fluterants:

gay-440:

I’d love to have a more in-depth discussion of this sometime, but here’s a few facts off the top of my head

• Mozart used to stay out all night partying and getting laid and then he’d sleep until noon and his long-suffering jerk of a father had to drag him out of bed to practice
• He also wrote the overture for the opera Don Giovanni the morning it premiered, while extremely hungover
• The interval between a perfect 4th and a perfect 5th (a tritone) was called “the devil’s interval”, and for centuries composers avoided it at all costs because it was believed to cause madness, violence, and sexual desire
• Franz Liszt played so intensely that he physically destroyed pianos and they had to invent a stronger one (which is the model still used today)
• Another thing about Liszt: women used to throw their underwear at him while he was performing. He was the first one-man boy band.
• At the premiere of The Rite of Spring the audience was so alarmed by the dissonance and non-traditional style that they left their seats to storm out or beat each other up in the aisles
• Many symphonies use non-traditional percussion like canons or massive wooden mallets, modern classical composers like John Cage like to stick things in piano strings
• Shostakovich was the most hardcore composer (though I’m biased because he’s my fave). He barely escaped being exiled or killed by Stalin while continuing to write music containing forbidden folk melodies or thunderous movements depicting the dictator himself.
• Paganini had no teeth and apparently looked like the devil

If folks have other facts I’d love to hear them!

• J.S. Bach straight up lost one of his first jobs because he got in a sword fight with one of his students. He was 20. His student was 23. Apparently he called the student a “nanny-goat bassoonist”.
• There is an opera about a magical ring that gives the wearer the power to rule the world. Through all the carnage for ownership of the ring, ALL the gods die, and Valhalla is destroyed. The opera is known as “The Ring Cycle” by Richard Wagner, and it is 15 hours long.
• Oh and another thing about Liszt, he used to wear gloves and then throw them dramatically into the audience (of what I can only imagine as screaming teenage girls) before he performed.
• Mozart wrote a piece called “"Leck mich im Arsch“, or “Lick Me in the Arse.”
• Before batons was used for conducting, they used “pointed staffs” that would beat the tempo against the ground. Jean-Baptiste Lully stabbed himself through the foot with it, and therefore died from gangrene from the wound.
• There is an aria in Lucia di Lammermoor in which the soprano has gone completely mad and has stabbed her husband to death. She sings with an accompanying flute (a bird that she’s hearing in her head), while in her wedding dress – covered in blood.
• In Berlioz’s Symphony Fantastique, movement IV – “The March to the Scaffold”, the music depicts a young man’s march to the guillotine. You can hear the moment his head is cut off and bounces down the stairs.

I could probably go on forever. Classical music is fascinating!