When the Obstacle Becomes the Music

 by Tunacan Tuna  June 28th, 2026

How physical and psychological adversity shaped some of classical music’s most radical voices

There is a persistent myth in the telling of great artistic lives: that genius triumphs despite its hardships. The more honest — and more interesting — story is often that genius triumphs through them. Across the history of classical music, some of the most radical and enduring works were not produced in comfortable studios by comfortable people. They were wrested from silence, from pain, from confinement, from a single remaining hand.

What follows is not a catalogue of suffering. It is something closer to the opposite: a record of transformation.

The Composer Who Could No Longer Hear the World

Beethoven conducting

The story of Beethoven‘s deafness has been told so many times that it risks becoming a kind of motivational poster — something to be invoked and moved past. But its implications for music history deserve more careful attention.

Beethoven began losing his hearing in his late twenties. By the final decade of his life, the silence was almost complete. He reportedly pressed a wooden stick against the piano and held it between his teeth, feeling the vibrations through bone rather than air. He could no longer perform publicly as a pianist.

What deafness took from him — the ambient noise of fashionable Viennese musical life, the pressure of trends, the approval or disapproval of audiences — it replaced with something more demanding and more free: total inwardness. The late string quartets and the Ninth Symphony were not composed for listeners he could hear react. They were composed for a musical logic that existed entirely within him. The result was music so strange, so structurally bold, that his contemporaries were baffled. We now call it the birth of musical Romanticism.  

The Eyes That Heard Everything

Joaquín Rodrigo

Joaquín Rodrigo lost his sight to diphtheria at the age of three. He would go on to write one of the most performed guitar concertos in history — despite never having mastered the guitar.

He composed in Braille, working through scores with his fingers before they reached any instrument. His wife, the pianist Victoria Kamhi, transcribed his work. The Concierto de Aranjuez — its famous Adagio in particular — conjures light, shadow, memory, and imagined landscape with a vividness that seems almost paradoxical from a composer who had lost his sight in earliest childhood.  

Perhaps that is precisely the point. Rodrigo had little visual memory to constrain him. He had sound, and what he had made sound mean. His relationship to the guitar was analytic and exterior rather than habitual and physical — and it produced something that every guitarist since has had to reckon with.

The Mind That Played Differently

Glenn Gould at the piano

Glenn Gould has often been discussed in relation to the autistic spectrum, although no formal diagnosis was made during his lifetime. His hypochondria was legendary; his posture at the piano — hunched over a specially built low chair constructed by his father — was singular; his habit of humming audibly throughout his performances drove recording engineers to distraction and has haunted every recording he ever made.

Whatever the source of his unusual cognitive style, it gave him something that conventional pianists rarely possess: the ability to hold multiple contrapuntal voices in simultaneous, independent focus. He did not experience polyphony as a blur to be navigated but as a kind of architecture to be inhabited room by room. His 1955 recording of Bach‘s Goldberg Variations remains, for many, the most radical and clarifying interpretation the piano has ever produced.

Gould withdrew from the concert stage entirely in 1964, at thirty-one. He found live performance anxious, wasteful, and socially exhausting. He spent the remaining eighteen years of his life in recording studios, treating microphone placement and tape editing as compositional tools in their own right — becoming one of the first pianists to treat the studio not as a documentary space, but as an instrument.   

The Composer Who Could No Longer Play

Robert Schumann

According to a long-repeated account, Robert Schumann damaged his right hand while using a mechanical device intended to strengthen his fingers — a story that remains debated, but has become inseparable from the mythology of his abandoned career as a virtuoso pianist.

What followed was a compositional life of extraordinary psychological richness. Schumann invented two alter egos — the impetuous, extroverted Florestan and the introspective, melancholy Eusebius — as vessels for emotional extremes that many modern scholars have associated with bipolar disorder. These were not merely literary conceits. They structured his music, giving it a dialectical tension, an inner argument, that animates the piano works and the symphonies alike. His injury did not make him a composer; but it removed the alternative, and in doing so, gave music a voice it would not otherwise have had.  

One Hand, a New Literature

Paul Wittgenstein

And then there is the case that is perhaps the most extraordinary of all — not because it involved a single person overcoming a limitation, but because one person’s refusal to accept that limitation changed what classical music itself contained.

Paul Wittgenstein — brother of the philosopher Ludwig — was a promising pianist when he was called up in the First World War. On the Russian front, he was shot in the right arm. The arm was amputated. He was taken prisoner, and when he returned to Vienna, he returned without the limb that his entire musical life had depended upon.

He did not stop playing. He rebuilt his technique from the ground up, developing a left-hand method that used pedal, arpeggio, and register-leaping to create the illusion of two-handed texture. Listeners heard what sounded like a full piano; they were hearing one hand, moving with extraordinary speed and deliberate intelligence across the keyboard.

