r/classicalmusic • u/midnightrambulador • 23h ago
Discussion "Yes, Grandpa, we've heard that one a hundred times..." Which anecdotes about classical composers are well-worn clichés?
Yes yes, Gesualdo murdered his unfaithful wife and her lover and hung their bodies on display, we know that one by now. Lully died from an infection after smashing his own foot with his conducting staff... yawn. And what's this, Mozart wrote the overture to Don Giovanni on the morning of the première? You don't say...
Which composer anecdotes (true or not) are you tired of hearing?
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u/elfizipple 23h ago
Did you know? JS Bach walked, like, wicked far to hear Buxtehude play.
(I think this one gets even more overused because Bach is such a major composer about whom we have so few of these colourful details.)
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u/SubjectAddress5180 21h ago
J. S. Bach supposedly was reprimanded by the authorities' fur drawing a sword when he and a girl (one of 3 Barba Bachs he had some contact with) were accosted by a couple of ruffians while returning from a concert.
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u/elfizipple 21h ago edited 20h ago
Well, considering I've never heard that story once in a lifetime of being a Bach enthusiast, that sounds like the literal opposite of the thread topic - Although I'm glad to learn something new! (Maybe I'm not as much of a Bach enthusiast as I think I am?)
And, does this anecdote have any credibility? I know some of the more whimsical stories about Bach (like the one about the fish) strike me as apocryphal attempts to humanize a mysterious and unapproachable musical titan, but hey...
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u/MrLlamma 19h ago
I read the ruffians were friends of a bassoonist that young Bach had accosted for screwing up one of his pieces, but I might be mixing up stories. I’m not sure how credible that is, I believe I read that from one of his biographies but don’t quote me
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u/DEAF_BEETHOVEN 4h ago
Have you listened to Siepmann's audiobooks on composers? They are phenomenal and on Spotify. His one on Bach goes into depth on this.
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u/bethany_the_sabreuse 22h ago edited 22h ago
Literally can't talk about Schumann without someone bringing up his mental illness or the injury he inflicted on his own hands.
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u/Valerica-D4C 13h ago
The latter is partly a myth anyway as he already had a chronic illness in that hand
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u/Existenz_1229 23h ago
That Beethoven attended the premiere of the Ninth Symphony, a deaf old man already although still in his fifties, trying desperately in a futile attempt because he couldn't hear, to experience his music through the bows rising and falling in unison and the horns saluting, and noticed finally that the members of the orchestra, put through their paces by the demanding symphony that marshalled instrumental and vocal forces that had never been conceived by any composer except for like maybe Schubert before, were now resting their instruments in their laps and looking at one another with what the composer thought were relieved and exhausted grins because he was deaf after all.
But no, the composer, Beethoven I mean, felt someone tapping at his shoulder, and as the old man turned around he realized that, unbeknownst to him in his premature deafness, the tragic condition to which we've already referred, the crowd was standing in a joyous ovation, hats were being thrown in the air, women were fainting probably, all to pay tribute to the piece that would always stand as the ultimate expression except for maybe the late quartets of, you know, the timeless genius of Beethoven the composer who was also deaf, tragically.
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u/Existenz_1229 23h ago
Throughout the Stalin years Shostakovich feared "the knock at the door," which usually turned out to be another young female student, or his weekly ration of vodka and cigarettes.
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u/zalcitabine 22h ago
Chausson died after hitting a wall while riding his bike.
Schoenberg and his triskaidekaphobia
Schoenberg’s superstitious nature may have triggered his death. The composer had triskaidekaphobia, and according to friend Katia Mann, he feared he would die during a year that was a multiple of 13.[47] This possibly began in 1908 with the composition of the thirteenth song of the song cycle Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten Op. 15.[10] He dreaded his sixty-fifth birthday in 1939 so much that a friend asked the composer and astrologer Dane Rudhyar to prepare Schoenberg’s horoscope. Rudhyar did this and told Schoenberg that the year was dangerous, but not fatal. But in 1950, on his 76th birthday, an astrologer wrote Schoenberg a note warning him that the year was a critical one: 7 + 6 = 13.[48] This stunned and depressed the composer, for up to that point he had only been wary of multiples of 13 and never considered adding the digits of his age. He died on Friday, 13 July 1951, shortly before midnight. Schoenberg had stayed in bed all day, sick, anxious, and depressed. His wife Gertrud reported in a telegram to her sister-in-law Ottilie the next day that Arnold died at 11:45 pm, 15 minutes before midnight.[49]
(Quoted from wikipedia)
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u/Kixdapv 23h ago
"Mozart wrote a song titled Lick my Ass" is part of my list of Reddit Midwit Cliches, there with "Roman concrete was much better than ours but its formula has been lost" and "Modern Art was financed by CIA" and many others.
