Classical music comes with its own folklore: a poisoned rival, a king rising to his feet, a violin no modern maker can match. Some of it holds up and some does not. These stories follow composers, works, instruments and the halls where the music was heard, from a stolen skull to an organ piece that will not finish until 2640, and they sort what is documented from what is merely repeated.
Every tile in a Classical Music game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Composers
nine stories
1Four weeks of leave, nearly four months away
On the tile: Bach1705
In 1705 Johann Sebastian Bach, the 20-year-old organist of the New Church in Arnstadt, asked for four weeks off to visit the organist Dieterich Buxtehude in Lübeck. The trip was more than 250 miles each way, reportedly on foot. Then he stayed. Bach was gone for nearly four months. In February 1706 the church consistory demanded to know where he had been for so long, and he answered that he had gone to Lübeck to understand one thing and another about his art. He was severely reprimanded.
Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, was born in Guadeloupe in 1745, the son of a French plantation owner and an enslaved woman named Nanon. In Paris he became famous as a swordsman trained by the master La Boëssière and as a violinist who directed the Concert des Amateurs. When he was considered to lead the Paris Opéra in 1776, leading women of the company petitioned Marie Antoinette so they would not have to take orders from a man of mixed race, and his bid failed. Later, as conductor of the Concert de la Loge Olympique, he negotiated the commission for Haydn's six Paris symphonies.
3Mozart's supposed poisoner composed music with him
On the tile: Salieri1785Myth busted
Antonio Salieri is often remembered as the jealous rival who poisoned Mozart, a picture the film Amadeus helped spread. When a rediscovered piece by both men was unveiled in 2016, Ulrich Leisinger of the Mozarteum Foundation said that Salieri did not poison Mozart. Letters and other documents of the time show the two were on cordial terms, and Salieri later taught Mozart's son. In 1785 they had even composed a cantata together, with a third composer named Cornetti, to celebrate the singer Nancy Storace's return to health. Long thought lost, it was identified in 2015 from a printed copy in the Czech Museum of Music in Prague.
Soon after Joseph Haydn's burial in 1809, two devotees of phrenology, the pseudoscience of reading character from the shape of the skull, arranged with a gravedigger to take his head. Joseph Carl Rosenbaum and Johann Nepomuk Peter hoped to examine what they believed was his music bump. In 1820 Prince Nicholas Esterházy II had the remains brought to Eisenstadt, and the body turned up headless. The pair handed over a substitute skull and kept the real one, which passed through several owners to Vienna's Society of Friends of Music. It was finally reunited with Haydn in 1954.
Frédéric Chopin died in Paris in 1849, and he wanted his heart to go home to Poland. He had feared being buried alive, and in a penciled note he begged to have his body opened after death. His sister Ludwika had the heart preserved in an alcoholic liquid, possibly cognac, and carried the jar past Austrian and Russian authorities hidden beneath her cloak. It was laid to rest in Warsaw's Holy Cross Church. Examined by medical experts in 2014, it suggested that he died of pericarditis, a complication of tuberculosis.
France's Prix de Rome for composition had gone to Berlioz, Bizet and Debussy, and in 1835 to Lili Boulanger's own father, Ernest, but never to a woman. Lili entered in 1912 and collapsed from illness before she could finish. In 1913, aged 19, she tried again, writing her cantata Faust et Hélène within the contest's four-week limit, and won. The judges also gave a first prize that year to Claude Delvincourt. Chronic ill health from a childhood bout of pneumonia shadowed her life, and she died in 1918 at 24.
7A symphonist's lost scores turned up in an empty house
On the tile: Florence Price1933
On June 15, 1933, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Frederick Stock played Florence Price's Symphony in E minor. It was the first performance of a large-scale work by a Black woman composer by one of the major American orchestras, and the symphony had already won first prize in the Wanamaker competition. Yet most of her concert music was still unpublished when she died in 1953. In 2009 a couple renovating an abandoned house in St. Anne, Illinois, found piles of her papers and scores, including two violin concertos.
8Vivaldi's scores were sold to pay for renovations
On the tile: Vivaldi1926
At least 92 percent of Vivaldi's surviving autograph scores are in Turin's National Library, and their path there began with a renovation. In 1926 a Salesian college near Casale Monferrato decided to sell some old bound volumes to fund building work. Asked for an expert opinion, the library's director consulted the music historian Alberto Gentili, and both realized the collection's immense value. A businessman, Roberto Foà, bought the volumes in 1927 in memory of his late son and gave them to the library. The other half was still with heirs in Genoa, and Filippo Giordano paid for it in 1930. Together they hold at least 450 works.
