Dead Music Trivia Quiz

Answer: violinist, organist, pianist, conductor, conductor, conductor

Vivaldi was reported as playing so high up the fingerboard that there was scarcely room for the bow between his finger and the bridge. Admittedly, the result was claimed to be more astonishing to look at than pleasant to listen to! Bach's organ playing was as legendary as his knowledge of organ construction and acoustics.

He once walked into a room that he'd never seen before, and immediately pronounced that if you whispered very quietly on one side of the room, someone on the opposite side would be able to hear you clearly. Needless to say, he was right. Beethoven's playing was amazing, if sometimes somewhat wayward, but his improvisation at the keyboard quite regularly moved his listeners to tears, at which point he laughed at them and mocked them harshly. Berlioz and Wagner between them did much to turn simple beating to keep an orchestra together into a real art form, one which (among other things) could give full expression to their complex scores. Strauss, one of the last of the great composer-performers, is the only one on this list to be recorded.

Answer: Mass

These composers fall into the time span from around 1300 (Machaut's birth) to 1594 (Palestrina's death); therefore "Mass" is the only possible answer, because the other three forms weren't invented till the seventeenth century. Oratorio and opera were invented within about a decade of each other, around 1600, while the glee became popular that century and fed into the partsong, examples of which are still being written today.

Answer: Castrato

...and a good thing too, you might say. Harpsichords are a dime a dozen, both solo and as continuo in a larger ensemble. You'll hear natural trumpets (i.e. valveless ones) in just about any large-scale performance of Baroque, Classical or early Romantic orchestral music played on the original instruments of the time. You can hear viols in many different contexts, ranging from Jacobean consorts to virtuoso solo French music of the mid-eighteenth century. What you won't hear is a live castrato: a castrated male singing soprano or alto.

There is a recording of Alessandro Moreschi, director of the Sistine Chapel choir and one of the last castrati, recorded in 1902-04. It's quite pathetic. Their heyday was in the eighteenth century, and by all accounts their range and power were utterly phenomenal; their voices were not considered effeminate or weak in any way. In fact, they took the roles which in the next century would be written for heroic tenors. Their disappearance poses grave problems for anyone trying to perform or record Baroque operas today - there just isn't a perfectly convincing equivalent, so you have to indulge in some suspension of belief when you hear a female (or male) alto singing a male role.

If you don't want to know the gory details, look away now.... The operation was performed on boys aged eight to 10 who could already sing well. Their testicles were immersed in warm water, kneaded mercilessly for some minutes and then cut off - without anaesthetic! This preserved their singing voices in the treble register; the idea for doing this purportedly came centuries earlier from eunuchs, some of whom quite obviously had sweet singing voices. They were originally used in a liturgical context, in order to adhere to St Paul's dictum to let women keep silence in the churches.

Answer: True

That's right - this German-born English naturalised composer only turned to oratorios like Messiah because the vogue for Italian opera in his adopted country, England, fizzled out, and he had to earn a buck somehow. Messiah is actually atypical of his oratorios, most of which fit the standard definition of oratorio as "unstaged opera".

In fact, some of them have been quite successfully staged. The previous question's comments on the problems which the disappearance of castrati pose for modern performances of Baroque operas apply primarily to Handel's operas.

Answer: Gesualdo, Verdi, Palestrina, Charles Ives, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Vivaldi

Don Carlo Gesualdo (1561-1613) was Prince of Venosa and Count of Conza. In 1861 Giuseppe Verdi was elected Deputy of Borgo San Donnino (today Fidenza) in the parliament of the newly reunified Italy, meeting in Turin. Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (?1525-1594) married the widow of a rich fur merchant, went into business with one of her former husband's partners and became incredibly rich. Charles Ives (1874-1954) ran his own insurance business, having taken advice not to make music a career because it would lead him to compromise his artistic integrity (it was he who developed the concept of double indemnity life insurance). Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908), of "Flight of the Bumble Bee" fame, trained as a naval officer when he was young; at the same time as he was Professor of Music at the St Petersburg Conservatory, he held the post of Inspector of Naval Bands. Alexander Borodin (1833-1887), composer of the opera "Prince Igor", among not very many other things, spent most of his time advocating women's rights in Russia, being a poet and writer, and fulfilling his duties as a respected research chemist at the Medico-Surgical Academy of St Petersburg. Vivaldi's nickname was the "Red Priest", probably because of his red hair.

