Classical Composers

Question: Which composition by Ludwig van Beethoven inspired a novella of the same title by Leo Tolstoy, in which a jealous husband murders his wife after she and another man play the composition together?

Answer: Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata (1891) reinforced the notion that the sonata for violin and piano, first performed in 1803, inspired immoral passions and was inappropriate for ladies.

Question: Which major American composer also ran a successful insurance company?

Answer: Ives worked in the insurance business for 30 years and composed in his spare time.

Question: What renowned 19th-century pianist, composer, and teacher became known as the Queen of the Piano during a successful recital career lasting more than 60 years?

Answer: Schumann regularly premiered the piano works of her husband, Robert, whose hand injury prevented him from performing in public.

Question: Which renowned Russian Romantic composer was also a professor of chemistry?

Answer: Borodin was also a medical doctor and a campaigner for women’s rights.

Question: Which contemporary composer wrote a piece consisting entirely of silence?

Answer: In 4’33”, or Four Minutes, Thirty-three Seconds (1952), the performers remain silent onstage for that length of time.

Question: Of which composer did Igor Stravinsky say, “[He] did not write 400 concertos; he wrote the same concerto 400 times”?

Answer: There are nearly 500 surviving concerti by Vivaldi. Contrary to Stravinsky’s remark, they are not indistinguishable.

Question: What Soviet composer’s death preceded that of Joseph Stalin by approximately 50 minutes?

Answer: Prokofiev and Stalin both died on March 5, 1953. There were no flowers at Prokofiev’s sparsely attended funeral, because all available blooms in Moscow had been requisitioned for the dead dictator.

Question: Which composer’s Sixth Symphony features the ringing of cowbells offstage?

Answer: Mahler intended the cowbells, which also appear onstage, to evoke the loneliness of the Alpine countryside.

Question: Which medieval composer and mystic was declared a saint of the Roman Catholic Church by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012?

Answer: Hildegard was also a visionary, a prophet, a poet, and the author of hagiographies and treatises on medicine and natural history.

Question: What composer wrote a symphony in which the musicians stop playing one by one and leave the stage until only two are left?

Answer: Haydn designed the finale of the Farewell Symphony, No. 45, as a not-so-subtle request to his patron, Prince Miklós Esterházy, to end his extended stay at his remote summer palace, Esterháza, so that his musicians, Haydn included, could return to their wives and families in Eisenstadt. The prince took the hint.