Music of America, a post he held from 1892 to 1895.

Which Elgar work is dedicated 'to my friends pictured within', each section sketching a member of his circle?

Enigma Variations portrays Elgar's wife Alice, his publisher August Jaeger and finally Elgar himself; it began as a tune he was improvising when his wife took notice.

In which Bavarian town did Wagner build a theatre reserved for his own stage works, funded mainly by King Ludwig II?

Bayreuth saw the foundation stone of the Festspielhaus laid on 22 May 1872, which happened to be Wagner's 59th birthday.

Which Carl Orff cantata, based on 24 medieval poems, begins with the pounding chorus 'O Fortuna'?

Carmina Burana also ends with the same chorus, which frames the whole work inside a section titled Fortune, Empress of the World.

Which Russian composer wrote Pictures at an Exhibition after a memorial show for his friend, the artist Viktor Hartmann?

Modest Mussorgsky was walking listeners through a real exhibition, staged at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg after Hartmann's sudden death the previous year.

Which French composer barred The Carnival of the Animals from public performance in his lifetime as too frivolous?

Camille Saint-Saëns feared the suite would dent his standing as a serious composer and relented only for the cello solo The Swan; the rest was published the year after he died.

Which Vienna court composer was long rumoured to have poisoned Mozart, a tale revived by the play and film Amadeus?

Antonio Salieri has been cleared by historians, since Mozart's symptoms did not point to poisoning, and the pair were more likely respectful colleagues than bitter rivals.

Which bell-like keyboard instrument did Tchaikovsky use for the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy in The Nutcracker?

Celesta notes answered the balletmaster Marius Petipa's instruction that the music should sound like drops of water shooting out of fountains.

Which French composer of the Gymnopédies bought a set of identical velvet suits and was dubbed 'the Velvet Gentleman'?

Erik Satie paid for the suits out of a small legacy, and he also claimed, tongue in cheek, to live on white food alone and to finish dinner in four minutes.

Alexander Borodin, composer of the opera Prince Igor, earned his living in which profession outside music?

Chemist and doctor by training, Borodin was a co-discoverer of the aldol reaction and among the first to demonstrate nucleophilic substitution.

Which Beethoven piano sonata was nicknamed by poet Ludwig Rellstab, who pictured a boat on Lake Lucerne?

Moonlight was never Beethoven's word: he marked the piece Quasi una fantasia and dedicated it in 1802 to his pupil Countess Giulietta Guicciardi.

At the 1824 premiere of which Beethoven work did a singer gently turn the deaf composer round to see the applause?

Ninth Symphony listeners gave five standing ovations, waving hats and handkerchiefs so that Beethoven could at least see the acclaim; the singer was the contralto Caroline Unger.

Which Handel oratorio was first performed in Dublin in April 1742, almost a year before London audiences heard the work?

Messiah went to Ireland to the dismay of its librettist Charles Jennens, who wrote of his mortification that Handel had taken the work there instead of performing it in London.

Handel survived a 1704 sword fight with fellow composer Johann Mattheson because the blade struck what?

A large button turned the blade aside; the quarrel flared up during a performance of Mattheson's own opera about Cleopatra, and the two men were otherwise close friends.

Bach's comic cantata BWV 211, probably first heard in Leipzig, pokes fun at an addiction to which drink?

Coffee drinking struck some people in Bach's day as a bad habit, and the Coffee Cantata was fittingly first performed, in all likelihood, at a Leipzig coffee house.

Which French composer's Funeral March of a Marionette became the theme music of TV's Alfred Hitchcock Presents?

Charles Gounod reached his widest audience that way: Hitchcock remembered the tune from the 1927 silent film Sunrise when he was choosing music for the series in 1955.

Sergei Prokofiev beat future world champion José Raúl Capablanca in a 1914 exhibition of which game?

Chess was a lifelong passion that Prokofiev had picked up by the age of seven, and in the 1930s he also played several matches against another champion, Mikhail Botvinnik.

George Gershwin and Arnold Schoenberg, composers poles apart in style, became friends who played which sport together?

Tennis partners they stayed, but when Gershwin asked for composition lessons Schoenberg is said to have refused, telling him he would only turn such a good Gershwin into a bad Schoenberg.

Grieg's 'Morning Mood' accompanies a sunrise scene in Ibsen's play Peer Gynt set in the desert of which country?

Morocco is where Peer Gynt wakes up stranded, his companions having sailed off with his yacht while he slept; most listeners picture Grieg's own Scandinavia instead.

Scriabin's Prometheus: The Poem of Fire has a part for a special keyboard that produces what instead of sound?

Coloured light was meant to flood the hall from a colour organ, with one line of the part following the harmony so that each key showed the colour Scriabin associated with it.

Which Italian prince and madrigal composer killed his wife and her aristocratic lover on catching them together in 1590?

Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, struck at a palace in Naples; he is better remembered for madrigals whose chromatic language was not heard again until the late 19th century.

The 'K' numbers attached to Mozart's works, such as K. 626, honour which cataloguer of his compositions?

Köchel, in full Ludwig Ritter von Köchel, published a 551-page catalogue that set out to put every Mozart work in order of composition.

Which choreographer created Appalachian Spring with Aaron Copland, a ballet titled after a phrase in a Hart Crane poem?

Martha Graham made the original choreography, and Copland's working title while he composed the score was simply Ballet for Martha.

György Ligeti's Poème symphonique of 1962 is performed by 100 of which devices, wound up and left to run down?

Metronomes set to different speeds are all started together after a long silence, and the piece usually ends with a single one ticking alone for a few beats.

Which 18th-century French composer, born in Guadeloupe to an enslaved mother, also excelled as a champion fencer?

Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, won a fencing contest as a young man that earned him a post in the king's guard, and he shone as a dancer and athlete too.

Which Czech composer of Má vlast went completely deaf in 1874 yet kept composing for almost the rest of his life?

Bedřich Smetana lost the hearing in his right ear first and in his left that October; Má vlast includes Vltava, the river portrait often known by its other name, The Moldau.

Which Russian composer dedicated his Second Piano Concerto to the hypnotherapist who cured his writer's block?

Sergei Rachmaninoff saw the neurologist Nikolai Dahl daily for more than three months in 1900, in sessions meant to restore his sleep, mood and appetite as well as his desire to compose.

Giuseppe Verdi and his wife are buried in Milan at the Casa Verdi, which he founded in 1896 to house whom?

Retired musicians were not his only good cause: in 1888 Verdi had already built, equipped and managed a hospital in a town bordering his country estate.

Which American composer of The Unanswered Question made his living as an insurance executive with his own agency?

Charles Ives devised life-insurance packages that laid the foundation of modern estate planning, and he stayed with the firm of Ives & Myrick to the end of his career.

Which French composer's The Sorcerer's Apprentice won a vast new audience when Mickey Mouse starred in Fantasia?

Paul Dukas based the piece on a 1797 ballad by Goethe, and it is by far the most performed and recorded of his works.