He was ordained in 1703, but received a dispensation in 1704 from celebrating Mass because of his asthma.

Answer: False

In fact, it's exactly the opposite. English madrigal composers didn't even get going properly until inspired by the publication in England in 1588 of "Musica Transalpina", a collection of Italian madrigals. According to Eric Harman in his preface to the "Oxford Book of Italian Madrigals", at this time there were 23 English composers who had written at least one book of madrigals.

The Italian equivalent number was more than 600!

Answer: recorder

Both were the primary instruments of their day in their class. The piano and harpsichord were the main keyboard instruments, while the flute and recorder were the leading reedless wind melody instruments.

If you said "flute" in 1700, chances are that you would have been referring to what we today call the recorder. What we call the flute often had to be given special names like "transverse flute" or "German flute" to distinguish it from the "normal" flute (which was also called the "flauto dolce", or "sweet flute").

The recorder in Germany and England, so I've heard, suffered one of the fastest declines of any musical instrument. If you'd called around to my house in 1740 so that I could accompany on the harpsichord some new flute sonatas by Handel you'd just bought, you would have brought your recorder along. If you'd come around in 1750 with some new flute sonatas by Quantz, you'd have brought your (transverse) flute; meanwhile, your recorder would have been languishing in the bottom of your drawer - if you hadn't thrown it in the fire. It was the veiled, breathy tone of the new transverse flute, together with its ability to vary its volume without changing its pitch, that suddenly became highly prized at that time. (It's interesting that the relative inability of the harpsichord compared with the piano to make changes in volume didn't cause its equally sudden decline. Jane Austen, in her juvenilia written around 1790, several times refers to young ladies playing on the harpsichord, while the title page of Beethoven's Pathetique sonata op.13, published 1799, declares it to be "for piano or harpsichord"! However, I'd be very interested to hear it on the latter - as far as I know, it hasn't been tried.)

Answer: Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Wolf would hardly have said that about Wagner, because he was a staunch Wagnerian, and the Wagner-Brahms fracas was one of the most virulent musical squabbles of its time. What seems to have annoyed Tschaikovsky about Brahms was his perceived inability to write a good tune without taking it to pieces motive by motive and developing each one.

It depends on your point of view, I guess. Brahms, doubtless, would have been just as scathing about Tschaikovsky's inability to develop his material, as opposed to just finding a good tune and hammering it over and over.

Answer: Bach and Handel went blind, Beethoven went deaf and Schumann and Wolf went mad

Why mad? Syphilis, what else?

The story of Bach and Handel's blindness is an interesting, not to say tragic, one. In 1749, Bach called on the English King George II's eye doctor, Charles Taylor, to operate on him to restore his failing eyesight. Taylor tried and failed twice, Bach lost his sight altogether and died the following year. In 1751 Handel called on Taylor to operate on him, and again Taylor failed. Handel's sight worsened. One of the most poignant musical manuscripts you'll ever see is Handel's, of his last oratorio, Jephtha, written in 1756. At one point in the music he quite obviously can't see clearly enough to join up the note stems with the note heads, so he leaves the stems out altogether, and notes at the bottom of the page - in his native German, which he probably hadn't used for years - that he couldn't continue that day due to his failing eyesight. The chorus he was working on at this point is: "How dark, O Lord, are thy decrees, all hid from mortal sight"; the chorus ends with the words "whatever is, is right" - which Handel changed from Alexander Pope's original "what God ordains, is right". Spooky, huh? It's one of Handel's most spare, powerful choruses - well worth a listen, especially now that you know what's going on.

Answer: Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1828)

The Eroica is his Symphony No.3 in E flat major, at first called "Bonaparte" and dedicated to his near-contemporay Napoleon. However, when the latter made himself emperor in 1804, Beethoven tore up the title page and renamed the symphony the "Heroic - to the memory of a great man".

The Emperor is fifth and last piano concerto, also in E flat major. On its first performance in Vienna in 1811 a French officer in the audience purportedly called it "an Emperor among concertos". The Archduke trio in B flat major op.97, composed at that time, was dedicated to the Archduke Rudolph.

Answer: "Tosca" and "The Dream of Gerontius"

The "shabby little shocker" label is the critic Ernest Newman's. Elgar's work was a flop on its first performance in England, but received rapturous applause at the Duesseldorf music festival the following year; it led Richard Strauss to declare Elgar a genius and welcome England back into the fold of great musical nations.