But Wittgenstein’s most lasting contribution was not technical — it was his role as a commissioner. He used his family’s considerable wealth to approach the greatest composers of the age and ask them, explicitly, to write for him: for one left hand, against orchestra.

The result was a body of work that might not exist otherwise. Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand — premiered in 1932 — is now considered one of the masterworks of the concerto form, its single-line piano part emerging from the orchestral mass with a dramatic concentration that two hands might have diffused. Prokofiev wrote his Fourth Piano Concerto for Wittgenstein. So did Richard Strauss, Benjamin Britten, and Paul Hindemith.  

Wittgenstein did not always perform these works as written — he was reportedly not above altering passages he found unidiomatic, to the fury of composers — but his existence as a patron and performer forced some of the most brilliant musical minds of the century to ask what they had previously never needed to ask: what can one hand do that two cannot?

The answer, it turned out, was to make the listener lean in. To make absence audible. To discover that constraint, properly inhabited, is not the opposite of expression — but one of its most demanding forms.

What these musicians share is not the triumphalist arc of the inspirational story — adversity overcome, normal life resumed. Their limitations did not disappear. They became, instead, the very condition of their originality: the pressure under which something new was forced into being.

Tunacan Tuna is a cultural journalist and researcher based in Istanbul, writing on music, heritage, and cultural memory across Europe and the Mediterranean.

Why Writing a First Symphony Terrified Even the Greatest Composers

 by Emily E. Hogstad  

Writing a first symphony has never been a casual undertaking.

Throughout the history of classical music, the symphony has stood as the ultimate achievement: a genre tied to ambition, talent, and legitimacy, leading to inevitable comparisons to the past. A failed symphony wasn’t just a private disappointment; it unfolded in front of critics, patrons, and rivals.

To compose a symphony is to step directly into the shadow of giants – and for many of history’s greatest composers, that shadow proved terrifying.

From Johannes Brahms wrestling for two decades with the burden of Beethoven’s legacy, to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky suffering physical collapse while finishing his Symphony No. 1, the “first symphony crisis” is a surprisingly common chapter in music history.

Some composers feared they wouldn’t – or couldn’t – measure up. Others feared national humiliation. One nearly lost his career entirely after a disastrous premiere.

Today, we’re looking at six composers who were deeply stressed about writing their first symphony – and what their struggles reveal about the pressure of entering the symphonic tradition.

Ludwig van Beethoven – Symphony No. 1   

Ironically, given the sway that his symphonies would have over future generations, Ludwig van Beethoven himself waited until he was nearly thirty to publish his first symphony.

He had already established himself in Vienna’s music world with piano sonatas and chamber works. But he also understood the heights that his predecessors, Mozart and Haydn, had brought the symphony to. Therefore, even Beethoven felt the weight of the composers who came before him.

Julius Schmid: Beethoven’s Walk in Nature

Beethoven’s first symphony had several striking elements. Its slow introduction and its opening dissonances grab a listener’s ear from the start.

From there, the work’s unexpected accents and sudden dynamic changes reveal him to be a composer willing to innovate and part with the traditions of the past.

Johannes Brahms – Symphony No. 1   

No one had a more infamous struggle while writing his first symphony than Johannes Brahms.

After his mentor, Robert Schumann, declared Brahms the future of music in 1853, when he was only twenty years old, Brahms felt crushed by expectations.

Johannes Brahms

He began sketching his first symphony soon after but, intimidated, abandoned several early attempts.

In 1872, he went so far as to tell a conductor friend, “I shall never write a symphony! You can’t have any idea what it’s like always to hear such a giant [i.e. Beethoven] marching behind you!”

However, after years of growth and artistic maturation, he finally finished his first symphony in 1876. The work’s gestation took over two decades.

Although Brahms’s symphony is recognised as a masterpiece today, it also never escaped that Beethovenian shadow. In fact, similarities between Beethoven’s final symphony and Brahms’s first garnered it the nickname “Beethoven’s Tenth.”

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky – Symphony No. 1   

While writing his first symphony, nicknamed “Winter Dreams”, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky struggled with poor health, dealing with insomnia, headaches, anxiety, and depression. The symptoms got so bad that he was afraid he was dying.

At one point, doctors told him to stop working entirely. He later wrote that he feared he would die before finishing it.

Unlike Brahms, his stress wasn’t only about living up to Beethoven’s legacy. It was also about proving that a Russian composer could master the Austro-Germanic tradition of symphonic writing, while still infusing the work with his Russian identity.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

At this time, a group of five nationalist composers, nicknamed the “Mighty Handful”, were rejecting European academic traditions and trying to establish a uniquely Russian school of music.

