Three B's of Classical Music? Make That Ten! Quiz

Answer: Johann Sebastian Bach

Composer and organist Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) was born into a highly musical family. He wrote essentially every kind of music that existed at the time except opera, but his entire career was spent within an area of Germany smaller than most American states. Though he never traveled very far, he studied as much music as he could find from other composers, and once he walked (yes, walked) 280 miles to hear a concert by organist and composer Dieterich Buxtehude.

Duke Wilhelm of Saxe-Weimar once jailed Bach out of spite for several weeks when he left him to be employed by Prince Leopold of Koethen (he used the time to compose organ preludes).

Bach wrote more than 1100 works, both religious and secular. Since the Bach Revival of the 19th century, he has been revered for his work's musical complexities and stylistic innovations. His death defined the end of the Baroque era.

Answer: Ludwig van Beethoven

Traditionally the second B of Classical Music, Beethoven created some of the world's most influential music and indeed transformed Western music. He moved from proper Classicism (String Quartets Nos. 1-6, Op. 18) to more inventive and expressive Romanticism (piano sonatas like Op. 26 "Les Adieux" and No. 8 "Pathétique") and set new standards for the symphony, by extending its length and expanding its scope to the expression of grand ideas or profound feelings. He wrote one opera, nine symphonies, and countless sonatas and other pieces for chamber ensembles, solo piano, and other instruments.

Beethoven's father had pushed his son to be the new Mozart, but young Ludwig, while a genius, was not quite the child prodigy that Mozart was. Beethoven did however compose "An Elegy to a Dead Poodle" at age 12. Sickly throughout most of his life, he started hearing buzzing in his ears at age 27 and became stone deaf by age 44 or 45. He couldn't even hear his Ninth Symphony, which was the first by a major composer to use a choral movement (4th movement "Ode to Joy"), yet it remains one of his most-admired and most-performed works.

Beethoven even influenced modern media centuries after his passing. As originally conceived in 1979-80, the audio compact disc (CD) was to hold 60 minutes of music. Electronics giants Sony and Philips decided, however, that their new music medium should be able to play the entirety of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, so the capacity of their standard CD was expanded to 74 minutes, the time it typically takes an orchestra to complete that famous work. Truly an "Ode to Joy"!

Answer: Johannes Brahms

Johanes Brahms was a child prodigy born in 1833 to a family so poor he had to play in music halls as a boy to add to his family's income. He composed music in his youth, but he was such a perfectionist that as an adult he destroyed most of those compositions out of embarrassment. That perfectionism caused him to take 20 years to complete his first symphony!

Brahms sent compositions to Robert Schumann, who returned them unopened. When Schumann finally listened to one of them, he wrote an essay called "Neue Bahnen" (New Paths) for the magazine "Neue Zeitschrift für Musik" praising young Brahms and predicting he would topple the New German School of Liszt and Wagner. (In fact, there was quite a bit of rivalry between conservative Romantics such as Brahms and the New German School). Quite possibly he carried on with his longtime friend Clara Schumann (a composer in her own right) after her husband Robert's death.

Brahms wrote his longest composition, "A German Requiem", out of grief when his mother died. Perhaps his most popular piece is "Wiegenlied" ("Lullaby" or "Cradle Song"), Op. 49, No. 4, for piano and voice, published in 1868. He gave up composing altogether in 1890 when he was 57, but he resumed before too long. He died of cancer in Vienna in 1897.

Answer: Hector Berlioz

The works of Louis-Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) are difficult to encapsulate. His "Symphonie Fantastique" is not quite a symphony in that it broke from the norms established by prior composers and made it more programmatic (i.e. story-telling). His "Harold en Italie', written for Paganini, is not quite a concerto nor is his Requiem a normal, religious requiem; and "Roméo et Juliette" is a mixture of all sorts of things, but regarded as one of his finest works and a major influence on Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde". (Shakespeare was a great inspiration to him.)

Unlike most musicians of his caliber, Hector Berlioz did not take music lessons until age 12. Although a talented composer, he was only ever an average performer. He was an advocate for an unusual instrument called the octobass, which is so ridiculously large that it requires a ladder to play it. (It never caught on.)