One of the great things about opera is the anecdotes it generates. Two of these concern Tosca. In one production, done very much on the cheap, the only instruction given the extras playing the firing squad was to shoot the lead character. Come the time, they shot Tosca, whereupon Cavaradossi, on the other side of the stage, dropped dead. The other involves a leading lady whose behaviour made her cordially detested by every other member of the cast, and they determined to give her her comeuppance. At the end of the opera, the singer playing Tosca jumps off the castle battlements at the back of the stage onto some hidden mattresses. The stagehands replaced the mattresses with a trampoline. I leave what the audience saw to your imagination.

Answer: True

The full text of the hymn goes: "UT queant laxis / REsonare fibris /
MIra gestorum / FAmuli tuorum, / SOlve polluti / LAbii reatum, Sancte Ioannes. You'll note that the first syllables in each line (with the exception of the first, later replaced by "doh") are the familiar first six degrees of the solfa scale. (Music at this time was organised in hexachords, or six-note scales - hence the absence of the seventh degree, TI, which was added in the sixteenth century.) Now, the curious thing about the hymn is that the first notes of each of its lines starts one note higher than the last. That's where the theorist Guido d'Arezzo (lived around 1000 AD) purportedly got the syllables from.

In the 19th century a chap called John Curwen developed the system into what we know as "tonic solfa". He never meant it to be a replacement for conventional stave/staff notation, but his followers taught it that way, causing endless problems for people brought up solely with that system to read orchestral and vocal scores.

Answer: Yes

In the 9th century manuscript Musica Enchiriadis, the earliest known polyphony is demonstrated. It's called organum, and consists basically of doubling a piece of plainchant a fourth higher. In Aquitanian chant, in the 11th century, the musical signs (called neumes), which until then served merely as an aide-memoire to the pitches, were set against a real or imaginary line on the page in order to make them more accurate. This was the first, one-line, staff/stave; gradually more lines were added.

I bet you're asking: "How did the author/s of Musica Enchiriadis notate pitches in polyphony without stave/staff notation?" The answer is that he/they used a peculiar form of notation called Daisean, which is derived from Greek letter names. In fact, it's closer to tonic solfa notation than to staff notation. You can't indicate rhythm with Daesian notation, but then the the manuscript wasn't trying to.

If you want to hear the musical equivalent of Jurassic Park, there's a very good recording of the monks of the Greek Orthodox monastery at Mount Athos singing the chants for Good Friday through to Easter. At one point, they do exactly what Musica Enchiriadis demonstrated more than one thousand years earlier - for real!

Answer: Haydn (1732-1809)

No, not the FOUR Seasons, but just "The Seasons". It's an oratorio written after "The Creation", but by all accounts it's not as good.

Answer: Clavichord

The piano is basically a mechanical dulcimer (in which the strings are struck with hammers), and the harpsichord is a keyed psaltery (in which they are plucked by plectra). The clavichord is the simplest action, but the most complicated to describe: each string is struck part-way along its length by a metal tangent set vertically at the far end of the key. One end of the string is permanently dampened, meaning that only the free side (i.e. between the metal tangent and the other end of the string) is free to vibrate, which it does as long as the key is held down and the metal tangent is in contact with the string. Because this instrument is the only one of the three in which the tone can be controlled after the note is initally struck, it is the most expressive of them, which is why it was CPE Bach's favourite of the three.

Answer: The London, the Moonlight, the Little Russian and the Classical

I'm not sure which of these nicknames are actually parts of their respective titles. Maybe you could enlighten me?

Answer: Frederick II (the Great) of Prussia

JS Bach visited Frederick the Great in 1747, tested one of his Silbermann pianos, and improvised on a theme the King wrote. Back home in Leipzig, Bach used the King's theme as the basis for the pieces comprising the "Musical Offering", one of the most phenomenal works of music ever written, so there! CPE Bach and Quantz were the directors of the King's music, and the latter was his flute teacher (at least until Frederick's teeth fell out, at which point he turned into a general and smashed up his neighbours) as well as composer of flute concertos easy enough for the King to play.

The King and Voltaire also maintained a correspondence and became friends.

Answer: John Cage

John Cage's three-movement piece called 4'33" is something of a joke among musicians. It is written for any instrument or combination of instruments, and consists of the performer/s sitting in silence for the prescribed period of time. In fact, I think he was trying to make a point about music being all around us in the environment, something to which our expectation of hearing a piece of "artificial" music would heighten our sensitivity - well, maybe.

