Classical Connections Trivia Quiz

Answer: ....Genghiz Khan

Tamerlane (1333-1405) was the last of the great Mongol conquerors. He claimed (quite probably truly) direct descent from the first of them, Genghiz Khan, through the latter's son Chagatai. His name means Timur (Turkic for "iron") the Lame - he had been wounded in battle when he was young and limped for the rest of his life. It is to him that the Mongols' reputation for butchery largely rests: he left piles of skulls by the walls of all the cities he took. He overran most of Central Asia and was conducting a campaign into China at the time of his death, but his empire rapidly fell apart thereafter.

Handel's 1724 opera concerns Tamerlane's love for the daughter of the Turkish sultan Bajazet (well, it is a Baroque opera, so ya gotta have love, man!). This refers to the aftermath of the battle of Ankara in 1402, in which Tamerlane defeated the Ottoman Turks and captured the sultan, who subsequently died in captivity. Handel, as was his wont, wrote like the clappers. He completed the opera in three weeks.

Answer: ...the tenth chapter of the biblical book of Revelations.

The work is written for clarinet, violin, cello and piano, good players of which (including Messiaen himself on the piano) happened to be available in Stalag VIIIA in Goerlitz, Silesia, the German PoW camp where the conscript Messiaen was interned after the German conquest of France in 1940. He intended the composition to be a kind of musical extension of the passage from the book of Revelation which deals with the coming of the seventh angel on the earth, prophesying the end of time and the finishing of the mysteries of God. The work consists of eight movements, six for the six days of creation, one for the day of rest and one for eternity. In this work, Messiaen created a new kind of fluid, asymmetrical rhythmic organisation based in part on Hindu rhythms.

According to Messiaen, the work was written in miserable conditions including -4C temperatures, and its writing was his only consolation. The premiere took place before 5,000 fellow inmates and guards on January 15th 1941.

Answer: ...Jack Ruby

Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald. The latter assassinated US President John F Kennedy on 22nd November 1963. The whole nation went into mourning, and Barber's Adagio, as an unofficial mourning anthem, was played nationwide - as, indeed, it was at the death of President Roosevelt in 1944, and on 9/11.

Answer: ...the French annexation of Louisiana in 1682

What is now Louisiana was part of Spanish territory, having been discovered by Hernando de Soto in 1542, until 1682, when Sieur de la Salle claimed the territory for France and named it after the current monarch, Louis XIV. If he hadn't done that, two Native American men wouldn't have been captured by French troops and finished up in the Theatre Italien in Paris on 10th September 1725, dancing three dances to Peace, War and Victory. One was dressed as a chief, the other as a warrior. Rameau was there. Three years later, he included in his third volume of harpsichord pieces (the "Nouvelles suites de pieces de clavecin") the piece in question (called "The Savages"), based on what he saw.

He subsequently arranged it for orchestra as part of his ballet "Les Indes Galantes", which flopped - but the music was a hit, and this piece in particular was played in the French West Indian colonies and, I believe, in China during Rameau's lifetime! Rameau spoke with approbation of the native people of the West Indies dancing themselves to exhaustion to his "Les Sauvages".

Answer: ...the unseasonably wet summer of 1529

The collection of essays called "What If?: Military historians imagine what might have been", edited by Robert Cowley, contains the following line of reasoning, which is the best example I've come across of one historical event's influence over another. Follow this:

The Ottoman Turks were a great world power, having finally taken Constantinople in 1453. In 1529 Sultan Suleiman I, "the Magnificent", struck at the defiant Frederick, brother of the Hapsburg emperor Charles V, by attacking Vienna. All indications are that he would have succeeded in taking the city. He had Europe's largest siege train, including the largest cannons, as well as a large and powerful army 100,000 strong, which three years before had smashed a much smaller Hungarian army at the Battle of Mohacs to enable the Ottomans to become major players on the European scene. He set out for Vienna...about 10 weeks later than he had planned, owing to the unseasonably wet summer, which made it impossible for him to transport his siege equipment until the ground dried out. When he finally arrived before the gates of Vienna, Frederick had had time to reinforce the city, and the end of the campaigning season cut the siege short.

This unexpected reprieve left Charles V free to maintain his stranglehold on the Papacy, begun when he invaded Italy, sacked Rome and imprisoned Pope Clement VII in 1527. He certainly would have had to abandon Italy if the Ottoman offensive had succeeded, in order to defend his domains from the impetus of the Ottoman military machine, and his empire might very well not have survived. However, the Ottomans could not muster the strength to return to Vienna.

In 1534 Pope Clement received a request from King Henry VIII of England for an annulment of his 24-year marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Normally the Popes granted such requests - but not in this case, because Catherine was Emperor Charles V's aunt, and he wasn't about to see her humiliated throughout Europe. Of course, as far as the Pope was concerned Charles was the boss. This Papal refusal was the main reason for Henry VIII breaking with Rome and founding the Church of England.

The Anglican church was not just an English version of the Roman Catholic Church, but a new church altogether, which led to new forms of worship, including new musical forms. One of the main new forms was the verse anthem, an accompanied setting for full choir alternating with semichorus or soloists, as opposed to the full anthem, a piece for full choir throughout. "Teach me, O Lord" is one of the first examples of this new form, which remained current for the next two hundred years.

