Classical Music
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8correct to beat the crowd
This classical music trivia quiz has 159 free questions with answers and runs from Gregorian chant and Hildegard of Bingen to John Cage's four and a half minutes of silence and the organ piece in Halberstadt scheduled to last 639 years. In between: Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Handel on the Thames, Haydn's Surprise, the unfinished Mozart Requiem, Beethoven's Ninth as the EU anthem, Chopin's heart in a Warsaw pillar, Aida in Cairo, Mahler dodging the curse of the ninth, the Rite of Spring riot, Holst's fading Neptune, Shostakovich under siege and the Three Tenors at the 1990 World Cup. It also covers the working vocabulary (concerto, leitmotif, homophony, why the oboe gives the tuning A) and the instruments, so it works as classic music trivia for a pub quiz, a music classroom or anyone who wants to test what they actually know beyond the famous tunes. Early questions are for anyone who has heard the pieces; the later ones will stretch conservatory students. Every answer was checked against a reference page and shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 159 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which prolific Baroque composer spent much of his career as Thomaskantor in Leipzig?
Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach held the Thomaskantor post from 1723 until his death in 1750, directing the music of Leipzig's four main Lutheran churches, including St Thomas's.
Q 02Which musical form pits a virtuoso soloist against an orchestra, usually with a cadenza for showing off?
Concerto
Concerto comes from the Italian for 'to agree' or 'to contend', and the form does both; Vivaldi alone wrote hundreds of violin concertos.
Q 03Which of these instruments belongs to the brass family and is known for its bright, penetrating sound?
Trumpet
Its sound starts as a lip buzz into the mouthpiece; the family runs from the piccolo trumpet down to the bass trumpet an octave below the standard B-flat.
Q 04Which Beethoven work opens with the four-note 'fate knocking at the door' motif, da-da-da-DUM?
Symphony No. 5
Symphony No. 5's short-short-short-long is Morse code for V, so the BBC used it, played on drums, to open wartime broadcasts to occupied Europe; it premiered in 1808 on the same night as the Sixth.
Q 05The Classical period, around 1750 to 1820, moved away from the Baroque's interweaving voices toward which texture, a single melody over chords?
Homophony
Homophony, a tune with accompaniment, suited the era's taste for clarity; it is how almost every pop song is built today.
Q 06Which Austrian composer, dead at 31 in 1828, left more than 600 songs and an 'Unfinished' symphony?
Franz Schubert
Franz Schubert gave only one public concert of his own music, months before he died; he is buried beside Beethoven, whose funeral he had attended as a torchbearer.
Q 07Which Russian composer wrote 'Swan Lake', 'The Nutcracker' and 'Sleeping Beauty'?
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky wrote all three: Swan Lake premiered at Moscow's Bolshoi in 1877, The Sleeping Beauty in 1890 and The Nutcracker in 1892, both at St Petersburg's Mariinsky Theatre.
Q 08Which monophonic, unaccompanied Latin song was the core music of the medieval Roman liturgy?
Gregorian Chant
Gregorian Chant is a single melodic line sung without instruments to Latin text; it carried the Roman Catholic Mass and Office for centuries and is named after Pope Gregory I.
Q 09In which Italian city did Antonio Stradivari build his celebrated violins?
Cremona
Antonio Stradivari worked his whole life in Cremona, the Lombard town that also housed the Amati and Guarneri workshops; roughly 650 of his instruments survive.
Q 10Which musical era emphasised intense emotion, individualism and often programmatic music?
Romantic
Romantic composers like Berlioz and Liszt wrote programme music with plots; E. T. A. Hoffmann's essays argued instrumental music was the truest art, in deliberate opposition to Classical restraint.
Q 11Who composed The Marriage of Figaro, premiered in Vienna in 1786 to Lorenzo Da Ponte's Italian libretto?
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote it from a Beaumarchais play banned in Vienna for mocking the nobility; its success won him a Prague commission that became Don Giovanni.
Q 12What is the term for a recurring theme tied to a character or idea, the device Wagner built his Ring cycle on?
Leitmotif
Leitmotif is German for 'leading motif', and John Williams uses the same trick in Star Wars, giving Darth Vader and Leia their own themes.
Q 13In which of his symphonies did Antonín Dvořák incorporate elements inspired by American folk music?
Symphony No. 9
Q 21Chopin is buried in Père Lachaise, but his heart is sealed in a church pillar in which city?
Warsaw
His eldest sister Ludwika smuggled the heart, preserved in alcohol, to Warsaw in 1850; it rests inside a pillar of Warsaw's Church of the Holy Cross.
Q 22Verdi's Aida, set in ancient Egypt, had its 1871 premiere in which city?
