A question, a guess, then the answer. Every one is sourced — and every piece mentioned is playable here in letter notes.
The most recognisable piano piece in the world sat unseen in a drawer for decades.
About 40 years — it wasn’t printed until 1867.
Beethoven dated the manuscript 27 April 1810, but never published it. The scholar Ludwig Nohl discovered and printed it in 1867, four decades after Beethoven’s death in 1827. The original manuscript has since been lost.
Everyone knows the name. Almost nobody knows Beethoven had nothing to do with it.
Not Beethoven — the nickname appeared after his death.
He published it as Piano Sonata No. 14, “Quasi una fantasia”, Op. 27 No. 2, in 1802. The “Moonlight” label spread from an 1824 comparison by the poet Ludwig Rellstab, and only became common in the late 1830s — years after Beethoven died in 1827.
Play the Moonlight Sonata → Source: Wikipedia — Piano Sonata No. 14
The most-played wedding piece on earth spent most of its life in total obscurity.
Centuries — it only became famous after a 1968 recording.
The Canon and Gigue in D major went out of fashion and stayed unknown for generations. A 1968 recording by the Jean-François Paillard chamber orchestra revived it, and by the early 1980s it was everywhere. Its looping chord progression has since shaped countless pop songs.
It’s sung in churches worldwide. That is not what he wrote.
No — it was a setting of a Walter Scott poem.
In 1825 Schubert set “Ellen’s third song” from a German translation of Scott’s narrative poem The Lady of the Lake, in which the character Ellen sings to the Virgin Mary. Because her song opens with the words “Ave Maria”, people later fitted the Latin prayer to his melody — and the pairing stuck so firmly that most listeners assume he wrote it that way.
One of the most-taught beginner pieces in history was credited to the wrong man for two centuries.
Christian Petzold — not Bach.
The Minuet in G major (BWV Anh. 114) appears in the 1725 Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach, which is why it was long attributed to Johann Sebastian Bach. Research established the Dresden organist Christian Petzold as its composer, and from the 1990 edition of the Bach catalogue the minuets are credited to him. The melody also became the 1965 pop hit “A Lover’s Concerto”.
Play the Minuet in G → Source: Wikipedia — Minuet in G major
The most recognisable organ work ever written has a question mark over it.
Some scholars doubt it — though the leading Bach expert says yes.
The authorship of the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, has been questioned by a minority of scholars since 1981, when Peter Williams suggested it may have started life as a violin piece. Christoph Wolff, the foremost living Bach scholar, maintains it is genuinely Bach’s, and the Bach catalogue has never listed it as doubtful. Disney’s Fantasia (1940) made it famous; film later made it shorthand for villainy.
Play the Toccata and Fugue → Source: Wikipedia — Toccata and Fugue in D minor
Nearly everyone assumes yes. We assumed it too — until we checked the score.
Not in the traditional version — it’s a more ornate melody.
The tune usually paired with “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” is the French melody “Ah! vous dirai-je, maman”, and many modern songbooks reuse it for “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep”. The traditional notated version is different and more decorated. We found this the hard way while building our library: writing the melody from memory would have shipped the wrong tune, so we now transcribe from published scores instead.
Play Baa, Baa, Black Sheep → Source: Wikipedia — Baa, Baa, Black Sheep
He removed something every other composer treats as essential.
Time signatures and bar lines — the music is written in “free time”.
The three published Gnossiennes have no time signatures and no bar lines. Satie also filled the score with unusual written directions such as “with astonishment”. He even invented the word gnossienne as a title. For a player, the missing grid is liberating: there is no rigid pulse to fight.
He left instructions. They were ignored.
The Fantaisie-Impromptu — printed in 1855, after his death.
Chopin composed the Fantaisie-Impromptu in C-sharp minor in 1834 but never published it, having left instructions that his unpublished manuscripts not be released. It appeared in 1855, six years after he died, and went on to become one of his most popular works. Its middle melody later resurfaced in the song “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows”.
Play the Fantaisie-Impromptu → Source: Wikipedia — Fantaisie-Impromptu
The form that defines him was somebody else’s idea.
No — the Irish composer John Field did.
John Field is generally viewed as the father of the Romantic nocturne. He wrote 18 of them and established the characteristic texture: a singing melody over a rippling, almost guitar-like accompaniment. Chopin then wrote 21 nocturnes of his own and became the form’s most famous exponent — so completely that most listeners now hear “nocturne” and think only of him.
The most performed opera in the world was, at first, a disappointment.
No — he died three months after the premiere.
Carmen premiered in March 1875 to a cool reception. Bizet died that June, aged 36, before the opera became one of the most frequently performed works in the entire repertoire. He never saw its success.
Today it’s the definitive ballet. In 1877 the critics were not impressed.
As a failure — “too noisy”, “too symphonic”.
