What Charitable Causes Did These Eight Great Composers Support?

by Emily E. Hogstad

Over the centuries, classical composers have used their fame and fortune to support various philanthropic causes.

Whether raising funds for wounded soldiers, supporting abandoned children, or helping fellow musicians in need, all of these composers felt compelled to give back to society after their musical successes…and it’s fascinating to know what causes were closest to their hearts.

Here are eight composers and the causes they supported.

George Frideric Handel and the Foundling Hospital

Portrait of George Frideric Handel by Thomas Hudson, 1756

The Foundling Hospital was founded in 1739 for the “education and maintenance of exposed and deserted young children.”

As its name suggests, the institution focused on improving child health, but it also provided housing and basic clothing. At fourteen, boys were apprenticed into a trade; at sixteen, girls were apprenticed as servants. It was a grim future, but certainly better than the alternatives!

The Foundling Hospital became a popular cause for wealthy and artistic types to support. Supporters include William Hogarth, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and others.

In May 1749, Handel conducted a benefit concert for the Foundling Hospital. He wrote a special work for the occasion, the “Foundling Hospital Anthem.” At the end, Handel tacked on his Hallelujah Chorus, before that work had become famous.   

The following year, Handel donated a pipe organ to the hospital chapel and gave two more benefit concerts there.

In fact, an annual performance of Messiah began to be held at the hospital, which helped grant that work its place in the musical canon.

Handel’s concerts raised around £7000 (the rough equivalent of £1 million plus today).

Ludwig van Beethoven and Wounded Austrian Soldiers

Christian Honeman: Ludwig van Beethoven, 1803 (Beethovenhaus Bonn)

The Battle of Hanau occurred between Austro-Bavarian forces and French Napoleonic forces in late October 1813. The French won.

Five weeks later, in early December 1813, Ludwig van Beethoven participated in a fundraising concert in Vienna meant to benefit injured Austrian soldiers. The orchestra was made up of the stars of Viennese music, like Ignaz Schuppanzigh, Spohr, Hummel, Meyerbeer, and Salieri.

Beethoven’s remarks included the observation “We are moved by nothing but pure patriotism and the joyful sacrifice of our powers for those who have sacrificed so much for us.”

At this performance, he premiered his seventh symphony and his overture “Wellington’s Victory.” Both works were received enthusiastically by the audience   

Franz Liszt for Flood Victims

Franz Liszt in 1870

In March 1838, a massive Danube River flood devastated towns and cities like Buda and Pest. The flood that year was especially severe due to melting ice and ice dams, and thousands lost their homes.

Although he was an international touring artist, Franz Liszt took his Hungarian roots extremely seriously. The next month, he took time out of his busy schedule to perform in Vienna to benefit the flood victims.

However, his partner Countess Marie d’Agoult was angry with him for his charity work. Their relationship was already fracturing, and she was frustrated that he left her to give (what she felt were) self-indulgent charity concerts. Liszt certainly didn’t assuage her concerns when he wrote letters to her on the stationery of wealthy society women who were helping with the fundraising!

Clara Schumann for Widowed Josephine Lang

Clara Schumann

Josephine Lang was a composer and pianist who was born in 1815. Robert and Clara Schumann befriended her; in fact, Robert Schumann published one of her songs in his magazine Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1838.

In 1842, Lang married a lawyer and poet named Christian Reinhold Köstlin. Their marriage was relatively short-lived, as he died tragically in 1856, leaving her an impoverished widow.

Josephine Lang

After struggling for a while, she reached out to Clara Schumann. She arranged a benefit concert for Lang and played in it for her friend.    

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Wounded Serbian Soldiers

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1893

In 1876, Russia supported Serbia in the Serbian-Ottoman War.

That summer, a music education organisation known as the Russian Music Society commissioned an orchestral work from Tchaikovsky. They wanted a work to be performed at a Red Cross fundraiser, with proceeds going to wounded Serbian soldiers.

