Classical Music & Composers Quiz — 10 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the figure, abbreviated to two letters from the Latin for work, that publishers assign to a composer's pieces roughly in order of publication, so that a work can be cited unambiguously even when many share a title?

Question 2

Which era of Western music, dominant through the 19th century, put personal emotion, storytelling, national identity and sheer scale at the centre, growing the orchestra, loosening form, and giving rise to the single-movement work that paints a scene or narrates a tale?

Question 3

Which composer of the Classical era, a touring child prodigy from Salzburg, produced more than 600 works in a 35-year life, among them 41 symphonies, the operas The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute, and a Requiem left unfinished at his death?

Question 4

What is the name for the structure used for most first movements in the Classical era, in which two contrasting theme groups in different keys are laid out, then broken apart and combined in a central development, then restated with both groups now in the home key?

Question 5

Which Italian opera composer, master of surging melody and theatrical pacing, wrote La boheme, Tosca and Madama Butterfly, and left a final opera set in legendary China unfinished at his death, its most famous aria promising that none shall sleep?

Question 6

Which Soviet composer wrote a fifth symphony billed as a creative artist's reply to just criticism, after a newspaper attack on his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District had put his life in danger, and later a seventh symphony begun in the besieged city of Leningrad?

Question 7

Which Italian composer, long the powerful court music director in Vienna, was rumoured after his death to have poisoned Mozart out of envy, a charge with essentially no supporting evidence that a 19th-century play and a 20th-century film nonetheless made famous?

Question 8

What is the name for the contrapuntal procedure in which a short theme, called the subject, is stated alone by one voice and then answered in turn by each of the other voices, with the material developed in linking passages and sometimes with entries overlapping in a tight stretto?

Question 9

Which Czech Romantic composer wrote a ninth symphony subtitled From the New World, composed during three years spent directing a conservatory in New York, along with a set of Slavonic Dances, a much-loved cello concerto and an American string quartet?

Question 10

Which Hungarian composer travelled the countryside with an early recording machine to capture thousands of peasant songs, then fused their irregular rhythms and scales with a hard modern style in works including a Concerto for Orchestra and a piece for strings, percussion and celesta?

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About Classical Music & Composers

Classical music is the written art-music tradition of the West, running from medieval chant to the present day, and this quiz covers its composers, works, forms and vocabulary in eighty questions. Each describes a composer, a period, a genre, a technique, a famous piece or an instrument's role, and asks you to name it from four options, then explains what it is along with a record, a story or a dispute attached to it.

The first pack is the bedrock: Bach, Mozart and Beethoven; Vivaldi, Handel and Haydn; Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Wagner, Brahms and Stravinsky; the three great style periods, Baroque, Classical and Romantic; and the central forms and roles, the symphony, the concerto, the opera, the string quartet, the fugue and the conductor.

The second pack widens the field. More composers, Schubert, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Debussy, Dvorak, Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Verdi, Puccini, Grieg, Sibelius, Bartok, Copland, Shostakovich, Gershwin, Ravel and Berlioz. More forms and terms, sonata form, the oratorio, the requiem, chamber music, the cadenza, the opus number, the Lied, the symphonic poem, the etude, the nocturne, counterpoint and programme music. The roles of the pipe organ, the harpsichord, the timpani and the cello. And the Ballets Russes that tied music to the wider modern arts.

The third pack is history, oddity and legend: Satie and Prokofiev; the riot at the premiere of The Rite of Spring; Clara Schumann and the teacher Nadia Boulanger; the Salieri poisoning myth and the film Amadeus; the cataloguing systems named for Kochel; Paganini and the devil's-interval tritone; John Cage's silent 4'33"; twelve-tone technique; the metronome and standard concert pitch; Gregorian chant; the castrato voice; the debunked Mozart effect; the Curse of the Ninth; the London Proms; and the difference between absolute and relative pitch.

The wrong answers are always names of the same kind, a composer beside composers, a form beside forms, so the quiz tests recognition rather than recall, and a shaky guess is easily punished. Nothing assumes you read music: every technical term is explained in plain language where it appears. Images are used only where a neutral photograph, a hall, a score page, a keyboard, a pair of pointe shoes, an orchestra pit, gives nothing away, since a portrait or a titled manuscript would. A few myths are corrected: Salieri almost certainly did not poison Mozart; the label 'Impressionist' was rejected by Debussy himself; the 'Curse of the Ninth' is a cherry-picked coincidence; and the Mozart effect never made anyone cleverer for longer than about a quarter of an hour.