INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT CLASSICAL

COMPOSERS: MOZART
Let’s start with Mozart, because everyone has heard of him!

1) Most of us know that Mozart was a big fan of fart jokes and that he was a big silly jokester.
But not everyone knows he enjoyed imitating cats. If he was bored during a rehearsal, he would
leap around tables and meow.

He enjoyed imitating cats so much that he wrote a song called “The Cat Duet”, where the
husband is singing questions to the wife and she only responds with “meow”. Eventually the
husband starts meowing too – but musically, of course.

2) And another Mozart fact: You know the famous opera Don Giovanni? Well, the opening song,
the orchestral overture, was written the night before the opera’s premier. Mozart was out
drinking with friends and one of them mentioned, “Hey Mozart, how come you haven’t written
the overture yet?”

So at midnight that evening, Mozart went home and spent a few hours writing the masterpiece…
while under the influence. The orchestra was handed the music moments before the performance,
and…played it flawlessly.

INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT CLASSICAL

COMPOSERS: JOSEPH HAYDN
3) When one mentions Mozart, one has to mention Haydn. They were real-life friends/kindred
spirits, and would often jam on the violins/violas together.

4) Haydn was a goof who loved playing practical jokes. At age 17, he was kicked out of singing
school, partly because he had cut off the pigtail of another boy, but mainly because he had
“matured” and his once-beautiful voice had turned to something described as “crowing”.

Empress Maria Theresa herself complained to Reutter about his singing, calling it “crowing”.

5) Haydn had lots of interesting life stories, but he has a good post-death story, too. About a
week after Haydn’s death, his body was dug up and his head was kidnapped. This was because
the kidnappers were interested in studying the brain of geniuses. The guys who stole it, Johann
Peter and Joseph Rosenbaum, had a collection of skulls that they displayed and liked to show
people – including Haydn’s.

Of course, people weren’t happy about this, so Peter and Rosenbaum returned a fake skull as
Haydn’s. Haydn wasn’t reunited with his real skull until 1954, and now his tomb has two skulls.

FRANZ LISZT
6) Most of us know that Franz Liszt lived the rockstar lifestyle as a youth, being very desirable
and fathering children out of wedlock. But not everyone knows that, in older age, Liszt went
through the process of becoming a Catholic priest.

He had wanted to be a priest off and on throughout his whole life, so finally in 1865, when Liszt
was 54, he took the four minor orders (but never officially became a priest).

RICHARD WAGNER
7) Richard Wagner has many, many stories. But one I find really interesting was his enjoyment
of crossdressing. Looking at pictures of Wagner and reading about his life and persona, he had a
rather stereotypical “man” exterior. But he liked to wear women’s underwear.

He would order pink lacy costumes “for his wife” (she never mentioned these costumes in her
diaries). She did, however, give him a pink carpet made from flamingo feathers for one of his
birthdays. So props to Cosima for being thoughtful.

8) Oh, and Cosima, Wagner’s wife, was one of Liszt’s illegitimate daughters.

FREDERIC HANDEL
9) Jumping back to the Baroque era, we have Handel the Food-Lover.
Also when I was trying to verify this claim, I typed in “Handel loved food”, and Google gave me
a bunch of websites on how to “melt away my love handles”. Maybe next time, Google.
Handel was a big fan of the finer things in life, including heaps of rich food and wine. In fact, his
heavy wine habit was thought to have caused him lead poisoning (it was a preservative), and the
rich foods caused him gout. One of Handel’s dinner guests, a comic artist, even made a rather
rude comic about his eating habits, portraying him as a pig sitting on a barrel of wine.

JEAN-BAPTISTE LULLY
Baptiste Lully was a Baroque composer who had the habit of keeping time by hitting his staff
against the ground. Well, one 10) Jean-time he missed the ground, and stabbed his foot. He
contracted gangrene from this wound, leading to his death at age 55.

J.S. BAC
11) Bach was a regular at Café Zimmerman in Leipzig, where he would consume 3 of 4 cups of
coffee. He was such a huge fan of coffee that he even wrote his famous (and silly) Coffee
Cantata about a woman trying to kick her coffee habit.

ANTONIO VIVALDI
12) And one more Baroque fact, via Vivaldi. Vivaldi, the renowned Baroque violinist and
composer, became a Catholic priest at age 25. He was nicknamed “The Red Priest” because,
cleverly, he was also a redhead.

FELIX MENDELSSOHN
13) Felix Mendelssohn was one of those annoying people who was good at basically everything.
Aside from composing, he was a good writer, made cartoons for fun, and could paint and draw.

14) A friend of Mendelssohn’s, Attwood, lost an original manuscript of Mendelssohn’s in the

back seat of a cab. It was the Overture to Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was the only copy. But
instead of freaking out, Mendelssohn just rewrote the whole thing from memory.
EDVARD GRIEG
15) Edvard Grieg had a good-luck figurine. It was a little frog that he would pat before a concert.

TCHAIKOVSKY
16) Tchaikovsky was a man of many mental health issues, but one especially peculiar habit of
his was holding his chin with his left hand while conducting. This is because he apparently
believed his head would fall off.

ERIC SATIE
17) And finally, the eccentric Eric Satie. One of his many quirks was his diet of white food. In
one of his letters, he detailed his diet, consisting of:

“Eggs, sugar, shredded bones, animal fat, veal, salt, coconuts,

rice, pasta, turnips, chicken, white cheese, cotton salad, and
certain fish.”
So maybe this just goes to show that artists and celebrities have been going on weird diets for
centuries.
CONCLUSION