“Winter Dreams” was ultimately overshadowed by Tchaikovsky’s later symphonies, but its Russian character encouraged the blossoming of nationalism in Russian – and later Soviet – orchestral music.

Sergei Rachmaninoff – Symphony No. 1  

The premiere of Rachmaninoff’s first symphony was an infamous disaster.

Storm clouds first appeared when elder composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov sat in on a rehearsal and told Rachmaninoff, “Forgive me, but I do not find this music at all agreeable.”

Conductor Alexander Glazunov under-rehearsed the orchestra and made a variety of cuts. He was also an alcoholic, and possibly drunk at the rehearsals and premiere.

Sergei Rachmaninoff

Not surprisingly, the premiere went off the rails so badly that Rachmaninoff fled the concert hall while it was still ongoing. Critics were vicious.

After the failed performance, Rachmaninoff fell into a three-year depression that required hypnotherapy before he could compose again.

For years, the symphony’s score was deemed lost, and it was only reconstructed in 1945, after Rachmaninoff’s death. Today, the work is often reassessed as bold and structurally ambitious.

A few years after the catastrophic failure, Rachmaninoff came back with his second piano concerto, one of the most famous pieces of classical music ever written.

But his first symphony nearly ended his career before it began.

Jean Sibelius – Symphony No. 1   

Jean Sibelius waited until his thirties to compose his first symphony, which was written between 1898 and 1899. It came after he heard Tchaikovsky’s final symphony performed in Helsinki in the mid-1890s.

He related to Tchaikovsky’s music, writing to his wife, “There is much in that man that I recognise in myself.”

Daniel Nyblin: Jean Sibelius, ca 1898–1900

Despite that, he was Finnish at a time of tension with Russia and rising nationalism, and he wanted his music to make statements about Finnish identity.

He was unsatisfied after the symphony’s premiere in the spring of 1899, and embarked on revisions in 1900.

Unfortunately for Sibelius, his mental block surrounding symphonies would surface again at the end of his career, after he’d written seven symphonies.

His eighth symphony was commissioned and even scheduled for performance, but he never finished the score. Before he died, he burned what he’d written.

The fate of that scrapped eighth symphony demonstrates how deeply Sibelius identified with the symphony as a measure of artistic legitimacy – and how reluctant he was to release a symphony he felt was less than perfect.

Gustav Mahler – Symphony No. 1   

Remarkably, Gustav Mahler – who would go on to become one of the foremost symphonists of his generation – was initially leery about presenting his first symphony as such.

In fact, at its 1889 premiere in Budapest, he didn’t even call it a symphony. Instead, he labelled it a “Symphonic Poem in Two Parts.”

Despite the hedging, critics were hostile. For years afterwards, Mahler dithered. He revised it repeatedly, cut a movement, rewrote the orchestration, and even provided a program to guide listeners through the work’s story (and then retracted it).

Gustav Mahler

Throughout his career, Mahler advocated for Beethoven’s music; he even arranged Beethoven’s symphonies for a larger, late-Romantic orchestra.

When it came to composition, Mahler metabolised Beethoven’s influence in his work, from using a choir in the final movement of his second symphony to employing an echo of the “fate theme” from Beethoven’s fifth in his own fifth symphony.

Mahler clearly understood the lineage behind the Austro-Germanic symphony and respected it. That was reflected in his work, from his first symphony – and beyond.

Conclusion

The first symphony is rarely just a beginning. It is a declaration to the musical world: I have something big and important to say.

For Brahms, that declaration took more than twenty years to make. For Tchaikovsky, the idea of doing so ruined his health. For Rachmaninoff, it triggered a crisis that nearly silenced him forever. Even Sibelius, Mahler, and Beethoven approached their first entries into the genre with caution, insecurity, and an acute awareness of the genre’s storied history.

The irony is striking: many of the composers who feared writing their first symphony ended up redefining the genre.

Maybe that’s the true test of a symphonist: the willingness to stand in the shadow of the past, be intimidated by it – and still write anyway.

Interview With Japanese Composer Naoko Ikeda

 by Fanny Po Sim Head  September 13th, 2023

When searching for repertoire for my students to perform at local festivals, I discovered the compositions of Naoko Ikeda, a talented Japanese composer and teacher. Her pieces are full of beautiful, flowing melodies that I thoroughly enjoy teaching and playing. In the interview, Naoko introduces herself and shares the inspiration behind all of her beautiful compositions.

Naoko Ikeda

Can you introduce yourself and tell us your musical background?

I was born in Sapporo city in the north of Japan and still live here. I am a piano teacher and have been publishing original piano works from Willis Music for about 20 years. I started taking singing lessons at the age of 4 and piano lessons at the age of 6 under the supervision of my music-loving parents. I became interested in composing when I encountered William Gillock’s Lyric Preludes in Romantic Style when I was in junior high school. His works are simple and have a beautiful sound, and various scenes come to mind. I thought it would be wonderful if I could make such a rich piece one day.