Tchaikovsky composed Swan Lake in 1875–76 and it premiered at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre in 1877. Critics found it too noisy, too “Wagnerian” and too symphonic, and thought the choreography unmemorable. The version companies dance today descends largely from an 1895 St. Petersburg revival — staged after Tchaikovsky had died.
One of the great composers paid a rival the ultimate compliment — in writing.
The opening bars of The Blue Danube, plus “Unfortunately not by Johannes Brahms”.
Johann Strauss II composed The Blue Danube in 1866; it premiered in Vienna in February 1867. Brahms, asked for an autograph, wrote out its opening bars and added the line beneath. The waltz was written first with choral lyrics — the purely orchestral version, made for the 1867 Paris World’s Fair, is the one that conquered the world.
She won the most prestigious prize in French music — and died at 24.
Lili Boulanger, in 1913.
Boulanger (1893–1918) won the Grand Prix de Rome with her cantata Faust et Hélène, the first woman ever to do so. Associated with the Symbolist and Impressionist movements, she wrote D’un matin de printemps and the song cycle Clairières dans le ciel before dying at 24.
Lili Boulanger’s pieces → Source: Wikipedia — Lili Boulanger
A largely self-taught composer broke a barrier no one else had.
Amy Beach — her “Gaelic” Symphony, premiered 1896.
Amy Beach (1867–1944) was the first successful American female composer of large-scale art music, and her Gaelic Symphony was the first symphony composed and published by an American woman. She also wrote a Piano Concerto in C-sharp minor and a Mass in E-flat major.
France’s highest order of merit had never gone to a woman composer before.
Cécile Chaminade, in 1913.
Chaminade (1857–1944) was a French Romantic composer whose Concertino for flute and orchestra remains her most popular work today. In 1913 she became the first female composer to receive the Légion d’Honneur.
One composer, one form, an almost absurd number of them.
555.
Scarlatti (1685–1757) — born the same year as Bach and Handel — is known mainly for his 555 keyboard sonatas. Inventive and brilliantly idiomatic to the instrument, they are the body of work for which he is remembered.
More than three thousand works — and he was Bach’s contemporary and friend.
Georg Philipp Telemann.
Telemann (1681–1767) produced more than 3,000 works, making him one of the most prolific composers who ever lived. From 1721 he was musical director of Hamburg’s five main churches. His best-known works include Tafelmusik and the Brockes Passion.
Telemann’s pieces → Source: Wikipedia — Georg Philipp Telemann
Seventy years after it was written, it was a Top 3 hit.
A film — The Sting put it at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Scott Joplin copyrighted “The Entertainer” in December 1902. Largely forgotten for decades, it returned with the 1973 film The Sting: Marvin Hamlisch’s adaptation reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in May 1974 and won an Academy Award. The RIAA later ranked it tenth on its “Songs of the Century” list.
The world’s most famous carol was written by a village schoolteacher.
Franz Xaver Gruber, on Christmas Eve 1818.
Gruber (1787–1863) was an Austrian primary school teacher, church organist and composer. He wrote the music to “Stille Nacht” on Christmas Eve 1818, in collaboration with the lyricist Joseph Mohr.
He didn’t write the harmony. He borrowed it from a piece written 130 years earlier.
Bach’s Prelude in C — the opening of The Well-Tempered Clavier.
Bach’s Prelude in C major, BWV 846, dated 1722 in his autograph, is built almost entirely from gently rolling broken chords. Charles Gounod composed a melody designed to sit over that prelude; it was later set to the Ave Maria text. Two of the most famous pieces in music, a century apart, share the same chords.
Play the Prelude in C → Source: Wikipedia — Prelude in C major, BWV 846
A famous Mozart manuscript, missing for two centuries.
Lost pages of Mozart’s own manuscript of the “Turkish March” sonata.
The Rondo alla Turca is the finale of Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 11, K. 331, composed around 1783. In 2014 several long-lost pages of Mozart’s autograph manuscript were rediscovered in Budapest’s National Széchényi Library. Mozart himself headed the movement “Alla turca”: it imitates the Turkish Janissary bands then fashionable in Vienna.
Play the Turkish March → Source: Wikipedia — Piano Sonata No. 11
The connection behind one of the most famous symphonies ever written.
Harry Thacker Burleigh.
Burleigh (1866–1949) was an American composer and singer who arranged spirituals in a classical form and made them available to concert artists. He introduced Antonín Dvořák to Black American music — an influence on Dvořák’s celebrated “From the New World” symphony.
A composer of over 450 works who was largely kept out of print.
Over 450 written; almost none published in her lifetime.
Fanny Hensel (née Mendelssohn, 1805–1847), Felix Mendelssohn’s elder sister, composed more than 450 works, including over 125 pieces for solo piano and over 250 Lieder. She remained largely unpublished during her life because of the social conventions restricting women’s public musical careers.
Fanny Hensel’s pieces → Source: Wikipedia — Fanny Mendelssohn
Each answer links to the reference it was checked against. Facts are drawn from our source-cited composer biographies and piece notes — see also On This Day in Music and our guides.