Answer: Edvard Grieg, Franz Berwald, Carl Nielsen, Jean Sibelius

For the record, their dates are respectively 1843-1907, 1796-1868, 1865-1931 and 1865-1957.

If you've never heard any Berwald, shame on you. Go and get his four symphonies on CD. Right now. Yes, now! You won't be disappointed. He was one of the most original musical thinkers of the mid-nineteenth century. A rough contemporary of Mendelssohn, Schumann and Berlioz, he can hold his head high in their company. The scherzo of his "Symphonie Singuliere" is buried in the middle of the slow movement - quite a daring experiment, and one which is very effective. The Pasadena Symphony's conductor Jorge Mester calls him "the Berlioz of Sweden".

Answer: ...Franz Liszt (1811-1886)

Liszt's daughter Cosima married the up-and-coming conductor Hans von Buelow. While the latter was preparing the premiere of Wagner's revolutionary opera "Tristan and Isolde" in Munich in 1865, Wagner was having an affair with Cosima. Finally Buelow granted her a divorce and she married Wagner. Buelow was evidently a really nice kinda guy.

Answer: ...is the greatest composer I know, either personally or by name."

Haydn and Mozart always held each other in the highest regard, and deeply influenced each other's music. Haydn was distraught on hearing of Mozart's untimely death in 1791.

Answer: The film "2001: A Space Odyssey", the film "Gallipoli", the musical "Kismet" and the film "Elvira Madigan"

It wouldn't be "Nosferatu", because that was a silent film. "Elvira Madigan" used the Andante from the Mozart concerto. Mozart Piano Concerto - "A Nightmare on Elm Street" - you've got to be kidding! The best-known excerpt from "Prince Igor" used in Kismet was one from the Polovtsian Dances used in the opera, which became the song "Stranger in Paradise".

Answer: Shakespeare

Prokoviev wrote the Romeo and Juliet ballet, Mendelssohn the Midsummer Night's Dream overture and incidental music, Tschaikovsky the Romeo and Juliet fantasy overture, Berlioz the King Lear overture and the opera "Beatrice et Benedict" (based on "Much Ado about Nothing"), Verdi the operas Macbeth, Otello and Falstaff (the last based on The Merry Wives of Windsor) (he also contemplated an opera on King Lear), Weber the opera Oberon, Bellini the opera Capuleti e Montecchi (based on Romeo and Juliet), Wagner the youthful opera Das Liebesverbot (based on Measure for Measure), and Lehar the operetta The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Answer: They're all unfinished

All of these works except the Schubert and (as far as I know) the Schoenberg have been "completed" by others after their composers' deaths, some several times.

Answer: PDQ and JL

Johann Ludwig Bach (1677-1741) was Johann Sebastian's second cousin, sometimes known as the "Mannheim Bach". Carl Philipp Emmanuel (1714-1788) was arguably JS's greatest son, being (as we've seen) court composer for Frederick the Great. He was a leading composer of the 1770s, and the chief proponent of the "Empfindsamer Stil", which expressed many different feelings within the same movement. Wilhelm Friedemann (1710-1784) was perhaps Bach's most wayward son, resorting in the end to passing off some of his father's compositions as his own - but when he was on form, he came up with some very original music indeed. Johann Christian (1735-1782) was known as the London Bach. He was friends with Mozart and was a leader of the classical style which Mozart and Haydn subsequently brought to perfection.

As for PDQ, the dates on his gravestone read 1807-1742 (yep, you read that right), and he is described as being "Sebastian's last and least musical offspring". He was in fact invented by Peter Schickele, who claims to be professor of music at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, as a way of taking the mickey out of Baroque and Classical music. He's done recordings of PDQ's music, as well as the definitive biography charting his catapult into obscurity. Both of these are great, especially Schickele's introductions to the recordings - one concerns his concerto for lute and bagpipes, "a combination which presents obvious problems of balance - problems for which PDQ found no solution for whatsoever. Never mind, it's a beautiful lute. Think of it while you're listening to the bagpipes." An interesting correspondence between the fictional PDQ and the real WF is that usually composers of the mid-eighteenth century could make up their minds whether they were Baroque or Classical, but our two heroes couldn't, with hilarious results in the former case and often very thought-provoking ones in the latter. If you want to explore the disgusting life of the foul PDQ, see the website at http://www.schickele.com/ and waste some money on the outrageously priced merchandise (Schickele's sentiment, not mine!).