Anybody got any strange facts about any composer's , there's so many!
I'll just start of

Erik Satie:

He carried a hammer in his pocket for protection.

He wore grey velvet suits and became known as "the velvet gentleman."

He detested the sun, and tried to go outside only during bleak days.

He washed only with pumice stone, never soap.

He "never spoke while eating, for fear of strangling himself,"

and only ate white foods. His list? Eggs, sugar, shredded bones, animal fat, salt, coconuts, rice, turnips, pastry, cheese (white varieties), cotton salad, and certain kinds of fish.

In his one-room apartment Satie had two pianos. One placed on top of the other, their pedals interconnected.

His room must have been pretty crowded, for it also contained his collection of over 100 umbrellas !

Satie once bought 12 grey velvet suits at the same time. He used one suit at a time until it was worn out, then he put on a new one.
When he died, there were 6 suits left in his room, along with his 100 umbrellas.

When Satie was criticised for writing music without form, he immediately composed "Trois Morceaux en forme de poire" (Three
Pear-shaped Pieces. They are piano duets).

That's hillarious!

Hans Rott tried to shoot random passangers in a train, because he thought Brahms had filled it with explosives, because he, t.i. Brahms, didn't like his, t.i. Rott's symphony, a piece that foreshadows Mahler up to his 5th...He was sent to an asylum where he died, very young indeed, poor sod.

The punchline is that there are actually seven pieces.

He also had an elaborate hot-water bed heating which he built himself out of bottles and old copper pipes.

Richard Strauss was sad after the war and found himself trying to kill time in Pontresina. He expressed his depressed feelings to his son who told him to try to write some songs and stop complaining. After some years Richard,père, presented Franz, fils, with the famous 4 last songs with the following remark: Hier hast du deine Scheißlieder (there you have your [censored]-songs), this being somewhat remote from the feeling most of the listeners have on hearing those wonderful swansongs.

strange fact: why did Wagner leave it up to Hermann Levi to conduct the premiere of Parsifal, a Jewish conductor, he being a wellknown and rabiate antisemite?

Brahms wasn't real friends with Liszt and Wagner, yet he wrote out Das Rheingold in piano-reduction, and when Wagner needed a copy, he asked Brahms, who kindly obliged, asking in return a copy of the score of the Meistersinger, which he got!

Schumann on Wagner: he is so talkative.
Wagner on Schumann: he says so little.

Was it Horowitz who stole vegetables from his neighbour's garden? I remember this has been mentioned here, but I am not sure it was Horowitz.

Back to composers... Beethoven wanted exactly 60 beans in his coffee.

someone playing the Fantaisie in b, op.28, by Scriabin, the composer being in the next room, faintly hearing his music being played, asking: what's that piece?

Scarlatti not writing anymore of his famous hand-crossings because of his obesety..

the rebuke Poulenc got on his, admittedly, frivolous setting of the Gloria by some rather severe, religious critics, was met with his remark that he once saw some Benedictine monks playing soccer.

Haydn recieving the anouncement of his memorial-concert in Paris, the Mozart Reqiuem being performed, and writing to the organizers that he was still alive and would like to recieve an invitation for the next occasion...

AHAHA! Was that an insult?

Anyone remember the story about Prokofiev borrowing textbooks from all of his classmates and laying them all open to different pages on his desk during an exam? The teacher asked him what he was thinking, and he replied with something like: "This is so that if I don't know an answer, I can easily look it up." The teacher kicked him out.

Gosh, I really wish I hadn't lost my copy of his teenage diaries -- they're a riot.

Then there's the story about Leonard Bernstein's first major performance. At the time, he was the assistant conductor (read: coffee boy) for the NY Philharmonic, which meant he didn't really get to conduct anything. One Saturday night, he went out to a party and got woefully drunk, as a young soprano sang his newly-composed song-cycle titled "I Hate Music". He got back early in the morning, slept for an hour or two, and was woken by the phone's ringing. The caller frantically informed "Lenny" that the guest conductor for the NY Phil performance that day had fallen ill and could not conduct. So Lenny got dressed, met with the ill conductor to go over details, and then conducted a program including Don Qixote at Carnegie Hall without ever having rehearsed it. The critics went wild, and he was immediately sent off on a national tour. That was the beginning of his major stardom.

Oh, and then there's the story about Bartok's shopping list.

Bartok's music is so often structured around the fibanacci sequence / golden ratio, and yet for so many years scholars could not find a single document among his papers indicating that he had calculated any of this himself. How could it be that he structured so much of his music around the golden ratio without ever calculating it?

Then suddenly, a scholar discovered something among Bartok's papers. It was a list of numbers, to which Bartok had applied various calculations. It was like the Rosetta Stone of Bartok research. Scholars were so excited. And then someone figured out what that document REALLY was: a shopping list. Bartok was calculating the total cost of his shopping, including taxes.

Oops.

Levi was the chief conductor at the Munich Opera, and Wagner was very impressed with his musicianship. Wagner seriously suggested that Levi undergo Christian conversion, but Levi resolutely refused, and Wagner had to back down so as not to jeopardize the premiere.

Wagner was amoral but he was not stupid.

Oh -- you mean he was CRAZY!

A false fact.

But at least it's a true false fact.
So to speak.

Salad made from cotton? Or is this an expression for something else?
Hard to imagine only eating white food.
Is this for real I wonder, along with the other crazy facts given
Or a major exaggeration of some eccentricities he had?

He is confusing this with PDQ Bach!

That could also be true of Rossini, who after hearing a singer embellish an aria of his beyond recognition: 'So, who wrote that?'

Remember that?
As you probably know.... he said PDQ got so fat he couldn't even reach the keyboard, but started playing side-saddle.....(I'll leave out the rest, it's not as good).

And when Rott was in the 'asylum', there were reportedly some scatological issues with the score of his Symphony in E.

I attended a master class a few months ago in which the teacher and performer discussed this fact/myth... then the teacher proceeded to tell the performer - who is not exactly svelte - that she should play more of Scarlatti's later works. He didn't mean it like that, but it was totally awkward and hilarious.

That's but one explanation of why PDQ wrote Discontinuo parts in some of his ensemble works.

Exactly!

No, that isn't right. Brahms had a copy of Tannhäuser which he received from Tausig. Wagner asked for it to be returned, and at that point, Wagner passed on to Brahms the score of Das Rheingold.

This whole scenario took place before Meistersinger was even written.

so it is a myth? I had read it in the preface to one of the volumes of Scarlatti's keyboard sonatas.

I'm pretty sure it's a myth, but it gets told so much that a lot of people assume it's true, and anyway it's a real actual rumor. So at least it's a true false fact.

We were talking about it in another thread recently.....One thing that seems to argue strongly against this being true is that there wasn't a lot of chronological spread between when all the sonatas were written.

It's easy to assume that they covered a long period of time, because there are so many of them. But actually (we think) they were all written in the latter part of his life -- like, maybe starting in his early 50's. It's rare to get a lot fatter after that.