Most of these composers aren't 'classical'
Strictly speaking, the Classical period is a short stretch, roughly 1750 to 1820, when HAYDN and MOZART wrote music built on balance and clear, tidy shapes. BACH, HANDEL and VIVALDI came earlier, in the Baroque period, with busy lines of melody woven over one another. After them came the Romantics — CHOPIN, LISZT, BRAHMS, VERDI, WAGNER and TCHAIKOVSKY — writing bigger, stormier music about feelings, and then DEBUSSY, around 1900, blurring sounds together like a painting seen through mist. BEETHOVEN stands on the bridge between Classical and Romantic.
Everyday speech calls all of it classical music, and that is fine. But knowing the periods helps you hear why a piece by BACH and a piece by TCHAIKOVSKY feel so different.
Mozart's memory
MOZART was performing for royalty across Europe at six and wrote his first SYMPHONY at eight, while his family was staying in London. In 1770, aged fourteen, he visited the Sistine Chapel in Rome and heard the choir sing the Miserere by Gregorio Allegri. The Vatican guarded the music closely, and copying it was forbidden. MOZART went back to his lodgings and wrote the whole piece down from memory, then went back to hear it again and fix a few details. Nobody punished him; that same summer, the Pope made him a knight. By his death, aged 35, he had written more than 600 works.
Beethoven turned round to see the applause
BEETHOVEN began losing his hearing in his late twenties and was almost completely deaf by his late forties. He kept composing, hearing the music in his head, while friends talked to him by writing in notebooks; about 140 of them survive. At the first performance of his Ninth SYMPHONY, in Vienna in 1824, he stood on stage beside the conductor. When the music ended he was still facing the ORCHESTRA, unaware of the cheering behind him, until one of the singers turned him round to see the audience clapping and waving their hats. The tune from its final movement, 'Ode to Joy', is now the anthem of the European Union.
The first pop star played the piano
Long before screaming pop fans, there was LISZT. A dazzling pianist in the 1830s and 1840s, he played entire concerts alone and from memory, which had rarely been done, and turned the piano sideways so the audience could watch his face. Fans fought over his gloves, his handkerchiefs and even the stubs of his cigars, and the poet Heinrich Heine gave the craze a name: Lisztomania.
A secret instrument for the Sugar Plum Fairy
On a visit to Paris in 1891, TCHAIKOVSKY came across a new instrument, the celesta, which sounds like tiny chiming bells. He had one sent to Russia and asked his publisher to keep it quiet, in case a rival composer used it first. The following year it became the voice of the Sugar Plum Fairy in The Nutcracker, and that twinkling sound has been part of Christmas ever since. His 1812 OVERTURE goes to the other extreme: its score includes parts for real cannons.