Classical Music
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7correct to beat the crowd
This classical music trivia quiz has 206 free questions with answers and runs from Gregorian chant and Hildegard of Bingen to John Cage's four and a half minutes of silence and the organ piece in Halberstadt scheduled to last 639 years. In between: Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Handel on the Thames, Haydn's Surprise, the unfinished Mozart Requiem, Beethoven's Ninth as the EU anthem, Chopin's heart in a Warsaw pillar, Aida in Cairo, Mahler dodging the curse of the ninth, the Rite of Spring riot, Holst's fading Neptune, Shostakovich under siege and the Three Tenors at the 1990 World Cup. It also covers the working vocabulary (concerto, leitmotif, homophony, why the oboe gives the tuning A) and the instruments, so it works as classic music trivia for a pub quiz, a music classroom or anyone who wants to test what they actually know beyond the famous tunes. Early questions are for anyone who has heard the pieces; the later ones will stretch conservatory students. Every answer was checked against a reference page and shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 206 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Bach work thunders through the opening minutes of Disney's 1940 film Fantasia?
Toccata and Fugue in D minor
Toccata and Fugue in D minor is an organ piece, but Fantasia plays it in an orchestral arrangement by the film's conductor, Leopold Stokowski; its opening bars are also a staple of horror films.
Q 02Which musical form pits a virtuoso soloist against an orchestra, usually with a cadenza for showing off?
Concerto
Concerto soloists once improvised the cadenza on the spot; Beethoven broke with the habit in his last piano concerto, writing the passage out and forbidding the pianist to add one.
Q 03Which instrument is the highest-pitched regular member of the orchestra's brass section?
Trumpet
The natural trumpet of the Baroque era had no valves and could sound only the notes of its harmonic series, which is why its parts climb so high: up there the notes lie close enough together to play a tune.
Q 04Which Beethoven work opens with the four-note 'fate knocking at the door' motif, da-da-da-DUM?
Symphony No. 5
Symphony No. 5's short-short-short-long is Morse code for V, so the BBC used it, played on drums, to open wartime broadcasts to occupied Europe; it premiered in 1808 on the same night as the Sixth.
Q 05The Classical era turned from the Baroque's interweaving voices toward which texture, one melody supported by chords?
Homophony
Homophony, one tune over a chordal accompaniment, suited the era's taste for clarity; a pop singer backed by piano or guitar chords is using the same texture.
Q 06Which Austrian composer, dead at 31 in 1828, left more than 600 songs and an 'Unfinished' symphony?
Franz Schubert
Franz Schubert gave only one public concert of his own music, months before he died; he is buried beside Beethoven, whose funeral he had attended as a torchbearer.
Q 07Which Russian composer wrote 'Swan Lake', 'The Nutcracker' and 'Sleeping Beauty'?
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky never saw the Swan Lake danced today: its 1877 Moscow staging left the repertoire in 1883, and today's version descends from an 1895 St Petersburg revival, made after his death.
Q 08Which monophonic, unaccompanied Latin song was the core music of the medieval Roman liturgy?
Gregorian Chant
Gregorian Chant is named for Pope Gregory I, who by tradition collected it; the repertory sung today took shape later, when Charlemagne's Franks blended Roman chant with their own in the 8th and 9th centuries.
Q 09In which Italian city did Antonio Stradivari build his celebrated violins?
Cremona
Cremona was also home to the Amati and Guarneri workshops; about 650 Stradivari instruments survive, yet in blind tests most professional players could not tell them from fine modern violins.
Q 10Which era of music prized personal expression and story-telling programme music over formal balance?
Romantic
Romantic principles in music were first set out by the writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, whose 1810 review of a Beethoven symphony ranked wordless instrumental music as the art best able to express emotion.
Q 11Which Mozart opera features the Queen of the Night's furious aria, famous for its high Fs?
The Magic Flute
The Magic Flute's first Queen was Mozart's sister-in-law Josepha Hofer, and he apparently wrote the top notes to show off her voice; the opera opened about two months before he died.
Q 12What is the term for a recurring theme tied to a character or idea, the device Wagner built his Ring cycle on?
Leitmotif
Leitmotif is German for 'leading motif', a label Wagner himself never adopted; John Williams uses the same device in Star Wars, where Darth Vader and the Force each have a theme.
Q 13Which American song tradition, sung to him by his student Harry Burleigh, coloured Dvořák's 'New World' Symphony?
Spirituals
Q 21Chopin is buried in Père Lachaise, but his heart is sealed in a church pillar in which city?
Warsaw
His eldest sister Ludwika smuggled the heart, preserved in alcohol, to Warsaw in 1850; it rests inside a pillar of Warsaw's Church of the Holy Cross.