Berlioz composed one of the most influential pieces of the early Romantic period in 1830, the "Symphonie Fantastique", or the full name in English, "Fantastical Symphony: Episodes in the Life of an Artist ... in Five Sections", Op. 14. (The points of ellipsis are part the title!) Conductor Leonard Bernstein called the fanciful, hallucinatory piece the first musical expedition into psychedelia (and indeed Berlioz may have composed it while taking opium).

While in Paris working on "Fantastique", Berlioz fell in love and got engaged to Camille Moke. But then Berlioz won the Prix de Rome, a prestigious award that afforded the winner a chance to spend a few years in Italy studying music. While he was away, Moke fell in love with another man. Berlioz planned to have him assassinated, but at the eleventh hour changed his mind. In 1833, he met and fell in love with an Irish actress, whom he married. He spent the 1840-50s touring Europe as a conductor, for which he was more famous in his lifetime than his compositions. In his final years he was plagued with painful intestinal ailments which finally caused his demise in 1866.

Answer: Georges Bizet

A child prodigy, Bizet entered Paris Conservatoire at age 9, and later he met Rossini and became admired by Lizst. Despite such promise, Bizet's early keyboard and orchestral compositions were not successful. His 1863 opera "Les pęcheurs de perles" ("The Pearl Fishers") was not well-received, although the duet "Au fond du temple saint", known as the "The Pearl Fishers' Duet", eventually became one of the most popular in Western opera. His second opera, "La jolie fille de Perth" ("The Fair Maid of Perth") fared little better.

He pinned his hopes on the opera "Carmen" (1875). In the preimiére audience was Camille Saint-Saëns, who loved it. Charles Gounod, however, whom Bizet had admired since his youth, accused the composer of plagiarism. That and bad reviews convinced Bizet it was a failure. Three months later, he succumbed to emphysema. It was only after his death, particularly in the 20th century, that Bizet became recognized for his brilliant and original work.

Answer: Béla Bartók

Béla Bartók was born March 25, 1881, in Nagyszentmiklós in the Kingdom of Hungary (now in modern-day Romania). He was blessed with a musical family, and his mother began giving him piano lessons when he was only five years old.

After hearing a young Transylvanian girl sing a folk song with an unusual melody in 1904, he embarked upon a quest. To Slovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Morocco he travelled and transcribed folk songs and recorded them using an Edison phonograph. Peasants and working people he met were pleased to sing and play into the recording horn, and so he amassed over 6,000 songs!

Bartok also preserved folk music from Hungary and Romania, and he incorporated Eastern European rhythms and melodies into his compositions. His "Concerto for Orchestra" and "Music for Strings", for example are both very rhythmically complex works with experimental harmonies, and some audiences found them quite difficult to understand at first.

He wrote only one opera, "Bluebeard's Castle", two ballets, and a good deal of chamber music. His ballet "The Miraculous Mandarin" shows the influence of Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, and Igor Stravinsky -- and like Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" it was very controversial in its day.

When World War II broke out, his criticism of Nazis put him in danger, and he fled to the USA with his wife Ditta Pásztory. He was unhappy in New York and found it difficult to compose (though it was where he composed the aforementioned "Concerto for Orchestra"). He died of a rare blood disease in 1945 at age 64 and left a viola concerto commissioned by Yehudi Menuhin unfinished.

Answer: Lili Boulanger

When Marie-Juliette Olga (Lili) Boulanger was just two years old, composer Gabriel Fauré observed that she had perfect pitch. Coming from a family of musicians, Lili played violin, cello, harp, piano, and organ.

In 1913, Lili Boulanger won the Prix de Rome, a prestigious artistic honor whereby the winner would live in Rome, all expenses paid, for 3-5 years. She was not only the first woman but also the first composer to win this award! She wrote her winning cantata, "Faust et Hélčne", in just four weeks (in accordance with the rules of the competition). It sounds rather like a cross between Verdi and Debussy. Her setting of Psalm 130, "Du fond de l'abime" ("De Profundis", or "Out of the depths") and the "Vieille Pričre bouddhique" ("Old Buddhist Prayer") of 1917 are also admired its for lush harmonies and instrumentation.

When Lili Boulanger was 24, she wrote her last piece, "Pie Jesu", which she dictated from her deathbed to her sister Nadia. Sickly as a child, Lili finally succumbed to tuberculosis in 1918. Nadia became inspired and would eventually become the most influential music instructor of the 20th century, with students no less than Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, and Leonard Bernstein.

