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50 free Famous Composers trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Composers leave behind more than scores. They leave anecdotes: a superstition that reshaped an opera title, a ballet written for a circus, a court case fought to marry, a symphony thrown on the fire. This quiz gathers fifty of those stories from nine centuries of music. The questions run from the medieval abbess who is one of the first composers we know by name through the Baroque, Classical and Romantic giants, into the twentieth century's modernists and minimalists, and on to the film composers whose themes everyone can hum. Each one names a work, a premiere, a patron, a nickname or a first, and every answer comes with the fact that makes it worth remembering. It suits anyone who has sat through a concert and wondered about the person behind the music, quiz hosts who want a music round with real teeth, and students who would rather learn composers through their stories than their dates.
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Q 01Balanchine staged Stravinsky's 1942 Circus Polka for the Ringling circus; which animals danced it?
Elephants
Fifty elephants and fifty ballerinas danced the Circus Polka, which Stravinsky wrote after Balanchine phoned him to ask for a piece 'for some elephants'.
Q 02Which steak dish topped with foie gras and truffle honours the composer of The Barber of Seville?
Tournedos Rossini
Tournedos Rossini is filet mignon on a croûton under a slice of foie gras, one of several rich dishes named for Gioachino Rossini. He wrote no operas after Guillaume Tell in 1829 and spent his last decades in Paris as a gourmet.
Q 03Which planet, already known when Holst finished The Planets in 1917, has no movement in the suite?
Earth
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.
Q 04Schoenberg spelled his opera Moses und Aron with one 'a' to dodge a title with how many letters?
13
Schoenberg's triskaidekaphobia was so strong that 'Moses und Aaron', 13 letters, became 'Moses und Aron'; he died on Friday, 13 July 1951.
Q 05Haydn's 1797 birthday hymn for Emperor Francis II is now the national anthem of which country?
Germany
Germany's Deutschlandlied sets words Hoffmann von Fallersleben wrote in 1841 to Haydn's 'Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser', an Austrian emperor's hymn.
Q 06Prokofiev died on 5 March 1953, the same day as which Soviet leader, whose mourners swamped Moscow?
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin's death the same day meant crowds mourning him for three days made it impossible to hold Prokofiev's funeral at the Composers' Union.
Q 07Which Scott Joplin rag from 1902 reached the Billboard top three in 1974 as the theme of The Sting?
The Entertainer
The Entertainer climbed to No. 3 on the Hot 100 in Marvin Hamlisch's arrangement, seven decades after Joplin wrote it.
Q 08Which film composer can be glimpsed in the Buggles' 1979 video for 'Video Killed the Radio Star'?
Hans Zimmer
Hans Zimmer worked with the Buggles long before winning Oscars for The Lion King and Dune.
Q 09Which Gershwin work premiered at Paul Whiteman's 1924 concert 'An Experiment in Modern Music'?
Rhapsody in Blue
Rhapsody in Blue was orchestrated by Whiteman's arranger Ferde Grofé, with Gershwin himself playing the piano part at Aeolian Hall.
Q 10The 'Galop infernal', the tune every can-can line kicks to, ends which Offenbach operetta?
Orpheus in the Underworld
Orpheus in the Underworld ends with the gods throwing themselves into the galop, a tune the Moulin Rouge adopted for the can-can in the 1890s.
Q 11Which organist did the young Bach travel some 450 km, reportedly on foot, to hear play in Lübeck?
Dieterich Buxtehude
Dieterich Buxtehude's organ playing kept Bach in Lübeck about four months on a four-week leave, a 450-kilometre journey each way that he reportedly made on foot.
Q 12Where in London did the fireworks for which Handel wrote his 1749 wind-band suite actually take place?
Green Park
Green Park's display went badly: rain caused misfires and the right pavilion caught fire, though 12,000 people had paid to hear the rehearsal at Vauxhall Gardens days earlier.
Q 13Which travelling eye surgeon operated on both Bach and Handel, and both composers died soon after?
