THE ARTICLE · 13 MIN
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Great composers collect stories. Some of those stories were added long after the music was written: by a biographer, a playwright, an editor or a film. Below are ten things people often believe about the great composers, each set against the letters, catalogues, archives and scholarship we could read.
One of them, about Tchaikovsky’s death, touches on suicide. That is why the helpline block above is on this page.
How to read the labels. Doesn’t hold up means the sources contradict the belief. Partly means there is something to it, but the usual version goes further than the evidence. Still argued means people who have studied it reach different answers.
For beliefs about music itself rather than composers, such as the Mozart effect, Beethoven’s deafness or whether Mozart wrote Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, see Music Myths Checked. For the pieces themselves, see Classical Music Essentials.
The claims, one by one
1. “Salieri poisoned Mozart”
Doesn't hold up Letters of the time show the two men on good terms; the poison story came later. The National Museum in Prague holds a piece they wrote together. It says that after Mozart’s death in 1791, speculation appeared that Salieri had poisoned him. But documents on musical matters and letters of the time show that the relationship between Mozart and Salieri was cordial.
Mozart died in Vienna on 5 December 1791, at the age of 35, after a brief illness, according to the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
That joint piece is a short cantata, Per la ricuperata salute di Offelia. It was set to music in the autumn of 1785 by Salieri, Mozart and a third composer named Cornetti, to celebrate a singer’s return to health. The museum announced in 2016 that a printed copy, long thought lost, had been identified in its collection.
The museum also notes that Mozart’s son was later a pupil of Salieri. At court, the two were colleagues of different rank. After Gluck died in 1787, Emperor Joseph II made Salieri court Kapellmeister, the director of the court’s music. The emperor gave Mozart a newly created, lower-paid post as composer of court chamber music.
The poison became a story through literature. Alexander Pushkin’s short play Mozart and Salieri, written between 1826 and 1830 and published in 1832, turns it into a scene. Salieri brings out the poison with the words “Here is poison, the last gift of my Isora” (our translation).
Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus took the rivalry to the stage, with its first preview at London’s National Theatre in November 1979, and to film in 1984.
2. “Mozart was buried in a pauper’s grave”
Doesn't hold up He was buried in an ordinary grave of the time, the kind used by people of every rank.
The Vienna History Wiki is built by the Vienna City and State Archives and the Vienna City Library. It says Mozart’s body was taken on the evening of 6 December 1791 to the St. Marx cemetery, outside the city. There it was buried in a “general simple grave” (our translation of allgemeines einfaches Grab).
The wiki explains the term. In the language of the time, a general grave was the usual burial place. It was the norm “for all levels of society regardless of rank, but by no means a pauper’s or mass grave” (our translation).
The story does start from something real: the exact grave was later lost. The same source says such graves were used for ten years and then reused. The likely spot was marked with a monument by Hanns Gasser in 1859, and the monument was moved to Vienna’s Central Cemetery in 1891.
3. “Pachelbel only wrote one piece”
Doesn't hold up He wrote a great deal; the Canon in D is the piece people know him for.
In his time, the Chamber Music Society says, he was an extremely well-regarded organist, chamber musician, composer and teacher. It quotes one of his employers, who called him a rare and perfect virtuoso.
The Petrucci Music Library (IMSLP) listed 315 compositions under his name when we checked in October 2026. He also published music in his lifetime. One collection, the keyboard set Hexachordum Apollinis, was printed in Nuremberg in 1699 and dedicated to Ferdinand Tobias Richter and Dietrich Buxtehude.
The Canon’s own history is thin. The Chamber Music Society says it probably dates from around the 1680s. It adds that the earliest surviving manuscript was copied between 1838 and 1842. IMSLP gives its first publication as 1919.
Pachelbel also has a link to the Bach family. He was godfather to two of Ambrosius Bach’s children and taught Johann Christoph Bach. That older brother later took in the orphaned Johann Sebastian.
4. “Vivaldi wrote the same concerto 500 times”
Doesn't hold up He wrote hundreds of different works, and the quip itself has no fixed wording or number.