He came back with his famous Marche Slav. The first section portrays the repression of the Serbs, and later sections depict the Russians coming to their aid.

The work has become incredibly popular over the ensuing years, but few know its philanthropic origins.   

Edward Elgar for Belgian and Polish War Victims

Charles Frederick Grindrod: Edward Elgar, ca. 1903

World War I broke out in the summer of 1914. In August, Germany invaded neutral Belgium, to the horror of Britain.

Not long afterwards, Elgar wrote Carillon, a recitation of a patriotic poem by Belgian poet Émile Cammaerts to orchestral accompaniment. It premiered that December.

The next year, he wrote Polonia in honour of Poland. He included quotations from the Polish national anthem, patriotic songs, and themes by Polish musical heroes Chopin and Paderewski.

Elgar conducted the premiere of Polonia at the Polish Victims’ Relief Fund Concert in London in July 1915.    

Leonard Bernstein for AIDS Activism

Leonard Bernstein

Composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein contributed to a number of charitable causes over his career, championing anti-war causes, Amnesty International, racial equity, and others.

One of the causes he helped fundraise for was AIDS activism, back when doing so was controversial due to the disease’s association with the gay community.

In 1986, he approached Mathilde Krim, the founding chairman of the American Foundation for AIDS Research, suggesting a fundraising concert.

In Krim’s words:

“And so it was that six short weeks later, on a cold December night, Aaron Neville and Linda Ronstadt sang ‘Ave Maria’ together, Isaac Stern played ‘Fiddler on the Roof;’ Bernadette Peters performed the First World War song ‘My Buddy,’ and Hildegard Behrens sang, ‘Falling in Love Again.’ The evening ended with a standing and swaying audience joining the performers singing ‘Somewhere’ from West Side Story. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. It was another Lenny ‘miracle night,’ unforgettable for its intensity, beauty and depth of emotion. It also provided manna from heaven to several unfunded but most deserving AIDS research projects.”

This was at the beginning of the worst part of the AIDS crisis in America. Bernstein continued supporting the cause until his death in 1990.   

Giuseppe Verdi for Impoverished Elderly Musicians

Giuseppe Verdi, 1844

Thanks to his string of hugely successful operas, Giuseppe Verdi ended up becoming one of the wealthiest composers in the history of classical music. He wanted to give back.

In 1895, he planned and endowed a home for impoverished musicians in Milan, known as the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti (which became known as the Casa Verdi). He wrote that he wanted a safe place for “old singers not favoured by fortune, or who, when they were young, did not possess the virtue of saving.”

Verdi died in 1901. The following year, a handful of musicians moved into Casa Verdi.

Amazingly, the institution is still in existence today! According to a 2018 New York Times article:

The successful applicants get to spend their last years in a place where, in addition to room, board and medical treatment, they have access to concerts, music rooms, 15 pianos, a large organ, harps, drum sets and the company of their peers.

 

Screen actors playing musicians: the best and worst examples

Actors ‘playing’ instruments on screen can be the stuff of nightmares. But, asks Michael Beek, to what lengths have they gone to make it look convincing?

James Stewart learned the trombone for his role in The Glenn Miller Story © Getty

Michael Beek

Published: November 10, 2025 at 6:00 pm

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In Humoresque (1946), John Garfield plays a virtuoso violinist. By then, Garfield was an Oscar-nominated actor, but he was no violinist. That said, his ‘performances’ are pretty convincing. Why? Because at least one of his arms is actually that of the great Isaac Stern. Similarly, in Deception (1946), a film released a few months prior, Paul Henreid plays a leading cellist. His performances were achieved thanks to the arms of a pair of professional cellists, accommodated by Henreid’s oversized jacket. Cosy...    

John Garfield 'plays' the violin - with the help of Isaac Stern – in Humoresque

Actors playing musicians: can you spot a fake?