Answer: ...German general Albert Kesselring

Kesselring was in command of Luftflotten II and III, the main German air groups involved in the Battle of Britain from July 1940. His were the bombers who used the White Cliffs of Dover as markers on the way to British airfields to subdue the RAF as a necessary preliminary to a German invasion of Britain.

The song, made famous at the time by Vera Lynn, is a peace song which looks forward to a future when birds, not warplanes, will be over the cliffs. The text of the first verse and chorus is: "I'll never forget the people I met / Braving those angry skies; / I remember well as the shadows fell, / The light of hope in their eyes. / And tho' I'm far away, / I still can hear them say 'Thumb's up!' / For when the dawn comes up: / There'll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover / tomorrow, just you wait and see. / There'll be love and laughter and peace ever after, / Tomorrow, when the world is free." The words were written by American Nat Burton, who had never seen the Cliffs, and the melody by Walter Kent. It was published in 1941 and became a hit in 1942, after Pearl Harbor, being recorded that year by Kay Kyser, Glenn Miller, Sammy Kaye, Jimmy Dorsey and Kate Smith. It was No.1 in the UK in 1995 in a medley with "Unchained Melody", recorded by Robson and Jerome.

Answer: ...Big Ben in the Houses of Parliament, London

Big Ben isn't the bell tower of the Houses of Parliament, but the bell in the tower that chimes the hour. It's one of the bells that plays the tune known as the "Westminster Chimes", consisting of four different phrases, the third of which is identical to the fifth bar of Handel's aria. This was quite probably deliberate.

The tune should more properly be known as the "Cambridge Chimes", because it was first adapted by Dr William Crotch in 1793 for St Mary's Church there, and subsequently adopted for the chimes at Westminster.

Answer: ...all of these

The connection is that all of the four pieces have early examples of tone clusters.

The most famous, the last movement of Beethoven's 9th, opens with a loud diminished seventh chord which, when repeated a little way into the movement (just before the beginning of the orchestral basses' "recitative"), takes the form of a cluster of all the notes of the D minor scale played simultaneously. It is noteworthy that some conductors (including, I think, Toscanini) rearranged the chord to make it nicer. Shame on them!

Rebel's ballet opens with a similar chord, about as loud and in-your-face as you can get. It portrays order arising out of initial chaos. If you think that this is one of those obviously barmy ideas that only a second-rate composer would come up with, get a recording (I've got Musica Antiqua Koeln) and judge for yourself. It's one of the more effective pieces of music I've heard. In fact, Rebel was a great composer of highly individual music, to my mind fully the equal of his contemporaries Handel, Vivaldi, Rameau and all other composers of the second rank behind the almighty JS Bach. Right, rant over!

New rant: Franz Liszt was the most revolutionary composer ever. That's right, ever. He said he wanted to "hurl his lance as far into the future as possible" (or something like that), and in his late music, particularly his piano music, he did just that. He abandoned tonality (one of his pieces is called "Bagatelle Without Tonality") and emancipated the dissonance, often by means of an ostinato over which some kind of figuration moves without heed to the resulting clashes. The final cadence of his short piece "Nuages Gris" consists of a "dominant" five-note chord "resolving" onto a "tonic" four note chord. Needless to say, the terms "dominant" and "tonic" in this context have no relation to their conventional use, only describing relative tension and relaxation. In this context, Via Crucis has an early example of a cluster, at the very opening of the 4th station, "Jesus meets his mother". It's a pandiatonic cluster in this case, the first five notes of the scale of A flat major (I think - it is a flat major key, in any case) played simultaneously and in close position.

Cowell's cluster in his piano piece is sometimes taken as the first use of the device, but as we've seen, it has been significantly predated - not least by Cowell's greater contemporary Charles Ives, to whom Cowell himself yielded first place when he heard about Ives' youthful experiments.

(The prototypical cluster could be regarded as the second movement of Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber's "Battalia", a suite for string orchestra of 1673. The movement portrays drunken musketeers reeling out of the pub. Each "sings" a different song. The harmonious combination of different tunes is called a "quodlibet", but in Biber's case he portrays the "singers'" drunkenness by making each song in a different key and time signature, so that they clash horrendously. The final cadence is something like that of Liszt's "Nuages Gris", but in this case it's just a good laugh.)

Answer: ...God.

That is exactly who his symphony is dedicated to. Given that he'd dedicated his 8th Symphony in C minor to the Austrian Emperor, I suppose he only had one dedicatee left if he wanted to move up.

It's unfinished - the last movement exists in substantial but unconnected chunks. I've got a recording of Carragan's completion, which sounds convincing to me.

Answer: ...Jane Austen

Jane Austen's maternal great-grandmother was Mary Brydges, sister of James Brydges, Duke of Chandos, for whom Handel wrote his anthems. James married Cassandra Willoughby, who gave her name to Jane's mother and sister. Mary married Theophilus Leigh, the formidable Rector of Balliol College, and their granddaughter was Cassandra Leigh, who married the Rev. George Austen and had a whole brood of kiddies, amongst whom the acknowledged literary genius was.... yes, you've guessed it, their eldest son James! He founded a literary periodical called "The Loiterer" during his time at Oxford University; it's possible that his much younger sister Jane may have contributed to it.