Among the achievements of twentieth-century scientific musicology is the reconstruction of a number of Bach’s original concertos, composed for the court of Köthen, where he served Prince Leopold between 1717 and 1723, and later transcribed for different instruments. In the case of Bach’s Concerto in C minor for Oboe, Violin, and Strings, BWV 1060, for example, we possess an autograph copy in which the solo parts are assigned to two harpsichords. Bach prepared this arrangement in 1736 for the needs of Leipzig’s Collegium Musicum, adapting it from a now-lost original concerto that featured two different solo instruments. It was not until 1966 that Wilfried Fischer succeeded in reconstructing what had been lost. Through meticulous philological research, he was able to restore the violin and oboe for which the work had originally been conceived. As a result, since 1970 these recovered concertos have formed an integral part of Volume VII of the Neue Bach Ausgabe (New Bach Edition).

When its composer wrote the Octet in E-flat major for Strings, Op. 20 in 1825, he was an extraordinary fifteen-year-old who already had behind him twelve string symphonies, string and piano quartets, piano pieces, and lieder—in short, a catalogue remarkable both for its quantity and its quality. Mendelssohn was born into a family that was far more than merely affluent, one that had built its prosperity over the course of two generations thanks to the exceptional intellectual gifts of its members. His grandfather was Moses Mendelssohn, the celebrated philosopher who rose to prominence despite his humble origins, his Jewish faith, and an education largely acquired through self-study. His father, Abraham, was a multilingual banker endowed with a refined classical culture, a man whose decision to pursue finance as a profession forced him to confine his considerable musical talent to private enjoyment. It is therefore hardly surprising that Abraham—much like Leopold Mozart, the father of the quintessential child prodigy—did everything possible to nurture his son’s evident genius. Before reaching adolescence, the young Felix spent his time not wrestling and quarrelling with other boys, but translating Greek and Italian literature into German, painting beautiful watercolours, and composing symphonies. The Octet is thus the work of a fifteen-year-old, but one possessing the compositional experience of a seasoned master. The piece is indeed both magnificent and innovative, beginning with its instrumentation: four violins, two violas, and two cellos. Until then, small chamber ensembles had almost always included wind instruments, traditionally associated with lightness and entertainment. Even Spohr’s Double Quartets—which appear at first glance to employ a similar ensemble—were fundamentally different from Mendelssohn’s Octet. In Spohr’s works, two separate quartets perform together, with only one taking the leading role. Mendelssohn conceived something entirely different, and far more ambitious: a chamber ensemble with a symphonic breadth, yet one in which every string player is treated as a soloist. It was something unprecedented, and in many respects has never truly been replicated. Equally remarkable is the work’s formal design. The cyclical use of thematic material runs throughout the entire composition, with the exception of the Andante. This approach avoids the thematic oppositions characteristic of Beethoven’s style—Beethoven was still alive when Mendelssohn wrote the Octet, making this display of artistic independence all the more impressive—and instead recaptures a Haydnesque unity and coherence of a particularly striking kind. The jewel that shines most brightly within this already splendid setting is undoubtedly the third movement, the Scherzo. Here appears for the first time the rapid, ethereal, fairy-tale style that would become one of Mendelssohn’s most recognizable hallmarks. It is therefore no surprise that the Scherzo was later orchestrated and, replacing the original Minuet in 6/4 time, incorporated into the London premiere of the Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 11 in 1828. The Octet concludes with a Presto, a breathtaking contrapuntal tour de force: a frenetic whirl of polyphonic interplay in which intricate textures reign supreme, yet never at the expense of crystalline clarity.

The Sextet by Guillaume Connesson was composed for his friends Éric Le Sage and Paul Meyer for a New Year’s concert given on 4 January 1998 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris.  This Sextet was written with celebration and entertainment in mind. The first movement, Dynamique, is a set of variations, a form that allows for the multiplication of rhythmic processes derived from repetitive American music. The central Nocturne is a gentle and poignant confession sung by the clarinet against a harmonic backdrop entrusted to the strings and piano. Finally, Festif creates a sense of joy and excitement (with an allusion to Schubert’s Trout Quintet). The score concludes with a small cadential joke.”