The number changes from book to book. A search of the Internet Archive’s scanned books turns up versions with 400, 450, 454, 500 and 600 concertos. The wording changes too, and so does the person it is credited to.
The version usually pinned on Igor Stravinsky is not what he said in Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (1959), written with Robert Craft. There he calls Vivaldi “greatly overrated—a dull fellow who could compose the same form so many times over.”
The Vivaldi scholar Michael Talbot traces the “same work” gibe to the 20th-century composer Luigi Dallapiccola. André Hodeir’s book Since Debussy also gives it as Dallapiccola’s words.
The music tells a different story from the joke. The Chamber Music Society’s guide to Vivaldi speaks of his 700-odd compositions. His best-known set, The Four Seasons, gives each concerto its own season, with sonnets printed in the 1725 edition and cued to the music.
Whether Vivaldi’s concertos sound alike is a matter of taste. Whether he wrote one piece hundreds of times is not.
5. “Bach was forgotten until Mendelssohn revived him in 1829”
Partly Mendelssohn’s 1829 performance was a real landmark, but musicians had kept Bach’s music alive before it.
The Chamber Music Society says that in March 1829 the 20-year-old Mendelssohn conducted Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in Berlin. It was a shortened, re-orchestrated version, and it helped spur a broader interest in Baroque music. A University of Wisconsin–Green Bay music-history textbook says it led to a revival of Bach’s music more generally. The Passion was first printed the next year, in 1830, according to IMSLP.
Where the claim goes too far is the word forgotten. Mozart wrote to his father from Vienna on 10 April 1782. Here is part of the letter in Lady Wallace’s 1866 translation: “I go every Sunday at twelve o’clock to Baron von Swieten, where nothing is played but Handel and Bach. I am now making a collection of the Bach fugues (Sebastian’s).”
Others kept Bach’s music in view too:
- Johann Nikolaus Forkel published a book on Bach’s life and work in 1802. The publisher Breitkopf & Härtel printed five of Bach’s motets in 1802–3. Both facts come from Charles Sanford Terry’s introduction to his 1920 translation of Forkel.
- Mendelssohn’s own teacher, Carl Friedrich Zelter, was particularly fond of Bach’s music, the Chamber Music Society says.
So 1829 brought the St Matthew Passion back to the public and helped start a wider revival. Among musicians, Bach’s music had never vanished.
6. “Für Elise was written for Therese Malfatti”
Still argued The original manuscript is lost, so the question cannot be settled. Scholars have argued over it for a century.
Here is what the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn says is known:
- The only surviving witness to the composition is a sketch leaf.
- The scholar Ludwig Nohl published the piece in 1867. He said he had seen the original autograph score, the manuscript in Beethoven’s hand, which has since disappeared without a trace.
- The sketches sit on the same leaf as ideas for a march that Beethoven dated 3 August 1810, so the piece belongs to 1810. Nohl said the autograph was dated 27 April.
- Beethoven came back to the sketches in 1822.
- As far as the Beethoven-Haus knows, there was no woman named Elise among Beethoven’s friends.
The case for Therese Malfatti. Nohl said the autograph came from the estate of Therese von Droßdik, born Malfatti, a pupil Beethoven was attracted to. The musicologist Michael Lorenz writes that Max Unger first suggested in 1925 that the title might really have read Für Therese. Lorenz calls this the prevailing view. The Beethoven-Haus also asks whether Nohl misread the name.
The case for Elisabeth Röckel. In 2009, Lorenz notes, the magazine Der Spiegel reported a new candidate. The musicologist Klaus Martin Kopitz had identified the singer Elisabeth Röckel, later Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s wife, as Beethoven’s Elise. He cited a baptismal entry of 1814 that gives her name as Maria Eva Elise.
Lorenz rejects this. He argues that the hypothesis rests on flimsy evidence and cannot be upheld, partly because no document shows her calling herself Elise.
A third candidate. In 2014 the musicologist Rita Steblin proposed in The Musical Times a different Elise: Elise Barensfeld. Lorenz rejected this too, writing that Steblin offers no proof at all that Elise Barensfeld was Beethoven’s Elise.
