Famous Composers Trivia
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100 free Famous Composers trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Composers leave behind more than scores. They leave anecdotes: a superstition that reshaped an opera title, a ballet written for a circus, a court case fought to marry, a symphony thrown on the fire. This quiz gathers fifty of those stories from nine centuries of music. The questions run from the medieval abbess who is one of the first composers we know by name through the Baroque, Classical and Romantic giants, into the twentieth century's modernists and minimalists, and on to the film composers whose themes everyone can hum. Each one names a work, a premiere, a patron, a nickname or a first, and every answer comes with the fact that makes it worth remembering. It suits anyone who has sat through a concert and wondered about the person behind the music, quiz hosts who want a music round with real teeth, and students who would rather learn composers through their stories than their dates.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Balanchine staged Stravinsky's 1942 Circus Polka for the Ringling circus; which animals danced it?
Elephants
Fifty elephants and fifty ballerinas danced the Circus Polka, which Stravinsky wrote after Balanchine phoned him to ask for a piece 'for some elephants'.
Q 02Tournedos Rossini, a steak topped with foie gras and truffle, honours the composer of which opera?
The Barber of Seville
The Barber of Seville's composer, Gioachino Rossini, wrote no operas after Guillaume Tell in 1829 and spent his last years in Paris hosting gourmet dinners; rich truffle and foie gras dishes bear his name.
Q 03Which planet, already known when Holst finished The Planets in 1917, has no movement in the suite?
Earth
Earth was skipped because Holst followed astrology rather than astronomy, and Pluto, found in 1930, got a movement only when Colin Matthews wrote one in 2000.
Q 04Which composer, afraid of 13, is said to have dropped an 'a' from Moses und Aron?
Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg dreaded years that were multiples of 13, and 'Moses und Aaron' would have had 13 letters; he died on Friday, 13 July 1951.
Q 05Haydn's 1797 birthday hymn for Emperor Francis II is now the national anthem of which country?
Germany
Germany's Deutschlandlied sets words Hoffmann von Fallersleben wrote in 1841 to Haydn's 'Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser', an Austrian emperor's hymn.
Q 06Prokofiev died on 5 March 1953, the same day as which Soviet leader, whose mourners swamped Moscow?
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin's death the same day filled the streets around Prokofiev's home near Red Square with mourners for three days, blocking the way to the composer's own funeral service.
Q 07Which Scott Joplin rag from 1902 reached the Billboard top three in 1974 as the theme of The Sting?
The Entertainer
The Entertainer climbed to No. 3 on the Billboard pop chart in Marvin Hamlisch's arrangement, and two years later Joplin, dead since 1917, was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.
Q 08Which film composer can be glimpsed in the Buggles' 1979 video for 'Video Killed the Radio Star'?
Hans Zimmer
Hans Zimmer, then a young keyboard player, is seen in black at a synthesizer in the clip, which became the first video shown on MTV; his Oscars for The Lion King and Dune came decades later.
Q 09Which Gershwin work premiered at Paul Whiteman's 1924 concert 'An Experiment in Modern Music'?
Rhapsody in Blue
Rhapsody in Blue was written in about five weeks, after Gershwin's brother read him a newspaper report that he was composing a jazz concerto for the concert; Whiteman's arranger Ferde Grofé orchestrated it.
Q 10The tune every can-can line kicks to comes from the climactic scene of which Offenbach operetta?
Orpheus in the Underworld
Orpheus in the Underworld climaxes with the gods throwing themselves into the 'Galop infernal', the tune the Moulin Rouge and Folies Bergère later adopted for their can-can.
Q 11Which organist did the young Bach travel hundreds of kilometres, reportedly on foot, to hear play in Lübeck?
Dieterich Buxtehude
Dieterich Buxtehude's playing kept Bach in Lübeck for months when his Arnstadt employers had granted him only four weeks' leave; the journey was more than 400 kilometres each way.
Q 12Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks accompanied a 1749 display in which London park, beside today's Buckingham Palace?
Green Park
Green Park's display went badly: rain caused misfires and the right pavilion caught fire, though a crowd put at over 12,000 had paid to hear the rehearsal at Vauxhall Gardens days earlier.
Q 13John Taylor, a travelling surgeon who operated on Bach and reportedly on Handel, treated which part of the body?
Q 21Whose Marche funèbre, the third movement of his Piano Sonata No. 2, was played at his own Paris burial in 1849?
Frédéric Chopin
Frédéric Chopin wrote the march at least two years before the rest of the sonata, and it has since been played at state funerals around the world, from Poland to Egypt.
Q 22Liszt's 1840 concert at London's Hanover Square Rooms was the first billed by what now-common term?