Smoke and mirrors can only do so much, though, and not all filmmakers go to such creative lengths. So, is it fair to say you can spot a fake musician a mile off? Julian Lloyd Webber certainly thinks so. ‘When you see them, they’re pretty much always terrible,’ says the British cellist; ‘it’s rare that you see them and think they’ve actually got it right. I mean Deception does, because they’ve got people who are professionals doing that job. I think it’s not possible for someone who doesn’t play at all to make a convincing job of it – I don’t see how they can. Shine was pretty good… the fact he played the piano himself just says it all.’

• The 12 best uses of classical music in film

He is of course referring to Scott Hicks’s 1996 film, in which Geoffrey Rush gave an Oscar-winning performance as Australian pianist David Helfgott. Rush played as a youngster and happily returned to the keyboard to put in the hours to take on the role; indeed, he performs on screen himself, even in close-up. The actors playing the younger Helfgott in flashbacks, Alex Rafalowicz and Noah Taylor, were hand-doubled in close-up by pianists Simon Tedeschi and Martin Cousin. It’s a well-tested means of capturing a more realistic performance.    

Geoffrey Rush, as pianist David Helfgott, in the film Shine

Tricks of the camera: the hand double

Unlike Geoffrey Rush, and despite months of tuition and practice, actor Adrian Brody used a hand double for his role as Wladysław Szpilman in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002). Janusz Olejniczak did the honours for the performance, which otherwise won Brody an Oscar.

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Someone with experience of hand doubling is French pianist Alexandre Tharaud, whose fingers recently appeared in Anne Fontaine’s Boléro, about Maurice Ravel – he also plays music critic Pierre Lalo in the film. Actor Raphaël Personnaz portrays Ravel and while he undertook piano lessons for the role, it is Tharaud doing a lot of the work, as he explains. ‘When you see the hands with his face it’s him, but when you see only the hands it’s my hands. Sometimes you see his hands, then my hands, then his hands, and we have totally different hands! But nobody thought that was a problem...’

Tharaud shared a costume with Personnaz in order to match the sleeves on camera, pre-recorded the tracks for them both to play to on set, shot scenes at Ravel’s Parisian house and even played Ravel’s piano. He admits it was a surreal experience. ‘I wore the same suit and robe as Raphaël, so it was a little bit sweaty. I played to the playback of what I recorded three weeks before, on the same model of piano – when I recorded it, I tried to play with mistakes, because Ravel wasn’t a good pianist. So, I was dressed as Ravel, at his piano playing to my own recording, which was trying to imitate him! It was a very deep connection and it’s difficult to explain what I felt.’   

Non-essential music making on screen

In these cases, the need for an actor to take to the keyboard or pick up a bow is unavoidable, music being at the heart of the story. But sometimes film or TV characters just happen to be written as musicians. Tim Burton’s Netflix series Wednesday sees the titular Wednesday Addams, iconic from decades-old comic strips, movies and TV series, recast as a cellist. For the producers it was a means of allowing the character (a closed book, emotionally) to open up, the cello an outlet for her feelings.

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That’s all well and good, but for Jenna Ortega (who plays her) it meant not only breathing life into Addams but getting to grips with the cello. I show Julian Lloyd Webber a clip and ask what he thinks of her technique. ‘I was impressed by the fact that she’d bothered to actually learn the cello a little bit,’ he replies. ‘Although it’s obvious she’s not playing that complicated piece, at least you know she’s had a go.’

Jenna Ortega 'has a go' at playing the cello in Wednesday

Actors learning instruments for a role... how good can they get?

Plenty of actors have ‘had a go’ with varying levels of success. James Stewart learned the trombone for The Glenn Miller Story (1954) and apparently had every intention of being heard in the film. Alas, the sound he made was so bad he mimed to recordings of his coach, Joe Yukl. Ryan Gosling learned at the keyboard for months before playing a fictional jazz pianist in La La Land (2016), while Emily Watson carried a cello around with her for a lengthy period ahead of portraying Jacqueline du Pré in Anand Tucker’s Hilary and Jackie (1998). Watson was coached by cellist Caroline Dale, who performed most of what we hear in the film, and Watson received an Oscar nomination for her portrayal.   