Everyone knows it, because it appears constantly on the soundtracks of films and television series. It played an important role in Twilight and an even more significant one in Everything Everywhere All at Once. We are speaking, of course, of one of the most famous piano pieces ever written: Debussy’s Clair de lune. The third movement of the Suite bergamasque, it was composed in 1890 together with the Suite’s three other movements for the publishing house Choudens Frères, which had previously issued several rather commercial pièces de salon by a Debussy not yet thirty years old and very much in need of earning a living. In 1891 the publisher also purchased the rights to the Suite, yet never published it. No one has ever fully explained the reasons for this decision. Evidently, what today’s filmmakers regard as a piece capable of working genuine miracles—instantly softening souls hardened by office life or opening stubborn shells of beauty-resistant viewers stranded before a screen—was at the time considered insufficiently sentimental and sighing for the bourgeois young ladies who were expected to demonstrate their accomplishments as hostesses not only by serving cordials but also by providing easy, home-made musical entertainment. Nor did it help, back in that distant year of 1891, that Clair de lune bore the title Promenade Sentimentale. The revision of 1905 and its publication by another publisher, Fromont, produced the version we know today, complete with its new title and its allusions to the poetry of Verlaine, as well as paving the way for the immense popularity the piece would eventually enjoy. There is another intriguing detail. Clair de lune is written in D-flat major. In the equal temperament of the piano, D-flat corresponds enharmonically to C-sharp. It therefore shares the same tonal center as Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in C-sharp minor, Op. 27 No. 2, the work universally known—though under a title not given by the composer—as the Moonlight Sonata. On the keyboard, the moon is the first black key of the octave; major and minor are its two faces. And all of us, in one way or another, feel at home in both.

Driven by the whirlwind energy of two unleashed pianos—just over a minute long, gone in the blink of an eye—Shostakovich’s Tarantella in G major for Two Pianos is a lively and irreverent homage to Rossini. Composed in 1954 and first performed in Moscow in its original two-piano version, it was later incorporated by the composer into the score of the 1955 Russian film The Gadfly. The title by which the film is known today is not an arbitrary translation from Russian; it reflects the original title of the novel on which it was based, a book written not in Cyrillic but in Latin script. Published in England in 1897, it was the work of a woman whose life was remarkable to say the least: Ethel Lilian Voynich. Ethel, who married the antiquarian bookseller Wilfrid Voynich—the discoverer of the manuscript that bears his name—was the daughter of George Boole, the Irish mathematician whose Boolean logic lies at the foundation of modern computing and, ultimately, bears some responsibility for the countless hours humanity has spent staring at mobile phones. Her mother was Mary Everest, mathematician, philosopher, and writer, whose uncle, also named George, served as head of the Indian Survey Department and achieved immortality on every map in the world thanks to a subordinate who evidently held him in the highest esteem and wished everyone else to know it: Mount Everest. A polyglot and an inveterate traveller, Ethel toured Europe as soon as she was old enough, lived in Russia, and became a fierce opponent of the Tsarist regime as well as a point of reference for expatriate revolutionaries. Her activities attracted the attention of Sidney Reilly, the brilliant Ukrainian adventurer who, during the first quarter of the twentieth century, became one of the most daring spies in the service—though not initially exclusive service—of the British Empire. To put matters in perspective, Reilly—polyglot, incorrigible womanizer, bon vivant, and later mythologized as the “Ace of Spies”—was among the figures who inspired Ian Fleming’s creation of James Bond. He was also, quite possibly, the ideal model for the protagonist of The Gadfly, Voynich’s novel, which recounts the adventures of Arthur Burton, a charismatic Englishman who moves to Italy during the Risorgimento and fights both Austrian domination and religious obscurantism. He does not wage war on the battlefield but rather with a sharp pen on the pages of newspapers, writing under the pseudonym The Gadfly, until he is eventually unmasked, captured, and executed. Such a romantic hero—a flamboyant man of letters, historically implausible and entirely out of step with his times—deservedly sank into obscurity in his native Britain, as well as in Italy, his spiritual second homeland. In China and the Soviet Union, however, The Gadfly achieved extraordinary popularity, selling millions of copies. Evidently, the story of an English imperial subject sacrificing his life in pursuit of the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire proved highly appealing in vast nations afflicted by hardship and famine, especially given the exotic flavour such a tale must have possessed there. News of this unexpected success reached a bewildered Ethel Voynich in the mid-1950s, leaving her astonished, though earning her only a few crumbs in royalties. And here we may return to Shostakovich’s Tarantella. It provided precisely the touch of local colour required for the film adaptation of the novel: a quick brushstroke that, through its irresistible rhythm, made Italy instantly recognisable. Today, whenever this Tarantella is performed, one likes to imagine Rossini and Shostakovich smiling from their little cloud, exchanging a knowing glance of mutual understanding.