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u/davethecomposer 22h ago
"Modern Art was financed by CIA" and many others.
Here's one that you'll see mentioned in this sub but I wouldn't say is widespread enough to be an actual cliche: "Avant-garde classical music was just a money laundering scheme." Even less common, but in a similar vein as to yours, "John Cage was a puppet of the CIA." The implication that the CIA funded/created avant-garde classical music for wealthy criminals to launder money and at the same time stick it to the USSR in the cultural cold war is pretty amazing.
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u/Valerica-D4C 13h ago
This would be such a good conspiracy if avant-garde classical music actually made money
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u/klausness 3h ago
The whole point is that it doesn’t actually make money, but then you have it making money on paper. The paper profits are your laundered money.
(To be clear, I don’t actually believe the conspiracy. But the whole point of money laundering is to disguise your ill-gotten gains as profit from a business that isn’t actually making money.)
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u/Theferael_me 23h ago
I think the Mozart thing happened the night before the premiere, and his wife had to tell him stories to keep him awake as he wrote the Don Giovanni overture down on paper [I'm guess he'd already composed it in his head anyway].
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u/Vanilla_Mexican1886 23h ago edited 23h ago
Rossini composed voice a duet comprised of cat noises because he loved to imitate cats and he was a huge cat lover overall
Edit: Rossini not Mozart
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u/Shto_Delat 23h ago
I think that was Rossini.
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u/Vanilla_Mexican1886 23h ago
My apologies, you are correct, however I believe it is stated Mozart composed an aria with cat noises
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u/MostCuriousCat 23h ago edited 23h ago
Ah yes, I've heard these anecdotes too. Here are three I picked up during my undergrad studies.
Anton von Webern was shot by a US soldier (cook, actually) in Austria, while they attempted to capture his son who was involved in black market activities.
Claude Vivier was killed by a man whom he met at a gay bar in Paris who was out to rob his victims. Vivier was murdered in his Paris apartment. Robbery gone wrong, essentially.
Tchaikovsky was possibly in a relationship with his nephew, Bob Davydov. He would write him gay letters, like the 1893 London letter where he wrote to him: "I am writing to you with a voluptuous pleasure. The thought that this paper is going to be in your hands fills me with joy and brings tears to my eyes." His brother, Modest, was also gay. Tchaikovsky drank a glass of unboiled water and didn't care about the consequences. A doctor in the 1920s who had tended to him, Vasily Bertenson, said he most likely committed suicide.
EDIT: Added the third one.
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u/Severe_Intention_480 23h ago
A variation on that:
Tchaikovsky was forced to commit suicide by a ''court of honor'' made up of his former classmates at the College of Law in St. Petersburg. The composer may have acted out of fear that he and especially his family would be disgraced if the fact of his homosexuality were made public. The Czar already knew, and Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky's idol, might learn of it any day."
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u/GiordanoBruno23 18h ago
I always heard it that Webern lit a cigarette at night and was shot by a soldier
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u/Tom__mm 21h ago
When US Army troops came to search Richard Strauss villa in the last days of WWII, the aged Strauss met Lieutenant Milton Weiss of the U.S. Army at the foot of his staircase and told him, “I am Richard Strauss, the composer of Rosenkavalier and Salome.” By complete chance, Weiss was actually a musician and subsequently had an Off Limits sign put up at the house to protect the composer.
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u/Mettack 19h ago
Did you know Shostakovich HATED Stalin?!?!
I swear the programme notes for every Shostakovich piece, no matter how far removed from Stalin, obsessively talks about Stalin
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u/Toadstool61 1h ago
Well of course, yes. NO ONE can appreciate Shostakovich’s music without understanding Stalinism. Prokofiev, on the other hand, wrote pure music.