It’s not a film Lloyd Webber is keen to champion, however, having known the real du Pré. ‘I think Emily Watson was very good, but it was a sort of hatchet job, really, and I’m very against the film. There were so many bad things in it; the worst, and the one that you know just would never happen, was when you see her leave her Stradivari out overnight in the snow in Russia. That is just stupid.’

The trailer for Hilary and Jackie, featuring Emily Watson as Jacqueline du Pré

Is it more difficult to pretend to play a violin than a piano?

Weather-related offences aside, I ask Lloyd Webber if it is perhaps more difficult to pretend to play a stringed instrument over, say, the piano, which an actor can hide behind to a certain degree. ‘I think it probably is more difficult,’ he says, ‘because if you need to do a full front shot – which would have been the case in something like Hilary and Jackie – you know it’s got to be right. And it seldom is!’

Alexandre Tharaud rightly points out that there is more to playing the piano than we might think, though. ‘On a piano it’s not just the fingers; it’s a chain of muscles. We play with the whole body, the legs, the feet; the position is your relationship with the stage. So, if an actor tries to play piano, they will play with the fingers, and they are too focused on the keyboard.’   

It’s a huge amount for an actor to take on, then, whatever the instrument, and while the likes of Julian Lloyd Webber might prefer that actors simply leave it to the professionals, some actors have gone the extra mile in order to pass muster.

Actors playing musicians... success stories

In A Late Quartet (2012), the late Philip Seymour Hoffman played the second violinist of a fictional New York string quartet (the Fugue Quartet). He threw himself into learning the instrument months before shooting began and was coached by violinist Nanae Iwata. The pair had weekly lessons, and Hoffman immersed himself in the violin. And it wasn’t just hold and technique; he wanted to understand every facet of how to live and work with the instrument and his quartet mates, as Iwata shares.

‘He asked how he would shift in his seat, or how he would talk to the others; eyelines etc. I don’t even think about those things, so I was then paying attention to them in order to help him. Even things like how you would hold the case, how you would open it and chit-chat while getting the instrument ready. He really wanted to feel comfortable doing that, so he practised at home. He told me, “I practised for 20 minutes straight, just opening the case and putting it back while I was talking to someone, and it was really difficult!” He wanted to look legit, and he really worked hard on it.’     

The trailer for A Late Quartet, featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman as a violinist

Iwata was on set, too, when Hoffman had to ‘play’ – his movement, body language, fingering and bowing were all carefully choreographed to the music: Beethoven’s Op. 131 String Quartet. This was after hours of time together, Hoffman sometimes videoing Iwata or practising fingering and vibrato to make it look like he was a seasoned player. She was impressed by his commitment. ‘He wanted to feel like it was really coming from within him,’ she remembers, ‘and I really respected that.’

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Fooling the viewer... Camera tricks and CGI

Like Hoffman, fellow actors Mark Ivanir (violin) and Catherine Keener (viola) did all their own ‘playing’ on camera, with Christopher Walken (cello) the only one to use a hand double for close ups. Much like Paul Henreid in 1946’s Deception, Walken’s left hand was that of cellist David Bakamjian, who snuggled into the actor’s back wearing matching shirtsleeves to blend in.   

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Today, digital effects are another way that filmmakers can attempt to maintain the crucial musicality of a real player. For her 2019 film Blanche comme neige, director Anne Fontaine simply replaced a real viola da gamba player’s head with an actor’s. It’s an expensive option, but one Alexandre Tharaud tells me they discussed using in Fontaine’s Boléro. ‘We were told we had to choose; if we did that, the money would have to be taken from somewhere else in the budget. I would have been Ravel, but only up to my neck!’   

