Classical Music & Composers Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which member of the string family, roughly the size to be held upright between the knees and supported on a spike, sounds an octave below the viola and is prized for a warm tone close to the range of the human voice?

Question 2

Which French composer wrote an orchestral piece that repeats a single tune over an unchanging snare-drum rhythm through one long crescendo, along with a ballet on the Daphnis and Chloe legend and a piano concerto written for a one-armed pianist?

Question 3

What is the French name for a short instrumental piece designed to drill one particular technical difficulty, such as rapid octaves or a specific finger pattern, which Chopin and Liszt raised from a dry teaching exercise into demanding concert music of real beauty?

Question 4

Which Romantic composer, born into a wealthy and cultured family, wrote a teenage overture and later incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream that includes a wedding march, along with an Italian and a Scottish symphony, a violin concerto in E minor and the oratorio Elijah?

Question 5

What is the name for the superstition, which Gustav Mahler is said to have taken seriously, that a composer will die before completing a tenth symphony, a pattern its believers trace through Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner, Dvorak and Mahler himself?

Question 6

Which Romantic composer, Polish by birth and resident in Paris, wrote almost exclusively for the solo piano, in intimate forms including the nocturne, the etude, the mazurka, the polonaise and the ballade, several of the dances rooted in the folk music of his homeland?

Question 7

Which Soviet composer wrote a symphonic fairy tale in which each character is played by a different instrument, a ballet on Romeo and Juliet with a grinding Dance of the Knights, a first symphony imitating Haydn, and a percussive, athletic third piano concerto?

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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.