Baroque Music
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50 free Baroque Music trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Baroque era, roughly 1600 to 1750, gave Western music opera, the orchestra and a cast of composers who are still household names. It was also an age of court intrigue, rival virtuosos, royal river parties and at least one duel, which makes it far more fun to be quizzed on than a textbook timeline suggests. This quiz covers what a music appreciation course usually asks about the period: the major composers and their best-known works, the instruments of the day, and the forms and terms that define the style. Alongside those are the stories people remember, from Bach's long walk to hear a hero play to the afterlife of Baroque tunes in film, sport and pop. It suits students revising for a Baroque unit, teachers who want a ready-made round to print, and anyone who simply likes this music. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you learn something even from the ones you miss.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word "baroque" is usually traced to the Portuguese barroco, a term for an irregularly shaped what?
Pearl
An irregular pearl gave the era its name because eighteenth-century critics used "baroque" as an insult for music they found overloaded and lacking clear melody.
Q 02What reportedly saved Handel's life by turning aside a sword during his 1704 duel with composer Johann Mattheson?
A large button
A large button on Handel's coat deflected the blade after the two friends quarrelled during a performance of Mattheson's opera about Cleopatra. They made up and wrote to each other for life.
Q 03Bach's comic cantata of the 1730s pokes fun at a young woman's addiction to which fashionable drink?
Coffee
Coffee is what the daughter, Lieschen, refuses to give up, however much her father grumbles. The piece was probably first performed in Zimmermann's coffee house, where Bach led a student ensemble.
Q 04Which Baroque set of violin concertos was published with sonnets describing birdsong, storms and a barking dog?
The Four Seasons
The Four Seasons paired each concerto with a sonnet, possibly by Vivaldi himself, and in Spring the violas imitate the sleeping goatherd's dog.
Q 05Handel's coronation anthem Zadok the Priest was adapted in 1992 into the anthem of which football competition?
UEFA Champions League
The UEFA Champions League anthem lifts its rising string phrase from Handel, as its composer Tony Britten cheerfully admitted. The original has been sung at every British coronation since 1727.
Q 06Which court composer to Louis XIV died of gangrene after striking his own foot with a conducting staff?
Jean-Baptiste Lully
Jean-Baptiste Lully struck his foot while beating time in a Te Deum celebrating the king's recovery from surgery. He then refused to have the toe amputated.
Q 07A recording of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 left Earth in 1977 on the Golden Record of which NASA probes?
Voyager
Voyager 1 and 2 each carry a copy of the disc, which holds three Bach pieces alongside Beethoven's Fifth and Chuck Berry. Both probes have since reached interstellar space.
Q 08Which affliction struck both Bach and Handel, born weeks apart in 1685, late in their lives?
Blindness
Blindness overtook both men, and each had been operated on by the same travelling eye surgeon, John Taylor, who is now widely regarded as a charlatan.
Q 09What happened to Bach in 1717 when he pressed too stubbornly to leave his post at the Weimar court?
He was jailed
He was jailed for almost a month and then dismissed in disgrace. Bach moved straight on to the court of Köthen, whose prince had hired him as director of music.
Q 10Which keyboard instrument, a mainstay of Baroque ensembles, makes its sound by plucking the strings with small quills?
Harpsichord
The harpsichord plucks each string with a tiny plectrum, so a note sounds equally loud however hard the player presses the key.
Q 11Audiences traditionally rise to their feet for one chorus of which Handel work, first performed in Dublin in 1742?
Messiah
Messiah gets listeners standing for its Hallelujah chorus, supposedly because King George II once rose for it, though nothing shows he was there. Handel wrote the whole score in 24 days.
Q 12Leopold Stokowski's orchestral version of Bach's famous D minor organ toccata features in which 1940 Disney film?
Fantasia
Fantasia sets the piece to abstract patterns rather than a story. Walt Disney even planned to show the sequence in 3D, handing audiences cardboard viewing frames, before dropping the idea.
Q 13Antonio Vivaldi, ordained a priest in 1703, was excused within a year from which duty because of poor health?
Saying Mass
Q 21Which era of music history followed the Baroque, bringing the lighter style of Haydn and Mozart?
Classical
The Classical period arrived by way of a short transition called the galant style, which prized light elegance over grandeur. The Baroque itself is usually dated from about 1600 to 1750.
Q 22Which woodwind did Italian Baroque scores usually mean by the plain word flauto?