Pasting an actor’s head onto a musician’s body might solve part of the puzzle when depicting realistic music-making on screen, but would we buy it even then? When we’re expected to believe that the person we’re watching is not just playing the music, but hearing it and feeling it as well, something will surely always be lost in translation.    

How to Prepare for Rehearsals

by Oliver Pashley 

The most obvious thing to take care of before a rehearsal
is learning your notes © ClassyAF/Facebook

As a classical musician, we are often faced (in more normal times, at least) with the dilemma of having too many notes to learn and not enough time to learn them in. Concerts and opportunities come in at the last minute, sometimes leaving us barely enough time to practice the music before being thrust out onto a stage, gawping out into the cavernous arena as a hungry audience bays for entertainment. Ok, maybe that’s my performance anxiety talking, but before I get too overdramatic and mix my metaphors of musicians and gladiators any further, it is true that people have asked me in the past how we prepare for rehearsals, especially at short notice. How do we get ready for rehearsals? How do we choose what to practise and prioritise? And, perhaps more importantly, what gets left to chance in the rehearsal room?

The most simple, and perhaps obvious thing to take care of before a rehearsal is learning your notes. Nothing is worse than waiting for someone to get to grips with something they could have learned in their own time, and in a professional setting, it’s a sure-fire way to never get asked back again. Of course, there may be genuinely difficult things that, despite practice, still take putting together in the rehearsal room – no one is saying you have to be 100% perfect all the time or it’s curtains – but there’s a difference between spending rehearsal time working out a legitimate problem and wasting rehearsal time because you didn’t look at your music beforehand.

© Manchester Summer Chamber Music

With this said, there might be instances where you just don’t have enough time to get everything under your fingers. If you get called up at the last minute to play in a concert you might not have time to play everything by yourself beforehand – but maybe the vast majority of what you have to play is sight-readable (unless you’re doing a last-minute concerto, but that’s a whole other story). And if there’s a tricky excerpt or something nasty that appears, then our training will have prepared us for this: it’s commonplace at conservatoires for students to learn the most infamous passages in the orchestral repertoire, not just to hone their technique, but on the off chance they’ll actually have to perform them in the future. The more work that’s done as a student, the greater the memory bank to fall back on later down the road.

While preparation is important, this shouldn’t be confused with needing to necessarily play every single note before the rehearsal starts. Part of the skill of working as a musician is being able to look at a part and laser out the bar or two that needs a bit of work while leaving the rest to the rehearsal. It might be that two bars of semiquavers stand out amongst a sea of semibreves, and so this is where the priority needs to be focused, especially for things like recording sessions, where the music may have been printed only minutes before the red light illuminates.

© reverb.com

This might sound scary, but this is where the training kicks in. Things that might take an amateur ensemble time to get to grips with – tuning, balance, ensemble, and so on – are all taken as read before any of us even open our cases in the rehearsal room. We’re responsible for learning our notes, of course, but we’re also responsible for being responsive and adaptive, for learning to adjust on the fly – and this is something that you can’t prepare for alone.

Through our years of training, of performing in youth orchestras, taking part in masterclasses, doing courses, receiving lessons, attending concerts: these are when all the skills are learned and honed. In music college, there are certainly still things to learn, but there is also a focus on opening up, on being receptive to what’s going on around you: in simple terms, of listening.

Our personal practice only takes us so far. We can arrive with the notes under our fingers but unless we listen and respond in the moment, the music won’t go anywhere. If you show up reasonably prepared and with your ears open, you’ll avoid being thrown to the lions and live to see another day. Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Franz Liszt: Dante Symphony Premiered on 7 November 1857

by Georg Predota

Franz Liszt, 1858

Enjoying the shores of Lake Como with Marie d’Agoult in 1837, Franz Liszt (1811-1886) immersed himself in a close reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy. The idea of composing a symphony to Dante’s Divine Comedy, one that would combine music, poetry and the visual arts, gradually took shape. Initially, Liszt suggested that the performance might be accompanied by the projection of lanternslides, showing scenes painted by Bonaventura Genelli. Apparently, he even considered “the use of an experimental wind machine at the end of the first movement to evoke the winds of Hell.”