In addition to Gillock’s work, what other sources of inspiration do you utilize when composing?

Melody is the most important thing for me. For example, if a melody comes to mind and you can feel the colors and scenery, you can use that as a trigger to continue writing the song. The music I’ve listened to so far (classical, jazz, popular songs, etc.), the books I’ve read, the movies, the paintings, the poems, the starry skies, and the landscapes of nature have made me do this. It inspires me and expands my imagination.  

Naoko Ikeda: Miyabi: Early Intermediate Level

Now that my work will be published in the United States, I would like to introduce to you a piece that has a Japanese sound and a feeling of culture in me. I would be very happy if you could feel the beauty. In Miyabi, which has a Japanese theme, I have devised Japanese koto scales in my way and mixed them with Western scales and chords to create a collection that is easy to get along with. In addition, I hope that it will be an opportunity to introduce Japan by incorporating the sounds of Gagaku and the rhythms of Japanese festivals.

Naoko Ikeda: Aya: 10 Introspective Pieces for Intermediate Piano Solo

“Aya” is a solo collection that was published last year. It contains 10 pieces written in a variety of styles, including Japanese works, that can be enjoyed by intermediate-level students.

Naoko Ikeda: Duets in Color – Book 1: Early to Mid-Intermediate Level

Naoko Ikeda: Duets in Color – Book 2: 12 Original Duets in Minor Keys

These are the duets’ collections that I wrote in 24 keys. The book is divided into two volumes, a major key, and a minor key, but C major and C minor, G major and G minor are composed as a set and have some common points such as the same melody and rhythm etc. I think it’s my masterpiece!

Many of your compositions are written for students. They are all beautifully written. Do you mean to write for students? What draws you to write music for students?   

Of course, in order to benefit the students, I try to incorporate technical elements into the works for the elementary level so that they can be enjoyed. This is a very rewarding job! As for the intermediate-level works, I compose them not only for the sake of my students but also for my friends and piano teachers to take a break and enjoy playing them. I would be happy if the students who played it could try out what kind of sound they wanted to play with what they envisioned from the piece, just like I did with Gillock’s work. As a composer, I’m looking forward to letting everyone hear a new side of the piece!

As a composer in Japan, what does your daily life look like? Do you have hobbies besides music?

Cool Chartreuse, a piano duet by Naoko Ikeda  

Like most of you, I am a piano teacher. Currently, I have lessons three days a week, and I also do workshops and lessons on my own work from time to time. Willis let me go at my own pace, so I started composing little by little, writing a few songs, putting together an idea for the collection, and starting discussions with the editor. My hobbies are listening to music, reading books, and looking at artworks…all of these things inspire me to compose music. I want to go on a trip soon, so I’m checking travel TV programs.

Did These Seven Great Composers Really Die of Syphilis?

 by Emily E. Hogstad  March 26th, 2026

During the nineteenth century, syphilis was rampant in Europe, and quite a few composers are believed to have had it.

The 2024 article “The Syphilis Pandemic Prior to Penicillin: Origin, Health Issues, Cultural Representation and Ethical Challenges” estimates that during the 1800s, approximately fifteen per cent of European men were infected. Plus, infections were more common in urban areas, where composers tended to live and work.

In a time before antibiotics, syphilis was more than a medical condition: it was often a death sentence. On top of that, the mercury and arsenic “cures” on offer were often just as toxic as the disease itself.

You can imagine how the mental and physical effects of infection and treatment impacted these artists’ lives and work.

Of course, diagnosing composers from centuries away with absolute certainty can be a fool’s errand. But today we’re using historians’ best judgment and looking at seven composers who either are confirmed to have had syphilis, or are widely believed to have had it…as well as how those infections shaped (and in some cases, ended) their careers.

Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840)  

A native of Genoa, Italy, Niccolò Paganini was the greatest violinist of his generation…and maybe of all time.

He became famous for his demonic appearance and seemingly supernatural abilities.

However, although some people felt he was an otherworldly being, he was actually very human, and he struggled with bad health throughout his life.

Niccolò Paganini

Modern historians believe that he had Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome or Marfan Syndrome. Either would help explain his double-jointedness, which he put to good use while reinventing violin technique.

He was diagnosed with syphilis around 1822, when he was forty. His treatment included mercury therapy and opium. That in turn led to mercury poisoning and opiate addiction.

In 1828, when he was 46, he developed necrotising osteitis of the jaw that had to be operated on.

He also developed tuberculosis, which may have contributed to his dysphonia (loss of voice).

