Composer Rituals

Composers have always been masters of strange working habits. Haydn believed he couldn’t write without the ring Frederick the Great had given him—and he demanded the whitest, best paper. Gluck worked best sitting in the middle of a field. Rossini claimed he was most productive when “fortified” with good wine, and both he and Paisiello liked composing in bed.

Sacchini wanted a pretty woman nearby and his cats playing around him. Mozart, supposedly, could write beautiful music while playing billiards or bowls. Zingarelli warmed up by reading Scripture or the classics. Sarti preferred a funereal gloom lit by a single candle.

Beethoven composed best during—or right after—a brisk walk in woods and fields, with nature as his trigger. Cimarosa wanted a dozen chatty friends around him, while Méhul, craving silence, once asked the Paris Chief of Police to lock him up in the Bastille so he could work uninterrupted (the request was denied).

Richard Wagner took ritual to another level: he liked to dress in the costume of the era and place of the scene he was writing, and he demanded absolute quiet—family kept out, letters ignored, and meals passed in through a trapdoor.