In 1704 a Hamburg production of Cleopatra, an opera by Johann Mattheson, starred Mattheson himself as Antony. Once his character died, he expected to take over at the harpsichord, but the 19-year-old Handel, playing it that night, refused to give up his seat. The quarrel spilled into the marketplace outside and became a sword fight. As the story is told, Mattheson's blade struck a broad metal button on Handel's coat and shattered. Within a month friends had reconciled them, and Mattheson went on to sing a leading role in Handel's first opera, Almira.
Gregorio Allegri's Miserere belonged to the Sistine Chapel, and the Vatican guarded it closely. In April 1770 Leopold Mozart wrote home from Rome that the chapel musicians were forbidden, on pain of excommunication, to remove even a single part, still less to copy it. In the same letter he reported that Wolfgang, then 14, had already written it down. They chose not to mail it to Salzburg, since the manner of performance mattered more than the notes. The famous version says he did it after hearing it only once, a detail some doubt.
2Did a king start the standing for the Hallelujah chorus?
On the tile: Messiah1743Legend
Audiences often rise for the Hallelujah chorus, and the usual explanation is King George II. The story goes that at one of the first London performances of Messiah, in 1743, the king was so moved that he stood, and the crowd followed. The trouble is evidence. The first written record of the episode dates from 1780, 37 years later, and scholars doubt it happened. Handel's oratorio had actually premiered the year before in Dublin, at the Music Hall on Fishamble Street, on April 13, 1742, in a concert that benefited three local charities.
Vivaldi's Four Seasons arrived with instructions for the imagination. The concertos were published in Amsterdam in 1725 as the first four of his Opus 8, paired with sonnets possibly written by Vivaldi himself, and the score carries cues tying the music to the poems. A viola plays a shepherd's barking dog, drone effects imitate bagpipes and plucked strings become rain. Vivaldi told the dedicatee, Count Wenzel Morzin, that the music now came with a clear description of everything pictured in the sonnets.
One of Beethoven's best-known piano pieces is also a mystery. It was unknown until 1867, when the Beethoven scholar Ludwig Nohl published it from an autograph manuscript that has since disappeared, so his edition is the only record of what it said. He gave the title as Für Elise, but the lady may really have been named Therese. The tune has since found day jobs Beethoven never imagined. Many garbage trucks in Taiwan play it to call residents out with their trash, and in Sri Lanka it long announced the bread trucks.
Tchaikovsky wrote the 1812 Overture in 1880 to celebrate Russia's victory over Napoleon, and at first he thought little of it. He told his patron, Nadezhda von Meck, that it would be very loud and noisy but written without warm or loving feelings. Its American holiday career began in Boston, where David Mugar, hoping to revive the fading Esplanade concerts, suggested it to Arthur Fiedler. On July 4, 1974, the Boston Pops played it with cannons and church bells, and by the Bicentennial two years later, orchestras across the country were programming it as Independence Day music.
When Gustav Holst began The Planets in 1914, the known solar system ended at Neptune, so his suite ends there too, fading away. Pluto was discovered in 1930, four years before Holst's death, and the composer Colin Matthews was certain Holst never once thought of adding it. Much later the Hallé Orchestra commissioned Matthews to supply one. His Pluto, the Renewer begins before Neptune has quite faded, and it premiered in Manchester on May 11, 2000, under Kent Nagano. Matthews noted even then that Pluto's status as a planet was in doubt.
7An insurance man won a Pulitzer for decades-old music
On the tile: Charles Ives1947
Charles Ives composed while building a career in life insurance. In 1907 he and Julian Myrick started their own agency, and he took an active part in training its agents. His Symphony No. 3, The Camp Meeting, reworked from church organ pieces early in the century, went unheard for decades. Lou Harrison finally conducted its premiere with the New York Little Symphony in 1946, and in 1947 it won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Ives, who had given up composing long before, famously dismissed the honor, saying prizes were for boys.
8A French court ruled Boléro was Ravel's work alone
On the tile: Boléro2024
Ravel's Boléro, first performed at the Paris Opera in 1928, earned his heirs millions until its French copyright ran out in 2016. Then came a lawsuit. Heirs of Alexandre Benois, a stage designer who worked on the original ballet, argued that he was a co-author. Since Benois died in 1960, that could have put Boléro back under copyright until 2039. In June 2024 a court in Nanterre, outside Paris, rejected the claim. It sided with the French authors' society Sacem, which had produced a 1929 declaration signed by Ravel naming him as the sole author.
9A church performance in Germany scheduled to end in 2640
On the tile: John Cage2001-2640
In St. Burchardi Church in Halberstadt, Germany, an organ is partway through a single performance of John Cage's Organ²/ASLSP, short for As Slow as Possible. It began on September 5, 2001, the date of Cage's birth 89 years earlier, and it is scheduled to end in 2640. The span of 639 years is a tribute to a historic Halberstadt organ dating back to 1361. The piece opened with a rest that lasted until February 5, 2003. Each chord change since has been an event, made by hand by adding or removing organ pipes.