When Paganini met with composer Hector Berlioz in 1838, his voice was so inaudible that his young son had to put his ear next to Paganini’s mouth to hear his words, then translate for Berlioz.

He died in Nice in 1840.

We wrote about the turbulent final years of Paganini, including why he was denied a Catholic burial.

Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848)  

Donizetti was born in Bergamo, Italy, in 1797. He became one of the most popular opera composers of his generation.

Sometime in his teens or twenties, he came down with syphilis.

In 1828, at the age of thirty-one, he married his eighteen-year-old wife Virginia. She gave birth to three babies, but all died as infants, and the first one was deformed, suggesting he’d passed the disease on.

Portrait of Gaetano Donizetti by Francesco Coghetti

Virginia’s own health deteriorated, as well, and she died young in the summer of 1837. It may have been cholera, but it might also have been a syphilitic infection.

Donizetti eventually began exhibiting a host of alarming symptoms: fevers, headaches, paralysis, speechlessness, incontinence, and more.

He was only formally diagnosed in August 1845. His doctor believed he was no longer able to make sane decisions for himself, and so he was tricked and involuntarily confined in 1846.

It was a darkly ironic fate for someone who had written the most famous “mad scene” in operatic history.

He never lived on his own again and died in 1848.

Franz Schubert (1797-1828)  

Franz Schubert was born in Vienna in 1797. He became infected with syphilis in late 1822, when he was in his mid-twenties.

He first noticed symptoms in early 1823, when he began suffering from particularly acute feelings of depression, as well as a red rash and hair loss.

As time passed, and as he got sicker and sicker, he began feeling increasingly doomed, and his compositions started turning darker.

Franz Schubert

His fourteenth string quartet from 1824, nicknamed Death and the Maiden, dates from this time.

In 1828, he saw a physician who told him that the end was near. He began suffering from headaches, joint pain, and fever, and became unable to keep down food.

During the final weeks of his life, he moved in with his brother, who took care of him until he died in November 1828 at the age of thirty-one.

Historians today are split about whether he died from typhoid fever, mercury poisoning, syphilis, or some combination of all three.

Read more about how his illness impacted the composition of the “Death and the Maiden” quartet.

Robert Schumann (1810-1856)  

Robert Schumann was born in Zwickau, Germany, in 1810, and suffered from health issues throughout his life.

By his early twenties, he was wrestling with depressive episodes interspersed with manic ones. A later note he wrote about this time of his life reads, “In 1832, I contracted syphilis and was cured with arsenic.”

If the problem was syphilis, it had actually not been cured; it had only become latent. (This might explain why he apparently never passed it on to his wife, Clara.)

Robert Schumann

By his thirties, his symptoms were turning more physical, with his doctor in Dresden noting he was complaining of “insomnia, general weakness, auditory disturbances, tremors, and chills in the feet, to a whole range of phobias.”

In February 1854, he jumped off a bridge into the Rhine River. He was rescued and agreed to be sent away to a sanitarium. Unfortunately, his health continued to deteriorate there.

In the summer of 1856, he came down with pneumonia. His overtaxed immune system couldn’t fight the infection off, and he died that July.

During his illness and after his death, his wife, Clara, and his friends sorted through his music. One of the works they felt revealed his sickness was his violin concerto. It was suppressed until its rediscovery in the 1930s.  

Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884)  

Composer Bedřich Smetana married his wife, pianist Kateřina Kolářová, in August 1849.

They had four daughters between 1851 and 1855, but by 1856, three of them had died of either tuberculosis or scarlet fever, and Kateřina had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, too. She died in April 1859. He remarried the following year.

Unfortunately, his story wasn’t going to have a happy ending. A couple of years later, he began developing hearing issues, chief among them incapacitating tinnitus.

Although he went to see countless doctors and specialists, he grew more and more deaf over the following years.

Bedřich Smetana

Day-to-day life became excruciating. In January 1875, he wrote, “If my disease is incurable, then I should prefer to be liberated from this life.”

In his first string quartet, dating from 1876, he portrayed the experience of tinnitus by using long high notes in the violin.

A few years after he wrote the quartet, he began expressing fears that he was going mad.

In the early 1880s, his symptoms grew debilitating and included hallucinations and intermittent loss of speech.

By early 1884, he began acting out violently toward his family. In late April, he was committed to an asylum. He died there a few weeks later.

The official death certificate claimed that he’d died of dementia, but his family believed it had been syphilis.

Some twentieth-century doctors took issue with this diagnosis, or whether his hearing loss was due to a syphilitic infection, but it remains a leading theory.

An autopsy was done that revealed high amounts of mercury in his remains.

Read more about how Smetana incorporated autobiography into his first string quartet, including the simulation of tinnitus.