Like Mozart, Camille Saint-Saëns was a child prodigy. He was composing at the age of five, and at eleven he gave his first public piano recital at the Salle Pleyel. He became the most celebrated French pianist and organist of his era, performing throughout the world—in Europe, the United States, South America, Asia, and Africa. Only the complete lack of suitable musical institutions prevented him from receiving invitations to perform in Australia and Antarctica, realms then inhabited chiefly by Her Majesty’s convicts and by penguins. In addition to being an organist, pianist, composer, and teacher, he possessed an insatiably curious intellect. He ventured into poetry and music criticism, not to mention the scientific interests expected of a nineteenth-century intellectual nourished on a diet of positivism. He studied acoustics and astronomy, even delivering a learned lecture before the Société Astronomique de France on the phenomenon of mirages. French music owes an immense debt to Saint-Saëns: the vital grafting of German Classicism and Romanticism onto the French tradition, the rediscovery of seventeenth and early eighteenth-century French music, and the creation of the nation’s first great body of chamber music. In short, he became the acknowledged founder of a major school and a major tradition. Having proven himself such an all-knowing patriarch, he lived to nearly ninety and even enjoyed the good fortune of dying in the manner dreamed of by heterosexual men since youth. Yet his exceptional longevity gradually transformed him into a survivor and, quite literally, a monument to himself. Saint-Saëns was among the very few artists who, amid the abundance of honours bestowed upon him—honorary doctorates, Legions of Honour, and countless distinctions—had the unusual experience of seeing a statue erected in his honour while he was still alive.

True, he stormed out of the premiere of The Rite of Spring after only a few measures, asking what on earth the instrument was that had begun the piece, and being told that it was a bassoon. He had his reasons: bassoons had never before ventured alone into such a register, and he saw no reason why they should, especially when sent there by Igor Stravinsky. But he was merely a rigorous gentleman, ill-tempered in the way that all strong personalities tend to be, cultivating both his sympathies and antipathies with equal determination and taking great care never to confuse the two. The fact remains that Saint-Saëns’s music—indeed, all of it—is exceptionally well crafted, highly respectful of its audience, and therefore consistently pleasurable to hear. Some critics, glancing at the dates of works such as Violons dans le soir (1908) or the Sonata for Clarinet and Piano (1921), may wrinkle their noses and think that such music was rather too easy a solution for those years. They may not be entirely wrong. Yet Saint-Saëns consciously chose to remain faithful to himself and to his public image as a great conservative until the end of his life. He did so so deliberately that even his sense of humour became a private vice. When he composed his most famous work, The Carnival of the Animals, in 1886—the piece everyone knows even if few can name it—he kept it hidden. In many respects it is an extraordinary work, heir to the tradition of wit that runs through French culture from Voltaire onward, though it requires no intellectual preparation whatsoever to enjoy. It is music created simply to amuse, and it succeeds in the fullest sense of the word, as do few works by few composers. One thinks of Gioachino Rossini, whose Barber of Seville appears as a “fossil” in the movement of that name, alongside nursery tunes; or of Jacques Offenbach, whose turtles dance a slowed-down version of the famous Can-Can. Yet beneath the laughter, Saint-Saëns was lampooning the entire musical society of his day: pianists, braying critics (the “Characters with Long Ears”), and even the still-living Hector Berlioz, portrayed as a gigantic elephant dancing the Dance of the Sylphs while occupying all the available space on stage. For this reason, he performed the work only for himself and never published it. With exquisite malice, he allowed only one movement to circulate during his lifetime: The Swan, a magnificent masterpiece of scientifically calculated sentimentality, so perfectly successful that ballet dancers in tutus immediately transformed it into The Dying Swan. It became a warhorse of bad taste, an invasive weed of the stage, the bane and delight of dance recitals across the globe. The remainder of the work remained hidden for thirty-five years, a secret too embarrassing to be made public. One wonders what Saint-Saëns would say today if he knew that we remember him above all for what he regarded as mere trifles—and that we perform them in evening dress, with the utmost seriousness.