Archives: Anekdote

Stage drama isn’t always tragic—performers mess around, too. In one opera set on a ship, a joker reportedly popped up through a trapdoor during the “rocking” scene, offering washbasins like a helpful steward: “Anyone need my services?” The audience couldn’t see why the cast was breaking. Another story says the singer Mme. Devrient, playing Leonora,…

If you’re going to critique loudly in public, make sure the composer isn’t sitting next to you. At the Paris premiere of Mendelssohn’s *A Midsummer Night’s Dream* overture, a group of music lovers in his box chatted freely—unaware Mendelssohn himself was there. One even stood up and announced they wouldn’t “relish the rest” and left.…

Composers have always had wildly different “work setups.” Beethoven scribbled ideas in cafés and taverns, but also composed while walking, even under a famous oak near Vienna. Mozart loved company and procrastinated on the *writing* because the music was already finished in his head; Schubert could draft melodies in the noise of a tavern. Haydn…

Paganini wasn’t known as a big charity case later in life, which is why this Vienna story stands out. He saw a poor boy scraping away on a battered violin to support his sick mother and siblings. Paganini took the instrument, played in his famous style until a crowd formed, then passed the hat himself—adding…

Today we’d call it “borrowing,” but older writers loved the word “theft.” This anecdote claims George Frideric Handel was unusually bold about reusing other composers’ material—scholars have pointed to parallels with Stradella, Carissimi, Corelli and others across works like Israel in Egypt and Samson. In the Baroque era, recycling themes was common; the difference is…

A young composer once asked Hans von Bülow to look over a piano concerto. Bülow said he was too busy, but promised to read it later. That same evening at a party, someone asked him to play—and to the composer’s shock, Bülow sat down and performed the entire concerto from memory. His colleagues at Meiningen…

Soprano Sigrid Arnoldson supposedly went to pick up a registered letter in Rome and was asked for a passport. She’d left it at the hotel, and “Trust me, I’m me” didn’t impress anyone. So she did the one thing only an opera star can do: she sang. The clerks handed over the letter—because, as the…

Rossini and Meyerbeer were close friends—and apparently very happy to hype each other up. At the Paris Opera, they sat together listening to *Roberto*. Rossini loved one passage so much he sprang up and told Meyerbeer: “If you can write anything better than that, I’ll dance on my head!” Meyerbeer didn’t miss a beat: “Then…

At a party hosted by Count Morzin, Prince Esterházy heard a symphony by Joseph Haydn and liked it so much he decided to hire the composer on the spot. When Haydn arrived at the palace, the prince reportedly greeted him with a class-obsessed—and racist—crack about his complexion, then switched straight into business: better pay, a…

We love stories about composers “writing a masterpiece in two days.” But a lot of that speed is a trick of timing. Mozart, Mendelssohn, Handel and others often did the real composing **in their heads**—walking, traveling, living—then wrote it down fast when deadlines forced their hand. The *writing* looks miraculous because the *thinking* happened earlier.…