Cairo
Aida opened at Cairo's Khedivial Opera House on 24 December 1871; Khedive Isma'il Pasha had first wanted a work for the house's 1869 opening, and Verdi finally accepted a fee of 150,000 francs.
Q 23Which work did Mahler refuse to number as a symphony, hoping to dodge the 'curse of the ninth'?
Das Lied von der Erde
Symphony No. 9, 'From the New World', was written in New York in 1893; Dvořák's student Harry T. Burleigh sang him spirituals, and a first-movement theme recalls 'Swing Low, Sweet Chariot'.
Q 14Which of these instruments belongs to the woodwind family?
Clarinet
The clarinet is a member of the woodwind family, which includes instruments where sound is produced by air vibrating a reed or across an edge.
Q 15Vivaldi's The Four Seasons was first published in 1725 in which city?
Amsterdam
Amsterdam publisher Michel-Charles Le Cène issued the four concertos in 1725 as the opening of Vivaldi's Op. 8, 'Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione'; each came with a descriptive sonnet.
Q 16Handel's Water Music was premiered in 1717 for King George I aboard a barge on which river?
Thames
The royal barge went up the Thames from Whitehall to Chelsea on 17 July 1717; George I liked Handel's suite so much he had it played three times that evening.
Q 17Haydn's 'Surprise' Symphony gets its German nickname from a sudden stroke on which instrument?
Kettledrum
The German nickname 'mit dem Paukenschlag' means 'with the kettledrum stroke': a fortissimo chord with timpani breaks the quiet Andante theme. Symphony No. 94 premiered at London's Hanover Square Rooms in March 1792.
Q 18Which pupil completed the Requiem in D minor left unfinished at its composer's death in 1791?
Franz Xaver Süssmayr
Franz Xaver Süssmayr finished the Requiem for Constanze Mozart after Joseph Eybler gave up; only the Introitus was fully orchestrated at Mozart's death, and Count Walsegg had commissioned it for his late wife.
Q 19The Salzburg-born composer of The Magic Flute was already writing little pieces at what age?
5
Mozart was 5 when his father Leopold wrote down his first little keyboard pieces in 1761; he went on to produce more than 600 catalogued works before dying at 35.
Q 20An instrumental 'Ode to Joy' from Beethoven's Ninth serves as the official anthem of which body?
European Union
The European Union adopted it after the Council of Europe did in 1972; at the 1824 premiere the deaf Beethoven had to be turned around to see the applause he could not hear.
Das Lied von der Erde, a song-symphony for two voices and orchestra, was left unnumbered after his Eighth; the dodge failed, as he finished a Ninth and died in 1911 with the Tenth in draft.
Q 24Debussy's 'Clair de lune' is the third movement of which larger piano work?
Suite bergamasque
Suite bergamasque takes its name from Paul Verlaine's poem 'Clair de lune', whose opening stanza mentions bergamasks; the movement is marked 'andante très expressif' in D-flat major.
Q 25Ravel's Boléro is built on an unchanging rhythm repeated 169 times on which instrument?
Snare drum
A snare drum taps the same two-bar ostinato throughout, 169 times in all; Ravel called the piece 'orchestral tissue without music', a single unbroken crescendo written for the dancer Ida Rubinstein.
Q 26Who choreographed the tumultuous 1913 premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring?
Vaslav Nijinsky
Vaslav Nijinsky's stamping, turned-in choreography drew as much protest as the score at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29 May 1913, yet the performance ran to the end and took curtain calls.
Q 27Which movement of Holst's The Planets ends with an offstage wordless female chorus fading into silence?
Neptune
In 'Neptune, the Mystic' the women's chorus sings from an adjoining room while a door is slowly closed, an early orchestral fade-out; Earth is omitted, and Colin Matthews added a 'Pluto' in 2000.
Q 28Elgar's 'Nimrod' variation puns on friend August Jaeger's surname, which is German for what?
Hunter
Nimrod is described in Genesis as 'a mighty hunter before the Lord'. Elgar never revealed the hidden theme behind the fourteen variations.
Q 29Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony is nicknamed for which city, where it was performed under siege in 1942?
Leningrad
The 'Leningrad' Symphony was played inside the besieged city on 9 August 1942 by the depleted Radio Orchestra; the score reached the West on microfilm via Tehran, and Toscanini gave the American radio premiere that July.
Q 30John Cage's silent piece 4'33" was premiered in Woodstock, New York in 1952 by which pianist?
David Tudor
David Tudor sat at the piano in the Maverick Concert Hall on 29 August 1952, closing and opening the lid to mark three silent movements of 30 seconds, 2 minutes 23 seconds and 1 minute 40 seconds.