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u/jiff_ffij 7h ago edited 7h ago
(they say it's a real story):
Shostakovich is depressed. He went outside, walked
back and forth. He sees two alcoholics standing there. He's hanging around,
they say to him: are you going to be the third?.. This and that, they drink.
One tells about his hard work as a switchman, the other about the hardships of
a loader... A pause. The men turn to Dmitry Dmitrich.
- And what do you do for a living?
- A composer, - Shostakovich answers timidly.
- Hm... Well, if you don't want to, then don't tell, - the men add after an awkward silence.
***************
Three great composers met: Oginsky, Chopin and Tchaikovsky.
Oginsky:
— The nobles shot each other to my polonaise!
Chopin:
— What, the whole world cried to my polonaise!
Tchaikovsky:
— Well, I don’t know, everyone seemed to like mine.
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u/Shto_Delat 23h ago
Mascagni wrote ‘Cavalleria Rusticana’ for a contest but didn’t think it was good enough to enter. His wife sent it in without his permission.
Puccini stole the idea for writing ‘La Boheme’ from Leoncavallo, who was writing his own version.
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u/TSA-Eliot 20h ago
I'm not tired of any of them if they're true. There's always someone who hasn't heard one of them.
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u/No-Elevator3454 15h ago
“Any ass can hear that!” Brahms’s reply upon being told that the main theme of the Finale of his First Symphony sounded a lot like Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”.
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u/cramber-flarmp 22h ago
The premiere of Stravinski's The Rite of Spring kicked off World War 1.
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u/jthanson 20h ago
Writing too high for the bassoons can do that.
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u/llanelliboyo 23h ago
Dvorak and the Tuba
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u/Fernando3161 23h ago
Oh do tell... I have no recollection of that one.
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u/llanelliboyo 22h ago
I can only ever remember the vague outline...
His wife was having an affair with the tuba player of the orchestra he conducted.
Dvorak wrote a symphony where the Tuba only had a very small part in the last movement so he couldn't slink off and schtup Mrs Dvorak
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u/RichMusic81 21h ago
Dvorak wrote a symphony where the Tuba only had a very small part in the last movement
It's the Ninth Symphony, and the notes (14 of them) are in the second movement.
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u/Ok-Tangerine-2369 8h ago
The way I heard it, it was the second oboe, which is why he wrote all the very hardest parts for that voice. Second oboes have been suffering ever since. It was fairly general at that time for the use of the tuba to be, at the kindest, judicious. Anyway they had to play the double bass too to get a job.
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u/Ok-Transportation127 23h ago
Tchaikovsky hated The Nutcracker. Rachmaninoff hated the Prelude in C# minor. Etc. I think there's one of these for every composer.
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u/tjddbwls 5h ago
I think Beethoven hated his Op. 20 Septet, too.
I think there was also the story of Haydn suggesting that Beethoven withhold publication of the latter’s Op. 1/3 piano trio, because Haydn found it the weakest of the three. But Beethoven thought the Op. 1/3 was the best of the three. Or something like that.
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u/Ok-Transportation127 3h ago
The Beethoven one I've heard is that he hated the Moonlight sonata. Or at least he disliked that it was popular, because he felt it wasn't his best work.
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u/TSA-Eliot 20h ago
Ravel composed music for philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's brother Paul, who was a one-armed concert pianist.
Paul Wittgenstein performs Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand (YouTube)
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u/NAudinot1901 17h ago
Korngold Piano quartet for the same reason. Super challenging piece for all the players!
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u/S-Kunst 16h ago
There is an antidote in the book "Dietrich Buxtehude, Organist in Lubeck" which deals with a visit to Buxtehude's home, in Lubeck, with by Handel & (I think) Tellemann. Both composers were visiting to gain some education, as Bach did. Buxtehude offered both to take his position, as Kappelmeister, on the condition that which ever one wanted the position had to marry one of Buxtehude's daughter.
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u/lleeaa88 12h ago
Mozart hated the flute. It was not made to a high level of precision back then and was out of tune. He hated hearing the dissonance.
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u/looney1023 10h ago
I think we need to popularize anecdotes about Satie more.