Our reading: Malfatti has the link through the manuscript’s reported history. The cases for Röckel and Barensfeld have both been contested in print. But as the Beethoven-Haus puts it, “in the end this question cannot be completely cleared up as the autograph score is obviously not to be found.”
7. “Handel wrote the Water Music to win back King George I”
Doesn't hold up The river party was real; the idea that the music won back the king has no support.
IMSLP dates the first performance to 17 July 1717, on the River Thames. ABC Classic, the Australian broadcaster’s classical service, says the music was played three times that evening.
The reconciliation story comes from John Mainwaring’s memoir of Handel, published in 1760, more than 40 years after the event. Mainwaring writes that Baron Kielmansegg and others worked out a way to restore Handel to the king’s favour. In his telling, the king, delighted by music played “unknown to his Majesty”, forgave him.
But by 1717 the king had already shown his support. ABC Classic notes that he had renewed Handel’s royal pension, originally granted by Queen Anne. It concludes that the reconciliation idea seems to be a myth. The Handel and Haydn Society describes the Water Music as simply part of an extravagant event to keep the king in the public eye.
Kielmansegg does belong in the story, for a different reason. ABC Classic says it was he who arranged for Handel to compose music for the 1717 water party.
8. “Tchaikovsky was forced to kill himself”
Still argued No single document can close this question, though the evidence we read leans towards the official cause, cholera.
Tchaikovsky died on the night of 25 October / 6 November 1893 (the Russian calendar of the time, then the modern one). The official cause was cholera. The doctor called in, Lev Bertenson, immediately diagnosed Asiatic cholera, according to a biographical essay by the Tchaikovsky scholar Alexander Poznansky.
The suicide theory. In its best-known form, former classmates from his law school held a court of honour over a threatened scandal about his relationships with men. They ordered him to take poison.
This version was set out in 1981 in the journal Music & Letters, in an article by Alexandra Orlova. It was not a fringe view. A year earlier, David Brown’s Tchaikovsky entry in the 1980 edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians stated: “That he committed suicide cannot be doubted”. The musicologist Richard Taruskin points this out in On Russian Music (2009).
The case against. Poznansky makes three points:
- The newspapers of 1893 carried not one suggestion that Tchaikovsky’s death was caused by intentional poisoning.
- The court-of-honour version is “a new elaboration based on old hearsay”.
- The idea of a poison that could mimic the symptoms of cholera turned out to be imaginary.
The Chamber Music Society’s biography of the composer goes further. Writing about the story that he killed himself out of self-loathing, it says “there is zero evidence to support the gossip”.
A neutral view. A 2025 article in Hektoen International, a medical humanities journal, says the court-of-honour story has never been confirmed. So, it concludes, the cause of death remains undetermined.
Our reading: the record from the time, including the doctors’ diagnosis and the newspapers of 1893, supports cholera. The forced-suicide story did not appear in print at the time, and Poznansky traces it to old hearsay. So the lean is towards cholera, while the question stays formally open.
9. “The 1812 Overture is about the War of 1812”
Doesn't hold up The title refers to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, not to the war between the United States and Britain known as the War of 1812. The shared year makes the two easy to mix up.
Tchaikovsky Research says the overture was composed between September and November 1880 for the opening concert of an arts and industry exhibition in Moscow. It commemorates Russia’s defeat of Napoleon in 1812. Its official premiere took place in Moscow on 8/20 August 1882.
The music says so too: it quotes the French anthem, La Marseillaise, and the Russian anthem God Save the Tsar. The Russian anthem, by Aleksey Lvov, dates from 1833, more than 20 years after the campaign it is used to celebrate.
10. “‘Classical music’ means music from the Classical period”
Doesn't hold up In everyday use, classical music is the whole tradition, and the Classical period is one short part of it. Using one word for both invites the confusion.
A University of Wisconsin–Green Bay music-history textbook says: “The term ‘classical music’ refers to art music of any period.” It calls the Classical period the shortest of the periods, spanning less than a century, from about 1750.
Bach and Handel are Baroque; Chopin and Tchaikovsky are Romantic; all of them are classical music. The periods are set out in Classical Music Essentials.