1The piano began as a harpsichord that could play soft
On the tile: Cristoforic. 1700
In 1700 an inventory of the Medici court in Florence listed a new keyboard by Bartolomeo Cristofori, keeper of Prince Ferdinando de' Medici's instruments. It was described as an arpicembalo of new invention that plays soft and loud. Not everyone was impressed: a 1711 article by Scipione Maffei reported that some professionals found its sound too soft and dull. It took nearly a century for the piano to push the harpsichord aside, and only three of Cristofori's pianos survive, all from the 1720s.
2Haydn's players asked to go home, one candle at a time
On the tile: Farewell1772Legend
In 1772 Prince Nikolaus Esterházy's stay at Eszterháza, his summer palace in rural Hungary, ran longer than expected, and most of his musicians had left their wives back in Eisenstadt. As Joseph Haydn told the story in old age, they asked him, their Kapellmeister, for help, and he replied in music. In the finale of his Symphony No. 45, each player in turn stops, snuffs the candle on his stand and leaves, until only two muted violins remain, played by Haydn and his concertmaster, Luigi Tomasini. The prince seems to have taken the hint: the next day he ordered the court home.
3Franklin's glass armonica did not drive anyone mad
On the tile: Glass Armonica1761Myth busted
While living in England, Benjamin Franklin heard his friend Edward Delaval play music on wine glasses and set out to build his own version. His armonica, completed in 1761, fitted graduated glass bowls, which needed no water, onto a horizontal spindle turned by a foot pedal, with rims painted to mark the notes. The armonica was a hit: Marie Antoinette took lessons, and Mozart and Beethoven wrote for it. Superstitions later gathered around it, and rumors claimed its ethereal sound could drive listeners mad or even summon the dead. Neither was true, though the instrument did fall into decline.
4Violinists in goggles preferred new violins to Strads
On the tile: Stradivarius2010Myth busted
Most violinists believe a Stradivarius sounds better than a new violin. In 2010 researchers tested that belief in a hotel room in Indianapolis, with 21 experienced violinists and six violins: two by Stradivari, one by Guarneri del Gesù and three new ones. The players wore modified welders' goggles so they could not see which was which. Asked which violin they would most like to take home, 13 picked a new one, and the least favorite of all was a Stradivari. Asked whether their pick was old or new, 17 players answered: seven had no idea, seven were wrong and three were right.
Niccolò Paganini called his favorite violin his cannon, for the fullness of its sound. It was built in Cremona in 1743 by Bartolomeo Giuseppe Guarneri, known as del Gesù for the cross he traced beside his signature. Paganini left it to his hometown of Genoa so that it would be preserved forever, and it is displayed in the city's Palazzo Tursi. It still bears the marks of his playing, because like his contemporaries he rested his chin directly on the instrument. It is no silent relic: the winner of Genoa's Paganini Prize violin competition gets to play it.
WWV, the radio station of what is now the National Institute of Standards and Technology, dates to the very beginning of radio broadcasting. Its first test transmissions, in May 1920, were Friday evening music concerts from Washington. It soon turned to broadcasting standard frequencies, and in August 1936, at the request of several music organizations, it added a 440-hertz tone, the A above middle C. The A came first. The ticking second pulses, now part of the time signals WWV is best known for, were added in June 1937.
Around 1920 a Russian physicist, Lev Termen, later known as Léon Theremin, built a machine that used radio waves to measure properties of gases and found it gave off a strange warbling tone he could shape by moving his hands. A trained cellist, he turned it into an instrument. The player never touches it: moving a hand near a vertical antenna changes the pitch, and a hand near a loop controls the volume. Theremin demonstrated it for Lenin in 1922 and performed on it with the New York Philharmonic in 1928.
Vivaldi wrote a large number of pieces for an all-female orchestra. The Ospedale della Pietà in Venice took in abandoned children, who could be left through a small window facing the canal, and it trained some of its girls as musicians. Vivaldi, an ordained priest nicknamed the Red Priest for his red hair, joined its staff as violin master in 1703 and wrote for its musicians, on and off, into the late 1730s. Its concerts became a draw for visitors from abroad, but the performers played hidden from view behind metal grilles.
9A war radio operator's electronic answer to the cello
On the tile: Ondes Martenot1928
Maurice Martenot, a cellist, served as a radio operator in World War I, and he found something musical in the accidental tones of military radio oscillators. He set out to build an instrument that could make such sounds with a cello's expressiveness, and he patented the ondes Martenot in 1928. Players originally slid a metal ring, worn on the right index finger, along a wire; a keyboard came later. One of its loudspeakers had its cone replaced by a gong. Olivier Messiaen was a particular admirer and wrote for it.