Hugo Wolf (1860-1903)  

Composer Hugo Wolf was born in present-day Slovenia in 1860.

From the beginning, two things were clear: Wolf was incredibly musically talented, and he lacked discipline, at least in part due to his depressive mood swings.

He came down with syphilis young, in his late teens, and became preoccupied with writing lied on themes of sin and suffering.

He had a few ups and downs physically and mentally, but he hit a low point in late 1891, when a combination of his depression symptoms and syphilis symptoms kept him from composing.

Hugo Wolf in 1902

A few years later, in 1897, he began feeling his mind deteriorating. He tried to write an opera, but only managed sixty pages before he became too ill to write.

He attempted to drown himself in 1899 but survived, and he spent the last few years of his life in an asylum before dying in 1903.

Frederick Delius (1862-1934)

Frederick Delius

Frederick Delius was born to a British family in 1862.

As a young man, he traveled to Paris to befriend artists and soak in the bohemian lifestyle there. It is believed that his syphilitic infection originated during these years.

In 1903, at the age of 41, he married a wealthy painter named Jelka Rosen. He had a number of affairs during their marriage, but she never left him.

In 1910, syphilis symptoms began to manifest, chief among them headaches, back aches, and blurred vision.

Within a decade, he could no longer move except with a wheelchair; he was completely blind; and he was on morphine for pain.

Jelka tried her best to take care of him, but she needed help. The couple hired a composer, conductor, and pianist named Eric Fenby, who would serve as Delius’s helper as he navigated the end of his life, dealing with syphilis-related health issues.

Delius’s farewell to music and to life was his setting of some poetry from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in his Songs of Farewell.  

Conclusion

Syphilis diagnoses – and the stigma and shame surrounding them – profoundly impacted the work of many major composers…and therefore, obviously, left a mark on the history of music.

For many composers, the diagnosis impacted not only their health but also the tone, intensity, and subject matter of their work, from Schubert’s haunting reflections on mortality to Smetana’s anguished depiction of his resulting deafness.

While this music offers us a glimpse into the despair and struggle of a pre-antibiotics syphilis diagnosis, what can’t be seen as clearly is, of course, all of the additional music that the disease deprived us of.

It’s a sad truth that without the scourge of syphilis and its deadly treatments, classical music history would look very different today.

Twenty Trivia Questions About Classical Music

 by Emily E. Hogstad  March 25th, 2024

Need some trivia questions about classical music? We’ve got you covered!

Today we’re looking at the history of classical music for trivia inspiration. Learn about everything from a composer who murdered his wife, to a Venetian orchestra of talented orphans, to forbidden love affairs, a deaf composer at the premiere of his groundbreaking symphony, and hypnotherapy that inspired a piano concerto.

© classicalregister.com

Without further ado, here are our twenty trivia questions from classical music history:

Which composer from Bingen is also known as a saint?

Hildegard of Bingen!

Hildegard of Bingen was born around 1098 in present-day Germany. She started having visions at an early age and joined a Benedictine monastery as a child.

Around 1150 she composed a famous sacred music drama called Ordo Virtutum, or Order of the Virtues.

Hildegard of Bingen wasn’t just a composer. She also wrote theological works based on her visions, as well as scientific and medical texts.

Some modern popes have referred to her as a saint.   

Which composer murdered his first wife and was never punished for it?

Carlo Gesualdo!

In 1586, when he was twenty, Gesualdo married his first cousin, Donna Maria d’Avalos. They had one son.

Four years later, Gesualdo came home and discovered his wife in bed with another man. Gesualdo killed both his wife and her lover with a gun and sword.

The authorities decided he had not committed a crime.   

Which composer died after striking his foot with a staff he used while conducting?

Jean-Baptiste Lully!

Italian composer Jean-Baptiste Lully was both a dancer and musician.

He got a job in the court of Louis XIV. In 1687, to celebrate Louis’s recovery from surgery, he conducted a performance of his Te Deum.

He conducted by pounding a staff on the floor. In the process, he accidentally hit his foot. Gangrene developed and he refused to amputate because he still wanted to be able to dance.

Lully died on 22 March 1687 of his injuries.   

Which composer had seven kids with his second cousin, and thirteen kids with his second wife?

Johann Sebastian Bach!

In 1707, Johann Sebastian Bach married his second cousin, Maria Barbara Bach.

She died tragically and unexpectedly in July 1720.

The following year, Bach married an accomplished young singer named Anna Magdalena. She was twenty and he was thirty-six.

They had thirteen children together. Their youngest child, a daughter named Regina Susanna, was only eight years old when he died.   

Which composer wrote music for a virtuoso orchestra of women who had been abandoned as babies?

Antonio Vivaldi!