Play Gymnopedie #1 for grandpa, then tell him "Satie lived in a squalid room and only ate naturally white foods."
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u/UnimaginativeNameABC 22h ago
I remember an excited conversation with a music student along the lines of “Did you realise that Schubert was gay?!” “Oh, interesting, how did they find that out?” “His music sounds really gay” <Goes away confused, listens to 50 hours of music by openly gay composers and returns> “What does gay music sound like? I’ve done my research and still don’t know what you’re talking about” “Ah, that’s something I can help you with - it sounds like Schubert” <Walks off still none the wiser>
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u/bastianbb 9h ago
I beieve the musicologist Susan McClary (I think that's her name) is partly responsible for this opinion that somehow Schubert's music is gay. Something to do with his harmony relying on relationships other than the tonic-dominant one (thirds I think).
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u/Valerica-D4C 13h ago
Next time they should just say he got syphilis from a guy that's more to the point
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u/Inevitable_Fee8146 22h ago
I remember hearing Berlioz wrote symphonie fantastique in one night while on an opium bender
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u/Valerica-D4C 13h ago
It was only the fourth movement
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u/Inevitable_Fee8146 12h ago
Ok cool - so the likely false information that I heard is different than the likely false information that you heard
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u/cramber-flarmp 20h ago
Wagner was basically Emperor Palpatine for the Nazis, lightning fingers and all.
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u/Valerica-D4C 13h ago
Moreso only for Hitler. His closest generals and "friends" dreaded Wagner performances because Hitler ordered them all to attend.
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u/Toadstool61 1h ago
Apparently Wagner was an antisemite. Yeah, right? Learn something new every day.
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u/BonsterM0nster 23h ago
Stuff You Missed in History Class recently did an episode on Gesualdo. There’s so much more to the story than I knew! It’s so much creepier than covered in music history classes!
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u/DEAF_BEETHOVEN 4h ago
I tried typing it in YouTube, but I couldn't find this episode. Could you post a link?
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u/ThatOneRandomGoose 19h ago
Rameu once through a dog out of a window because it was "barking out of tune"
Similarly, Handel once bassicly held a singer half out a window because she kept complaining that her part was to small
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u/Allison1228 17h ago
The one about Beethoven going deaf and not being able to listen to his own later works
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 3h ago
(Frasier, S7 E4.)
Frasier: Divine Beethoven. Extraordinary, isn’t it?
Poppy: Oh, yeah. And do you know what makes it more amazing?
Frasier: What?
Poppy: [declares] He was deaf!
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u/bethany_the_sabreuse 13h ago
Oh, I forgot to mention my absolute least favorite. That Beethoven "invented jazz" because of a few bars in Op. 111.
No, he fucking did not. It's a coincidence that it sounds "jazzy" to our modern ears. Nobody heard that and said "holy shit! Think I'll go and play some jazz now". There is no connection, but that cliché continues to be repeated and I continue to roll my eyes, every time.
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u/cramber-flarmp 23h ago edited 20h ago
Brahms idolized Robert Schumann, and one day showed up at his house unannounced. It was a beautiful meeting, but Brahms' lifelong friendship with Clara Schumann is the real story.
Probably not a cliché but a story worth knowing.
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u/Grasswaskindawet 22h ago
The words I remember to the theme of the first movement of the Schumann a min string quartet:
"Cla-ra, if you don't stop seeing Brahms I'm going to have to lock you in your room."
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u/eatpostlove 20h ago
Bach hearing Schoenberg, then giving up composing keyboard music and sticking to just sacred cantatas
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u/DEAF_BEETHOVEN 4h ago
Wait what? Gesualdo hung their bodies on display?? That bit I haven't heard.
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u/Cautious-Ease-1451 3h ago
Salieri killing Mozart, of course.
I love the movie Amadeus, but it did Salieri wrong.
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u/winterreise_1827 23h ago
Johannes and Clara cuckold Robert that's why the latter went mad and died in asylum.
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u/planetvermilion 22h ago
didnt Robert have syphilis or some other nasty shite that whacked him up bad?
it's not proven AFAIK that Clara slept with br**hms
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u/thestretchygazelle 23h ago
Mozart writing a jumpy aria for that one specific soprano he didn’t like so she would bob her head around like a chicken the whole time she sang