The Impressionistic Period straddles the Common Practice Era (roughly the 17th-19th centuries and encompassing the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods) and the Modern Era (the 20th-21st centuries).

Answer: Samuel Barber

Samuel Osmond Barber II, born in West Chester, Pennsylvania in 1910, composed his first piece at age 7. His first major success was the overture for an 18th-century play, and most of his best-known work was done his twenties. Nathan Broder called him a "lyric poet" in a period when there was hardly any lyricism to American music, as the 1930s were more of a time of excitement and experimentation than contemplativeness. (Some during his life considered him a neo-Romantic.)

Samuel Barber's best-known work is his "Adagio for Strings", a mournful and unforgettable piece of music arranged for string orchestra from his String Quartet, Op. 11. "Adagio for Strings" was played at the funeral of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945 and again for the funeral of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. It became, in the words of musicologist Thomas Larson, "America's secular hymn for grieving the dead".

The Adagio was not, however, Barber's favorite. "They always play that," he told WQXR in 1978. "I wish they'd play some of my other pieces."

In the 1950s, collaborating with librettist Gian Carlo Menotti, Barber turned to opera: Hermit Songs (1953) and Prayers for Kierkegaard (1954) A Hand of Bridge (1959). He had lived with Menotti for 30 years, and the end of their relationship devastated him. His last opera, "Antony and Cleopatra" (1966), on which he collaborated with Franco Zefferelli, was a critical failure from which his career and his personal life never quite recovered. He died from complications related to alcoholism in 1981.

Answer: Benjamin Britten

Born in 1913, Benjamin Britten was an important conductor and composer of the Modern Era. He wrote opera, choral music, orchestral works, and chamber pieces, including "Peter Grimes" (1945) and the "War Requiem" (1962). He may be best known for the orchestral showpiece "The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra" (1945). It was commissioned for the British educational documentary film called "Instruments of the Orchestra" (1946), but it has since been performed in its own right.

In 1961 Benjamin Britten befriended Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, and he composed multiple works for cello during the 1960s. Generally he avoided avant-garde works and instead espoused a "progressive conservatism". He received the British Order of Merit in 1965 and was made a life peer in 1976, something which no other composer had ever been so made before. Britten's health was never great even though he did his best to exercise and stay fit, and he died of heart failure later that year.

The "Young Person's Guide" is often associated with two other works meant to appeal to youngsters and also used by educators for their instructive value: Camille Saint-Saëns' "The Carnival of the Animals" (1886) and Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf" (1936).

Answer: Leonard Bernstein

Born in 1918 in Lawrence, Massachusetts to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Leonard Bernstein began playing piano at five years old. Between 1945 and 1947, he was Music Director of the New York City Symphony Orchestra, created by conductor Leopold Stowkowski to perform more modern pieces with more affordable seats than the New York Philharmonic. In 1951, Bernstein conducted the New York Philharmonic in the world premičre of Charles Ives' "Symphony No. 2", which although composed fifty years earlier, had never been performed!

Bernstein made many appearances on television as a conductor and as a lecturer. In his compositions, Bernstein he drew on Jewish musical, religious, and cultural themes in many of his works, and he wrote not only "artistic" or "classical" music but also music that crossed over into the popular realm. Bernstein's earliest completed works include "Piano Trio" (1937) and "Sonata for the Piano" (1938). His operas include "Trouble in Tahiti" (1951) and "A Quiet Place" (1983). Orchestral works include "Symphony No. 1 Jeremiah" (1942) and "Fanfare for the Inauguration of John F. Kennedy" (1961)

Bernstein might be best known, however, for his work on Broadway. Besides "West Side Story" (1957), his musicals include "On The Town" (1944), "Peter Pan" (1950), and "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue" (1976). He also wrote the score for the film "On the Waterfront" (1954).

A heavy smoker, Bernstein suffered from emphysema. He conducted his last orchestra on August 19, 1990, when he suffered a coughing fit which almost brought the concert to a halt. He announced his retirement that October, and five days later a heart attack took his life. In his obituary, the "New York Times" called Leonard Bernstein "one of the most prodigiously talented and successful musicians in American history."