Dante and His Poem by Domenico di Michelino

In the event, in June 1855, Liszt wrote to his future son-in-law Richard Wagner. “So you are reading Dante. He’s good company for you, and I for my part want to provide you with a kind of commentary on that reading. I have long been carrying a Dante Symphony around in my head – this year I intend to finish it. Three movements, Hell, Purgatory and Paradise – the first two for orchestra alone, the last with chorus. When I visit you in the autumn I shall probably be able to bring it with me; and if you don’t dislike it you can let me inscribe your name on it.” Wagner was enthusiastic, but advised against including a choral finale on the grounds that “Paradise could not be depicted in music.”

Royal Theatre in Dresden

On the advice of Wagner, Liszt discarded the idea of a choral finale and added a brief setting for women’s voices of the first two verses of the “Magnificat,” all ending with a “Hallelujah.” When Liszt played the Dante symphony for Wagner in Zürich in October 1856, Wagner greatly disliked the fortissimo conclusion. He wrote in his autobiography, “If anything had convinced me of the man’s masterly and poetical powers of conception, it was the original ending of the Faust Symphony, in which the delicate fragrance of a last reminiscence of Gretchen overpowers everything, without arresting the attention by a violent disturbance. The ending of the Dante Symphony seemed to me to be quite on the same lines, for the delicately introduced “Magnificat” in the same way only gives a hint of a soft, shimmering Paradise. I was the more startled to hear this beautiful suggestion suddenly interrupted in an alarming way by a pompous, plagal cadence. No! I exclaimed loudly, not that, away with it! No majestic Deity! Leave us the fine soft shimmer!” Liszt kept both endings; the loud one is indicated in his version for two pianos, but in the orchestral score it is usually omitted. The Dante Symphony is dedicated to Richard Wagner, and the first performance took place at the Royal Theatre in Dresden on 7 November 1857. Liszt conducted, and Hans von Bülow—still married to Liszt’s daughter Cosima—wrote, “the occasion proved a fiasco.” The press was hostile and Liszt wrote that the performance was “very unsuccessful from lack of rehearsal.”

Sandro Botticelli: Chart of Hell

A published preface functioning as a program guided audiences through the composition, but the music continued to challenge audiences for decades to come. George Bernard Shaw reviewed the work in 1885 and wrote, “the manner in which the program was presented by Liszt could just as well represent a London house when the kitchen chimney is on fire.” In terms of musical narrative, the opening movement is entitled “Inferno” and guides us through the nine Circles of Hell. The “Gates of Hell” sing slow recitative-like themes, and at “The Vestibule and First Circle Hell” the music becomes frantic. When Dante and Virgil enter the “Second Circle of Hell,” the infernal “Black Wind” that perpetually shakes the damned greets them. Here we find the tragic love of Francesca, whose adulterous affair with her brother-in-law Paolo cost her life and soul. The “Black Wind” motif returns in the “Seventh Circle of Hell,” and Liszt writes, “this entire passage is intended to be a blasphemous mocking laughter.” The “Eight” and “Ninth Circles of Hell” present slightly varied themes, and Dante and Virgil gradually emerge from Hell. They ascend Mount Purgatorio in the second, initially solemn and tranquil movement. Dante and Virgil ascend the two terraces of Ante-Purgatory, where souls repent their sins. The “Seven Cornices of Mount Purgatory” represent the seven deadly sins, and “Earthly Paradise” guides the soul to Paradise. In the score, Liszt directs that the choir be hidden from the audience in the concluding “Magnificat.” Liszt wrote, “Art cannot portray heaven itself, only its image in the hearts of those souls, which have turned to the light of heavenly grace. Thus for us the radiance is still shrouded, although it increases with the clarity of understanding.”