He was a teacher at a facility known as the Ospedale della Pietà, which took care of orphaned or abandoned children.

As children, the most musically talented girls were chosen to perform in the figlie di coro, or daughters of the choir. They would both sing and play instruments.

Vivaldi wrote many of his works for them.   

Which composer had a dream that the devil played violin for him – and then woke up and wrote it down?

Giuseppe Tartini!

Giuseppe Tartini wrote in Jérôme Lalande’s Voyage d’un François en Italie:

One night, in the year 1713 I dreamed I had made a pact with the devil for my soul. Everything went as I wished: my new servant anticipated my every desire. Among other things, I gave him my violin to see if he could play. How great was my astonishment on hearing a sonata so wonderful and so beautiful, played with such great art and intelligence, as I had never even conceived in my boldest flights of fantasy. I felt enraptured, transported, enchanted: my breath failed me, and I awoke. I immediately grasped my violin in order to retain, in part at least, the impression of my dream.

Even so, Tartini insisted that the work was not nearly as impressive as the one he’d dreamed.  

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart!

In 1781, Mozart was aiming to ingratiate himself with Emperor Joseph II, while still remaining employed with Prince-Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo in his hometown of Salzburg.

Unfortunately, Colloredo kept Mozart from making lucrative appearances, and acrimony grew between them.

Mozart tried to resign, but Colloredo refused to accept the resignation.

Meanwhile, Mozart’s father was horrified at his son’s behavior and was encouraging him to make nice with the archbishop.

The following month, Colloredo finally accepted the resignation…but not before having his steward kick Mozart on the behind.

Mozart decided to make a go at freelancing in Vienna. The decision would change his life and career and music forever.   

Which composer was also one of the best swordsmen in Europe?

Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges!

Bologne was the illegitimate son of a white planter named Georges and an enslaved Black woman named Nanon.

When he was seven, he was brought to France to be educated. At thirteen, he enrolled in a fencing academy. He soon proved to be a talented student.

A fencing master derided him by labeling him an “upstart mulatto.” Bologne beat that fencing master in a match, to the intense pride of his father.

Bologne also studied music as a teenager and became a great violinist and composer as an adult.  

Which composer had his skull stolen out of his coffin?

Joseph Haydn!

Haydn died in 1809 in Vienna and was buried. Soon after, the gravedigger was bribed by two men named Joseph Carl Rosenbaum and Johann Nepomuk Peter.

They wanted to examine Haydn’s skull because they were interested in phrenology, the pseudo-science then in vogue of associating character traits or talents with physical features.

Haydn’s skull ended up in Rosenbaum’s possession, and a series of darkly zany misadventures occurred.

Haydn’s skull and body were only reunited in the twentieth century, when a descendent of Haydn’s employer built a tomb for him.  

Which composer went deaf and had to be turned around to see the audience at the premiere of his ninth symphony?

Ludwig van Beethoven!

Beethoven was only in his mid-twenties in the 1790s when he first started noticing that his hearing was deteriorating.

By the time of the premiere of his ninth symphony in 1824, he had been completely deaf for a decade.

After the work’s first performance was over, he didn’t realize how the audience was applauding, and so singer Caroline Unger turned him around so he could see.   

Which composer and pianist were kept from marrying by the pianist’s father?

Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck!

Clara Wieck was born in 1819 and her music teacher father was insistent on molding her into a great musician.

Between his strict teaching regimen, his daughter’s astonishing inborn talent, and a little luck, Clara became one of the greatest pianists in Europe.

Another older piano student named Robert Schumann was rooming with the Wiecks. To Wieck’s horror, Robert and Clara fell in love. Robert proposed when she was eighteen, and she accepted.

Robert and Clara actually went to court to bypass Wieck. The court battle was bruising, but they were married in September 1840, the day before Clara’s 21st birthday.

Their love affair has since become one of the best-known love stories in the history of classical music.  

Which composer and violinist did people think had made a deal with the devil?

Niccolò Paganini!

The violin has always had a bit of a demonic connotation (see the Devil’s Trill sonata!). This may have started because portable violin-like instruments were popular in dances during the Renaissance and had connections with physical love.

Violinist Niccolò Paganini was born in Italy in 1782, and he was so good at playing the instrument that audiences struggled to believe his talent had a natural explanation.

His appearance contributed to the myth. He was pale and vampiric, and looked like a cadaver.

He was also said to be a dangerous womanizer, which didn’t help his reputation!  

Which composer almost carried out a mass shooting – but didn’t because he was a composer?

Hector Berlioz!

Berlioz was a promising young composer when he became involved with pianist Marie Moke, sometimes known as Camille Moke. They became engaged when she was nineteen.

Berlioz traveled to Italy to compose. While there, he got news that she’d broken off the engagement and married an heir to a major piano making business by the name Camille Pleyel. (Yep: two Camilles in one marriage!)

