If Music be the food of Love...

Question Results

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Question:

Name this famous potion-drinking character: dreaming of marriage to the prince, this water nymph implores the witch Ježibaba to give her a potion that will make her human. It ends in tears. 

Response:

	Isolde from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde
	Rusalka from Dvořák's Rusalka
	Adina from Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore
	Feedback: Answer: Rusalka the water nymph falls in love with a prince and drinks a potion which gives her legs but takes away her voice. Things don't end happily…

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Question:

How many children did JS Bach father between the years of 1708 and 1742?

Response:

	20
	22
	Feedback: Answer: 20. But only ten of them survived infancy
	24

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Question:

Never one to stifle his own romantic affairs, which French composer said: ‘I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.’

Response:

	Gabriel Fauré
	Maurice Ravel
	Claude Debussy
	Feedback: Correct! It was Debussy. The French composer left his wife in 1904 for the singer Emma Bardac - who some years earlier had had an affair with Gabriel Fauré.

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Question:

What did Richard Wagner and Cosima von Bülow call their first daughter conceived out of wedlock?

Response:

	Isolde
	Feedback: Correct! Isolde was born in 1865. Another daughter, Eva was born in 1867 and the couple's first son, Siegfried, in 1869.
	Brünnhilde
	Eva

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Question:

Who wrote the opera Sir John in Love?

Response:

	Ralph Vaughan Williams
	Arnold Bax
	Gustav Holst
	Feedback: Answer: The opera by Vaughan Williams is based on Shakespeare's play The Merry Wives of Windsor - and the John of the title is the famous bawd, Sir John Falstaff

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Question:

Which composer in the 1930s initially intended to keep his Romeo and Juliet alive, but later revised his plans and stuck to Shakespeare’s original plot?

Response:

	Frederick Delius
	Feedback: Answer: Prokofiev thought better of changing the plot in the end…
	Maurice Ravel
	Sergey Prokofiev

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Question:

When the Duke of Andria and Donna Maria D’Avalos were indulging in a little extra-marital pleasure in 1586, they had the misfortune of being caught in flagrante by her soon-to-be-murderous composer husband. And he was…?

Response:

	Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina
	Feedback: Answer: Gesualdo. The jealous composer then displayed the bodies outside his palace. Being a nobleman he was immune to prosecution - but he still fled to escape from relatives seeking revenge
	Tomás Luis de Victoria
	Carlo Gesulado

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Question:

A hirsute beast from a classic 1933 film becomes infatuated with the subject of a famous Vermeer Dutch painting. Name the 1994 opera in which this unlikely scenario occurs.

Response:

	The Second Mrs Kong
	The Pearl Earring Fisher
	Beast and the Beauty
	Feedback: Answer: Harrison Birtwistle's The Second Mrs Kong mixes modern stories, ancient mythology with a good dose of history too.

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Question:

Which British composer died of pneumonia when his wife locked him out of the house after a late night out?

Response:

	Hubert Parry
	Henry Purcell
	Feedback: Correct! Poor Purcell probably died of pneumonia after returning from the theatre one night and finding he was locked out.
	Orlando Gibbons