John Taylor
Q 21Chopin's Marche funèbre, played at his own Paris burial in 1849, is the third movement of which work?
Piano Sonata No. 2
Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor absorbed the Marche funèbre, which Chopin had composed at least two years before the rest of the work; it has become the archetypal funeral march, heard at Chopin's own funeral in Paris.
Q 22Liszt's 1840 concert at London's Hanover Square Rooms was the first billed by what now-common term?
Recital
Recital was the word first applied to Liszt's solo concert on 9 June 1840, and he is credited as the first pianist to give solo recitals in the modern sense.
Q 23Wagner's second wife Cosima, who outlived him by 47 years, was the daughter of which pianist-composer?
John Taylor, a self-promoting English oculist who toured Europe, operated twice on Bach's cataracts in 1750 and on Handel in 1758; Bach died within four months.
Q 14Which part of Haydn did phrenologists steal after his 1809 burial and return only in 1954?
His skull
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.
Q 15Who, Leipzig's first choice in 1723, used the offer to get a raise in Hamburg, leaving the post to Bach?
Georg Philipp Telemann
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.
Q 16Monteverdi left the Mantua court in 1613 to run the music at which basilica for the rest of his life?
St Mark's, Venice
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.
Q 17Tallis's c. 1570 motet Spem in alium, a Renaissance showpiece, is written for how many independent vocal parts?
40
Forty independent vocal lines make Spem in alium a Renaissance showpiece, possibly written to outdo a 40-part motet the Italian Alessandro Striggio brought to London.
Q 18Which Purcell work, his only all-sung opera, ends with the lament 'When I am laid in earth'?
Dido and Aeneas
Dido and Aeneas survives in no manuscript in Purcell's hand; the only 17th-century source is a libretto, possibly from the first performance.
Q 19Vivaldi's rediscovered manuscripts were bought for which city's library by two fathers mourning their sons?
Turin
Turin's National University Library got the collections thanks to businessmen Roberto Foà and Filippo Giordano, each paying in memory of a son; the Gloria was revived from them in 1939.
Q 20Domenico Scarlatti wrote his keyboard sonatas mostly for Spain's Queen Maria Barbara; how many survive?
555
The 555 keyboard sonatas were mostly written for Maria Barbara, and their unconventional harmonies won admirers from Bach to Bartók.
Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt fathered Cosima with the writer Marie d'Agoult, and Cosima left her first husband, the conductor Hans von Bülow, for Wagner.
Q 24In 1859 Italian nationalists chalked 'Viva VERDI' on walls as an acronym for long live whom?
Victor Emmanuel II
Vittorio Emanuele Re D'Italia — Victor Emmanuel II, King of Italy — hid inside the composer's name, turning Verdi into a password for unification.
Q 25Conductor Hans von Bülow ranked which composer with Bach and Beethoven as the 'three Bs'?
Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms, von Bülow wrote to his wife, was 'after Bach and Beethoven the greatest, the most sublime of all composers' — praise that Wagner mocked.
Q 26Dvořák wrote his 'American' Quartet in summer 1893 in Spillville, a Czech-speaking town in which US state?
Iowa
Iowa's Spillville, settled by Czech speakers, gave Dvořák a 'summer Vysoká' — a stand-in for his Bohemian country home — during his three American years.
Q 27Grieg said 'In the Hall of the Mountain King' reeked of what, though he hoped the irony would show?
Cowpats
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.
Q 28How many symphonies did Sibelius finish before the long silence in which he burned an unfinished eighth?
Seven
Seven symphonies form the core of Sibelius's output; his wife Aino recalled him collecting manuscripts in a laundry basket and burning them on the dining-room fire.
Q 29Mahler composed only in his summer holidays because his year-round living came from which job?
Opera conductor
Opera conductor was Mahler's living — Budapest, Hamburg and then Vienna's Court Opera — so composing stayed a part-time activity and his output remained small.
Q 30Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune is a 'free illustration' of a poem by which French symbolist?
Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé was unhappy that his poem had been set, until he heard the premiere at Debussy's invitation and wrote to thank him.