Berlioz was so infuriated that he got on a carriage to go to Paris, carrying two pistols. He intended to shoot Moke, her mother, and then himself.

However, his rage eventually abated, and he decided not to go through with his violent plan, in part due to the music that the world would lose out on if he’d kill himself at the start of his career.

Beyond a doubt, it’s one of the most disturbing stories in classical music history.   

Which composer fell in love with Clara Schumann…but never married her?

Johannes Brahms!

Brahms was only twenty years old when he came to visit Robert and Clara Schumann in the autumn of 1853.

Both Robert and Clara were hugely impressed by the young man and took him under their wings. Robert even wrote a famous article in which he hailed Brahms as the savior of music.

In February 1854, Robert’s mental health issues came to a head, and he went to an asylum for treatment, leaving behind a distraught pregnant Clara and seven other young children.

Brahms tried to help Clara how he could, and, awkwardly, fell in love with her.

For a variety of reasons, even after Robert’s death, they never married. But they continued to love each other deeply and inspire one another creatively until Clara died in 1896.   

Which composer died after getting cholera from drinking unboiled water?

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky!

Tchaikovsky was feeling uncharacteristically optimistic after writing and premiering his famous sixth symphony – also known as the Pathetique – in October 1893.

However, his life was cut short just a few days later, when he went to a restaurant and drank a glass of unboiled water. There was a cholera outbreak in St. Petersburg at the time. Tchaikovsky came down with cholera and after an illness of just a few days’ duration, died.

Rumors have circulated that Tchaikovsky’s death was suicide or forced suicide. The New Grove Dictionary of Music reports, “We do not know how Tchaikovsky died. We may never find out.”  

Which composer and pianist had to get hypnotherapy to cure his writer’s block?

Sergei Rachmaninoff!

In 1897 composer Sergei Rachmaninoff suffered a humiliating premiere of his first symphony. The conductor may have been drunk, and the critics panned the work.

For three years, he couldn’t compose a thing, and he sank into a deep depression. After months of this, his aunt suggested that he seek help from a mental health professional, which he did.

He began working with a doctor named Nikolai Dahl, seeing him daily for four months in early 1900. He was composing again by the summer.

His next big work is perhaps his most famous – his second piano concerto. He dedicated the work to Dahl in appreciation.  

Which composer once claimed he only ate white food?

Erik Satie!

Satie wrote in his book, the amusingly titled Memoirs of an Amnesiac:

My only nourishment consists of food that is white: eggs, sugar, grated bones, the fat of dead animals, veal, salt, coconuts, chicken cooked in white water, fruit-mould, rice, turnips, camphorated sausages, pastry, cheese (white varieties), cotton salad, and certain kinds of fish (without their skin). I boil my wine and drink it cold mixed with the juice of the Fuchsia. I am a hearty eater, but never speak while eating, for fear of strangling.

This portion of the memoir is somewhat satirical, but it’s unclear exactly how much he was exaggerating.   

Which composer left his first wife, who later shot herself?

Claude Debussy!

Debussy met and married his first wife, Lilly Texier, in 1899.

Within four years, Debussy had grown bored of her. She wasn’t a sparkling intellect, and he felt she was too dull. She also never gave birth to a child, which disappointed Debussy.

Debussy’s solution to his marital troubles was to have an affair with a glamorous married singer named Emma Bardac.

The day before their fifth wedding anniversary, Lilly shot herself at the Place de la Concorde. She didn’t die, but the dramatic gesture didn’t save their marriage.

Debussy would eventually divorce Lilly and marry Bardac.  

Which composer never married and had a houseful of Siamese cats?

Maurice Ravel!

The perpetually single composer lived in a magical house called Belvedere outside Paris. Instead of a wife or lover or children, he filled Belvedere with various mechanical trinkets, Siamese cats, and music.

In his opera L’enfant et les sortilèges Ravel we an aria called Duo miaulé, or Meowed Duet. This work was clearly inspired by his cats.   

Which American composer died of a brain tumor in his late thirties?

George Gershwin!

In the mid-1930s, at the height of his creative powers, Gershwin began complaining about headaches, stomach aches, and other symptoms.

In 1937, while soloing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he had a brief seizure, followed by an olfactory hallucination of burning rubber.

He began deteriorating mentally, rubbing chocolate on his body and trying to shove a man out of a car. Doctors labeled him a hysteric.

However, when he went to the hospital for the last time, it was clear to doctors something was physically wrong. Gershwin was diagnosed with a brain tumor and died on the operating table.  

Conclusion

Classical music trivia is full of facts about generations of musicians and performers. We hope you enjoyed these twenty, and that they’re a good jumping off point to learn more!