I’m trying to prove that classical music isn’t boring. Can you give me facts that show how hardcore classical music, musicians, and composers are (like the 1812 overture canons or the riot of spring)?
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!
seduce me with ur history knowledge
vikings made their woman handle the finances because they thought math is witchcraft
The idea that unicorns are only able tamed and captured by virgins originated as a medieval joke. The idea was that it took a mythical creature to catch a mythical creature.
There was once an English minstrel called Roland the Farter. He was awarded lands by the king on the condition that he turn up to the court every Christmas to perform his characteristic “whistle, leap and a fart”. His children could keep the lands after his death if they learnt and performed the same trick.
There is graffiti from the Norse invaders that reads (roughly) “ I slept with Ingiborg, the most beautiful woman in the world ”
A close friend of Alexander the Great named Dioxippus, once told one of his generals, named Coragus, to stop being so up himself, Coragus took offence and challenged him to a duel in front of all of his troops unaware that Dioxippus was a champion of Pankration, Ancient Greek Wrestling. Coragus turned up with all of his weapons and armour, Dioxippus turned up naked with a club, lathered in Olive Oil. The match was over in about 5 mins and Coragus got his arse well and truly kicked.
When an army of Swedes went off to war with the Norwegians, they left all the women to manage everything, however, in the village of Smaland, right on the Southern Border, they were attacked by an opposing force of Danes. The women, led by a woman named Blenda, responded to this by inviting the invaders in, feeding them, making them comfy and basically having a massive party to get them REALLY drunk. When all the invaders all passed out, the women slaughtered them all with anything they could find, and when the men came back, the King was so impressed that he basically granted them a bunch of new rights that were previously unavailable to them. From that point on, all daughters had the right to inherit property, money and land equally with their brothers, and were allowed to wear military-style garments around town and at their weddings. They were also given the prestigious right to wear the Royal Coat of Arms on their clothing – a tradition that has lasted to this day.
The term in Chess “Checkmate” is thought to have come from the Persian term “Shah Mat” which means “The King is dead”.
Captain Benjamin Hornigold, the mentor to Edward “Blackbeard” Teach, once captured a ship just so he could steal all of the crew’s hats, because his crew had gotten drunk the night before and thrown all of theirs overboard.
Napoléon Bonaparte, the Corsican soldier who eventually became the Emperor of France following the French Revolution and Maximilien de Robespierre’s “Reign of Terror”, was terrified of cats.
It is always different and also always amazing
P
Throughout his career, Hamilton was outspoken to a fault, while Burr was a man of ingrained secrecy. He gloried in his sphinxlike reputation and once described himself thus in the third person: “He is a grave, silent, strange sort of animal, inasmuch that we know not what to make of him.
Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton
Aaron Burr, Ultimate Mystery Bird.
(via lessthansix)
Aaron Burrb
(via recallthename)
I die a little inside every time someone says history is boring. History is one long, epic adventure with battles to be fought, royal scandals to be gossiped about, human rights to be protected. It can be comic and tragic, and it exhibits both the very best and the very worst of human nature. History is all about seemingly ordinary people doing extraordinary things, and that is why we all want to be remembered by it.
what she says: i’m fine
what she means: it’s 2 am and I can’t stop thinking about the Pied Piper. Initially i thought it was just an old faerie tale but i’ve been reading up on it and it turns out that at some point in the town of Hamelin, a bunch of children really did go missing all at once in fact a stained glass window in the local church in 1300 was made to tell the story AND Hamelin’s written history literally BEGINS in 1384 with the sentence “it is 100 years since our children left.” There are a ton of theories about what the piper could actually represent but historians are pretty much convinced that something did take away children en masse in the 1200s in Hamelin and to this day we still use the phrase “it’s time to pay the piper.” When will we pay him? Who was he???? Like okay I see the theories but what if some flute paying faerie really just led a bunch of kids away in 1284 I cannot get over this.