Recorder
The recorder was the default flute of the age, so a composer wanting the side-blown kind had to write flauto traverso. Bach's fourth Brandenburg Concerto gives solo parts to two recorders.
Q 23Bartolomeo Cristofori, instrument maker to a Medici prince, is famous for inventing which instrument around 1700?
Piano
Saying Mass was something Vivaldi did only a few times, and he complained of a tightness in the chest. Venetians still knew him as the Red Priest, after the colour of his hair.
Q 14The 1968 hit album Switched-On Bach performed Baroque pieces entirely on which then-new electronic instrument?
Synthesizer
The Moog synthesizer could sound only one note at a time, so Wendy Carlos built every track up line by line over about a thousand hours. The album went on to win three Grammys.
Q 15Which Cremona craftsman made the 1721 Lady Blunt violin, which sold in 2011 for a record $15.9 million?
Antonio Stradivari
Antonio Stradivari built more than a thousand instruments, and the Lady Blunt was auctioned to raise relief money after Japan's 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
Q 16An early biographer claimed that Bach wrote the Goldberg Variations for a Russian ambassador who suffered from what?
Insomnia
Insomnia kept the count awake, the story goes, so young Johann Goldberg played to him from the next room. Bach was said to have been paid with a golden goblet full of coins.
Q 17Antonio Vivaldi wrote much of his music for the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, which was what kind of institution?
An orphanage
An orphanage for abandoned children, the Pietà trained its most talented girls as musicians. Its all-female orchestra and choir became renowned, and Vivaldi taught there for decades.
Q 18Which composer, then aged just 20, revived Bach's long-neglected St Matthew Passion in Berlin in 1829?
Felix Mendelssohn
Felix Mendelssohn had been given a copy of the score by his grandmother some years earlier. His Berlin performance brought Bach's large-scale works back to public attention.
Q 19Which German organist wrote the Canon in D, a wedding favourite that lay in obscurity until a 1968 recording?
Johann Pachelbel
Johann Pachelbel may have written it for a wedding in the Bach family in 1694. Its chord pattern has since been borrowed by a long line of pop songs.
Q 20Giuseppe Tartini said his most famous violin sonata came to him in a 1713 dream in which who played?
The Devil
The Devil played so beautifully in the dream, Tartini said, that he woke and seized his violin to capture it. He judged what he wrote down far inferior to what he had heard.
The piano struck its strings with hammers, so a player could vary the volume by touch alone. A Medici inventory drawn up in 1700 is the first firm evidence that the new instrument existed.
Q 24Opera grew out of a circle of Florentine thinkers who hoped to revive the drama of which ancient civilisation?
Greece
Greece was the model for the Florentine Camerata, a group of poets, musicians and scholars who met at the house of Count Giovanni de' Bardi. Their experiments led to the first operas.
Q 25Handel's Water Music was first played in 1717 from a barge following King George I along which river?
The Thames
The Thames carried about 50 musicians on a barge of their own beside the royal party. The king was so pleased that he ordered the music repeated at least three times that evening.
Q 26Handel died a wealthy man in 1759 and was given a state funeral at which London landmark?
Westminster Abbey
Westminster Abbey drew more than three thousand mourners for the funeral, and Handel is buried there. He had arrived in England from Germany nearly half a century earlier.
Q 27Which Baroque form, the focus of Bach's unfinished late collection, has each voice enter in turn with the same theme?
Fugue
The fugue takes its name from the Latin for flight, as each voice seems to chase the one before. Bach's The Art of Fugue was still incomplete when he died and was printed a year later.
Q 28Which composer wrote L'Orfeo for the Mantuan court in 1607, the earliest opera still regularly performed?
Claudio Monteverdi
Claudio Monteverdi was beaten to the genre by Jacopo Peri, whose Dafne is generally counted as the first opera. L'Orfeo was written for the yearly carnival at the Gonzaga court.
Q 29Which English composer wrote Dido and Aeneas, an opera first known from a staging at a London girls' school?
Henry Purcell
Henry Purcell died at just 36, and the heroine's closing lament from the opera has outlived him. A band version is played each year at the Cenotaph in London on Remembrance Sunday.
Q 30After giving up the opera business, Handel found greater success with which unstaged genre, often on biblical stories?
Oratorio
An oratorio is given as a concert piece, with the chorus in a central role, and Handel all but created the English kind. Two early successes, Esther and Deborah, earned enough for him to start investing again.