Recital
Recital was the word first applied to Liszt's solo concert on 9 June 1840; a year earlier he had boasted in a letter, 'Le concert, c'est moi', and he is credited with inventing the solo piano recital.
Q 23Wagner's second wife Cosima, who outlived him by 47 years, was the daughter of which pianist-composer?
Franz Liszt
The eyes
The eyes of Bach were operated on twice in 1750 by Taylor, a self-promoting English oculist who claimed to have treated Handel too; Bach was left blind and died less than four months later.
Q 14Which part of Haydn, stolen by grave robbers after his 1809 burial, rejoined his body only in 1954?
His skull
His skull was taken by phrenologists hoping to study a genius's bumps, and Haydn's remains were made whole again only in 1954 in the Bergkirche's north-tower tomb.
Q 15Who, Leipzig's first choice in 1723, used the offer to get a raise in Hamburg, leaving the post to Bach?
Georg Philipp Telemann
Georg Philipp Telemann was Leipzig's first pick and Christoph Graupner its second; both used the offer to win better terms at home, so the job fell to Bach.
Q 16Monteverdi left the Mantua court in 1613 to run the music at which basilica for the rest of his life?
St Mark's, Venice
St Mark's in Venice, the basilica of San Marco, hired Monteverdi as maestro di cappella in 1613 after he auditioned with a Mass, and he stayed until his death in 1643.
Q 17Which Tudor composer wrote the 40-part motet Spem in alium, possibly to outdo an Italian visitor's piece?
Thomas Tallis
Thomas Tallis wrote it for eight five-voice choirs; an early account says a duke asked whether no Englishman could match an Italian piece, thought to be one Alessandro Striggio brought to London in 1567.
Q 18Which Purcell work, his only all-sung opera, ends with the lament 'When I am laid in earth'?
Dido and Aeneas
Dido and Aeneas survives in no score in Purcell's hand, and its first known staging, by the end of 1689, was at a girls' boarding school in Chelsea.
Q 19Which composer's lost manuscripts were bought for Turin's library by two fathers mourning their sons?
Antonio Vivaldi
Antonio Vivaldi's scores reached Turin's National University Library because businessmen Roberto Foà and Filippo Giordano paid for them in memory of their sons; the Gloria was revived from them in 1939.
Q 20Which composer wrote 555 keyboard sonatas, mostly for his pupil Queen Maria Barbara of Spain?
Domenico Scarlatti
Domenico Scarlatti taught the Portuguese princess from her childhood, followed her to Spain when she married the Spanish heir, and stayed in her service until his death in 1757.
Franz Liszt fathered Cosima with the writer Marie d'Agoult, and Cosima left her first husband, the conductor Hans von Bülow, for Wagner.
Q 24In 1859 Italian nationalists took up the slogan 'Viva VERDI' as an acronym for long live whom?
Victor Emmanuel II
Vittorio Emanuele Re D'Italia — Victor Emmanuel II, King of Italy — hid inside the composer's name, turning Verdi into a password for unification.
Q 25Conductor Hans von Bülow ranked which composer with Bach and Beethoven as the 'three Bs'?
Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms took a place first given to Berlioz: Peter Cornelius coined the cheer 'Bach, Beethoven, Berlioz!' in 1854, and von Bülow swapped in Brahms decades later, calling him the greatest after the other two.
Q 26Dvořák wrote his 'American' Quartet in summer 1893 in Spillville, a Czech-speaking town in which US state?
Iowa
Iowa's Spillville was the home town of Dvořák's secretary Josef Kovařík, whose father taught school there, and his talk of its Czech-speaking community led the composer to spend the summer of 1893 in the town.
Q 27Grieg said 'In the Hall of the Mountain King' reeked of what, though he hoped the irony would show?
Cowpats
Cowpats, 'ultra-Norwegianism' and 'to-thyself-be-enough-ness' were Grieg's own verdict on the troll-king march he wrote for Ibsen's play in 1875, and he said he could not bear to hear it.
Q 28Which composer finished seven symphonies and, in three decades of near-silence, reportedly burned his eighth?
Jean Sibelius
Jean Sibelius gathered manuscripts in a laundry basket in the 1940s and burned them in the dining room of his home, Ainola, his wife Aino recalled; his family later said the Eighth went with them.
Q 29Mahler composed only in his summer holidays because his year-round living came from which job?
Opera conductor
Opera conductor was Mahler's living, in Budapest, Hamburg and then at Vienna's Court Opera, so he wrote his symphonies each summer in small composing huts in the Austrian countryside.
Q 30Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune is a 'free illustration' of a poem by which French symbolist?
Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé was unhappy that his poem had been set, until he heard the premiere at Debussy's invitation and wrote to thank him.