Q 22Verdi's Aida, set in ancient Egypt, had its 1871 premiere in which city?
Cairo
Cairo's Khedivial Opera House staged Aida on 24 December 1871, months late: the sets and costumes had been stuck in Paris during the Prussian siege of the city.
Q 23Which work did Mahler leave unnumbered as a symphony, reportedly hoping to dodge the 'curse of the ninth'?
Das Lied von der Erde
Das Lied von der Erde is a symphony in all but name, written after eight numbered ones; the dodge failed, since Mahler went on to finish a Ninth and died in 1911 with his Tenth in draft.
Spirituals reached Dvořák through Harry Burleigh, a Black student who sang them to him at his request; Dvořák then declared that America's future music should be founded on African American melodies.
Q 14Which woodwind opens Rhapsody in Blue with its famous wailing glissando?
Clarinet
The clarinet's opening smear began as a rehearsal joke by the bandleader Paul Whiteman's clarinettist, Ross Gorman; the composer liked it and asked him to play it that way, with as much wail as possible.
Q 15Which Baroque work came with sonnets describing a barking dog?
The Four Seasons
The Four Seasons came with a sonnet for each season, possibly by Vivaldi himself, and he tied the lines to the notes: in Spring the violas play the sleeping goatherd's barking dog.
Q 16Handel's Water Music was first played in 1717 from a barge floating along which river?
Thames
The Thames carried King George I's barge from Whitehall to Chelsea on 17 July 1717, with some 50 players on a second barge; he liked the music so much he had it repeated at least three times.
Q 17Haydn's 'Surprise' Symphony gets its German nickname from a sudden stroke on which instrument?
Kettledrum
The kettledrum stroke gives the German nickname, 'mit dem Paukenschlag'; Haydn told his biographer it was not meant to wake dozers: he wanted something new so that a former pupil, engaged by a rival London series, would not outdo him.
Q 18Which pupil completed Mozart's Requiem after the composer died in 1791, leaving it unfinished?
Franz Xaver Süssmayr
Franz Xaver Süssmayr finished it in secret so that Mozart's widow could collect the fee from Count Walsegg, the anonymous patron, who liked to pass off other composers' work as his own.
Q 19Which family member wrote down the five-year-old Mozart's first pieces?
His father
His father Leopold, a court violinist, wrote them into his daughter Nannerl's music book, and from 1763 took both children on a concert tour of Europe's courts that lasted more than three years.
Q 20An instrumental 'Ode to Joy' from Beethoven's Ninth serves as the official anthem of which body?
European Union
The European Union adopted it in 1985, after the Council of Europe in 1972; it is meant to celebrate the values member countries share, not to replace their national anthems.
Q 24Debussy's 'Clair de lune' is the third movement of which larger piano work?
Suite bergamasque
Suite bergamasque was begun around 1890 but appeared only in 1905, after revision; Debussy is said to have thought the early pieces immature and to have yielded to a publisher counting on his fame.
Q 25Ravel's Boléro is built on one unchanging rhythm, tapped from start to finish on which instrument?
Snare drum
A snare drum keeps the same pattern going from first bar to last; Ravel himself described the piece as 'orchestral tissue without music', one long crescendo written for the dancer Ida Rubinstein.
Q 26Who choreographed the tumultuous 1913 premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring?
Vaslav Nijinsky
Vaslav Nijinsky shouted the step counts from the wings to dancers who could not hear the orchestra over the uproar; even so, the performance on 29 May 1913 ran to its end and took curtain calls.
Q 27Which movement of Holst's The Planets ends with an offstage wordless female chorus fading into silence?
Neptune
In 'Neptune, the Mystic' the women's chorus sings from an adjoining room while a door is slowly closed, an early orchestral fade-out; Earth is omitted, and Colin Matthews added a 'Pluto' in 2000.
Q 28Elgar's 'Nimrod' variation puns on friend August Jaeger's surname, which is German for what?
Hunter
Nimrod is described in Genesis as 'a mighty hunter before the Lord'. Elgar never revealed the hidden theme behind the fourteen variations.
Q 29Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony is nicknamed for which city, where it was performed under siege in 1942?
Leningrad
The 'Leningrad' Symphony was played inside the besieged city on 9 August 1942 by the depleted Radio Orchestra; the score reached the West on microfilm via Tehran, and Toscanini gave the American radio premiere that July.
Q 30Which American composer wrote 4′33″, in which the performer plays nothing for three movements?
John Cage
John Cage called it his most important work; at the 1952 premiere pianist David Tudor only opened and closed the keyboard lid, and the music was the wind, rain on the roof and a restless audience.