“Anecdotes and maxims are rich treasures to the man of the world.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The universe of classical music is jam-packed with musical anecdotes. Frequently these short narratives delineate subtle stories that highlight specific traits of a classical composer or a performer. Often humorous, anecdotes of classical composers don’t simply provoke laughter but can reveal a more general and subtle truth. We find Sophia Corri escaping her inattentive husband in an empty harp case, Beethoven being thrown in jail for vagrancy, and Rossini and Pavarotti both cooking their favorite meals. Napoleon gave free reign to his infatuation with an opera singer, Bach was challenged to a duel, and Frederick the Great had not only a great passion for music but also for a handsome Lieutenant in the Royal Guard. A musical anecdote is part of the process of telling a story, but it means sharing an experience with someone and not simply supplying him or her with information. And don’t worry, embellishment, exaggeration or fictitious invention are all part of the process. Anecdotes of classical composers impart the sense of a lived experience, as they usually involve real people in recognizable places and locations. In fact, musical anecdotes exhibit a special kind of realism and an identifiable historical dimension. Check back with us for more insightful and delightful musical anecdotes.
When Leopold Koželuch arrived in Vienna to follow his musical calling, he immediately understood that being a capable musician and composer was not enough to really get ahead.
When families migrate across linguistic borders, their names frequently undergo a number of significant changes. Just take the Stamitz family, an extended and highly active Bohemian group of musicians, as an example. The spelling of their family name in contemporary
We have a motet by the Dutch composer Ghiselin Danckerts (ca. 1510-1567) that has caused much puzzlement over the years. Originally published in 1535, but now lost, Danckerts’ motet Ave maris stella (Hail, star of the sea), was reprinted and
The American soprano Kathleen Battle read the words of the poet Toni Morrison and commissioned Morrison and the composer André Previn for a song cycle. Seeing the names of those three people in one sentence tells you from the beginning
The extraordinary dynasty of dance music composers and musicians named Strauss originated in the Hungarian town of Buda. Around 1750, Grandfather Johann moved to Vienna, and his son Franz Borgias operated a small tavern in the suburb of Leopoldstadt. That
Many of Franz Joseph Haydn’s symphonies have nicknames, sometimes for the circumstances, such as “The Miracle” in Symphony No. 96, where the audience, in moving forward to greet the great man in London wasn’t in their seats when the overhead
Joseph Haydn has entered music history as a jovial, grandfatherly figure with a reputation for a quick wit. Generations later, we still chuckle at the stories behind the Surprise Symphony or the Farewell Symphony. His famous good humor is all
It’s exceedingly rare, but autograph musical scores by some of the great composers in the Western classical tradition are still being discovered! In 1999, a miniature Beethoven string quartet was rather accidentally found in a chest of papers in Cornwall.