1Liszt turned the piano sideways and started Lisztomania
On the tile: Liszt1839
Before Franz Liszt, few believed a pianist alone could hold an audience's attention. Starting in 1839 he toured Europe playing from memory, at a time when that was considered almost in bad taste, and he placed the piano in profile so listeners could watch his face. Over about eight years he gave around a thousand recitals, and the very word recital is credited to him. The poet Heinrich Heine named the frenzy Lisztomania. Admirers fought over his broken piano strings and locks of his hair.
Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, toured North America from 1850 to 1852 under the promotion of the showman P. T. Barnum, and more than 30,000 admirers greeted her ship in New York. Between concerts in cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Nashville, she made a detour underground. On March 31, 1851, she visited Mammoth Cave in Kentucky and sat in a stone seat known as the Devil's Armchair. It was renamed Jenny Lind's Armchair. Nobody knows whether she sang in the cave.
Carnegie Hall opened on May 5, 1891, under a different name. Built for the Oratorio Society, with Andrew Carnegie as the principal investor, it was called the Music Hall. The opening was a five-day festival, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, making his first American appearance, conducted several of his own works. The building took Carnegie's name later in the 1890s. It drew large crowds but never paid its way, and by 1960 it was in danger of demolition when the City of New York acquired it.
4Refused a hall, Marian Anderson sang to 75,000 outdoors
On the tile: Anderson1939
In 1939 Howard University asked the Daughters of the American Revolution to let the contralto Marian Anderson sing at Constitution Hall, then the largest auditorium in Washington. The DAR refused, enforcing an unwritten rule that only white performers could appear there. Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the organization in protest, and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes announced an outdoor concert at the Lincoln Memorial instead. On Easter Sunday, April 9, some 75,000 people came, and hundreds of thousands more listened on the radio. Ickes introduced her with the words "Genius knows no color line."
5The assistant conductor who got the call at 9:30 a.m.
On the tile: Bernstein1943
On November 13, 1943, Leonard Bernstein, recently hired as the New York Philharmonic's assistant conductor, was celebrating a New York performance of his songs when word came that Bruno Walter, due to conduct the next afternoon, was ill. Bernstein studied the scores until 4 a.m., just in case. At 9:30 the next morning the call came: he was on. Without having rehearsed with the orchestra, he led the concert at Carnegie Hall, broadcast across the Columbia radio network. The New York Times headline read "Bernstein shows mastery of score."
6A Texan won Moscow's piano contest in the Cold War
On the tile: Van Cliburn1958
In April 1958, at the height of the Cold War, a lanky 23-year-old from Texas won the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. Van Cliburn had never been outside the United States before the trip. The judges reportedly asked Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev whether they could really give first place to an American, and he is said to have replied that if Cliburn was the best, they should give it to him. Cliburn came home to a ticker-tape parade in New York, and his recording of Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto sold more than a million copies.
7The night The Rite of Spring set Paris in an uproar
On the tile: Rite of Spring1913Legend
On May 29, 1913, the newly opened Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris was packed for the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring. Its opening bars, with a bassoon playing unusually high, drew what some present remembered as derisive laughter, and once Vaslav Nijinsky's dancers began stomping, Stravinsky described "a terrific uproar." Diaghilev flashed the house lights, and Nijinsky called out the steps to dancers who could not hear the music. Some accounts add flying vegetables, and whether the protest was spontaneous or planned is still debated.
8Sydney Opera House: ten years late, 14 times over budget
On the tile: Sydney Opera1973
In 1957 a largely unknown Danish architect, Jørn Utzon, won the competition to design Sydney's opera house, chosen from some 233 entries even though his proposal was mostly sketches. Nobody yet knew how to build his soaring shells, and the engineers at Arup could not make their calculations work. Utzon found an answer in the geometry of a single sphere, with every shell cut from it. Costs and political clashes mounted, and in 1966 he resigned and left Australia, never returning. Queen Elizabeth II opened the building in 1973, ten years late and 14 times over its initial budget.
9Venice's Phoenix opera house has lived up to its name
On the tile: La Fenice1792
Venice's opera house was named La Fenice, the Phoenix, before it ever burned. It opened in 1792, and the name marked the company's rebirth after losing its previous theater. The name proved apt. A fire devastated the house in December 1836, and on January 29, 1996, during renovation work, another destroyed it. In 2001 a court convicted two electricians of setting that fire; prosecutors argued their company wanted to avoid heavy fines over delays in the repairs. La Fenice, where Rigoletto and La Traviata were first heard, reopened on December 14, 2003.