What these have in common
Several of these stories were written down long after the people in them had died:
- Mainwaring’s version of the Water Music came 43 years after the river party.
- Pushkin’s poisoner came about four decades after Mozart’s death.
- Nohl’s Elise came 57 years after the sketches.
A later writer fills a gap with a good story, and the story outlives the gap. When a composer anecdote sounds too neat, it can help to ask who first told it, and when.
Sources
Mozart and Salieri
- National Museum (Prague), “A lost composition of Mozart and Salieri has been found” (17 February 2016).
- Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart”.
- Alexander Pushkin, Моцарт и Сальери (Mozart and Salieri), Russian Wikisource; English ours.
- American Film Institute Catalog, “Amadeus (1984)”.
- Wien Geschichte Wiki, “Mozart-Grab” and “Vienna History Wiki” (about the wiki); English ours.
Pachelbel and Vivaldi
- Chamber Music Society, “Pachelbel: Canon in D, P. 37”, “Antonio Vivaldi” and “Vivaldi: The Four Seasons”.
- IMSLP, Pachelbel composer category, Hexachordum Apollinis, Canon and Gigue, P.37.
- Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (1959); Michael Talbot, Antonio Vivaldi: A Guide to Research and Vivaldi; André Hodeir, Since Debussy — passages read through the Internet Archive’s full-text search of scanned books.
Bach
- Chamber Music Society, “Felix Mendelssohn”.
- UW-Green Bay, Survey of Western Music, “Nineteenth-century Romanticism” and “Music of the Classical Period”.
- IMSLP, St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244.
- The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, trans. Lady Wallace, vol. 2 (1866), letter 190, Vienna, 10 April 1782 (archive.org scan).
- J. N. Forkel, Johann Sebastian Bach: His Life, Art, and Work, trans. Charles Sanford Terry (1920), introduction (Project Gutenberg #35041).
Für Elise
- Beethoven-Haus Bonn, “Sketch leaves for ‘Für Elise’ WoO 59, the March WoO 19 and Egmont op. 84”.
- Michael Lorenz, “Die ‘Enttarnte Elise’: Elisabeth Röckels kurze Karriere als Beethovens ‘Elise’”.
- Michael Lorenz, “A Letter to the Editor of The Musical Times” (14 September 2014), on Rita Steblin’s article “Who was Beethoven’s ‘Elise’? A new solution to the mystery” (not read).
- IMSLP, Für Elise, WoO 59.
Handel
- John Mainwaring, Memoirs of the Life of the Late George Frederic Handel (London, 1760) (archive.org scan).
- ABC Classic, “1000 Years of Classical Music: Handel — Music for the Royal Fireworks and Water Music”.
- Handel and Haydn Society, “A Guide to Handel’s Water Music”.
- IMSLP, Water Music, HWV 348-350.
Tchaikovsky
- Tchaikovsky Research, “Tchaikovsky: A Life” (essay by Alexander Poznansky) and “The Year 1812”.
- Alexandra Orlova, “Tchaikovsky: The Last Chapter”, Music & Letters 62 (1981), doi:10.1093/ml/62.2.125 (not read; cited through Poznansky).
- Alexander Poznansky, “Tchaikovsky’s Suicide: Myth and Reality”, 19th-Century Music 11 (1988), doi:10.2307/746320 (not read in full).
- The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980), “Tchaikovsky” (David Brown), and Richard Taruskin, On Russian Music (University of California Press, 2009) — short passages read through the Internet Archive’s full-text search.
- Chamber Music Society, “Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky”.
- George Dunea, “Tchaikovsky: His medical life and his death”, Hektoen International (2025).
- IMSLP, 1812 Overture, Op. 49.
Terms
- Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra, “Orchestra 101: Periods of Classical Music”.
Every source above was read on 6 October 2026. The books on the Vivaldi quotation are in copyright and were read only as short passages through full-text search; Orlova’s and Poznansky’s journal articles were not available to us in full, and the page reports them through the sources named. Translations from German and Russian are ours.
Checked October 2026.
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