How did Hector Berlioz cope with the pressures of life as a composer and conductor? With a lively sense of humor. It comes out in a letter he wrote from London to Theodore Ritter on July 3, 1855.

A ghastly rehearsal at Exeter Hall yesterday. Glover’s cantata in a piquant style, but difficult, and I was sweating enough to engorge the gutters in the Strand, and the finale of my Harold in Italy, a ferocious concerto by Henselt played by Mr. Klindworth in a free style, which kept me dancing on a slack rope for an hour, and Cooper, our first violin, who couldn’t take it any more, sang out, “Sempre tempo rubato!”

...Glover gave a soireé at which Meyerbeer was expected. The great man sent his regrets, pleading a terrible colic...then, finally, he shows up just as everyone had finished regretting his absence. Congratulations on the end of his colic. Moseying through the streets of London in the moonlight, I go to Ernst’s house to join my wife....

Wagner has gone, after the esteemed Mr. Hogarth had introduced him to Meyerbeer, asking the two celebrities whether they were acquainted. Wagner’s delighted to be leaving London, a new salvo of ranting against him from the critics after the latest concert in Hanvoer Square. It’s true that he conducts in a free style, like Klindworth playing the piano, but his ideas and conversation are enchanting. We went to drink punch with him after the concert. He reassured me as to his friendship, embraced me ferociously, saying he used to have all kinds of prejudices against me. He wept, he capered around, and no sooner had he left than the Musical World published the passage in his book in which he cuts me to pieces with wry wit.

Two things gave Stravinsky the idea of writing the arrangement. A composer who visited him twice a week "to have his works re-composed" suggested, and since Stravinsky was obliged to begin all of his concerts with the National Anthem anyway, and didn't care for any of the existing arrangements, he set to work. He finished it in Los Angeles on July 4th, 1941.Shortly afterward an orchestra and chorus performed it. Stravinsky sent the manuscript to Eleanor Roosevelt for a war-fund auction. The manuscript was returned with an apology. Stravinsky could only guess at the reason for its refusal. "My major seventh chord in the second strain of the piece, the part patriotic ladies like best, must have embarrassed some high official," he speculated.

In the winter of 1944 Stravinsky performed his arrangement with the Boston Symphony. He stood with his back to the orchestra, conducting the audience, who were supposed to sing, but didn't. At the time, no one seemed to notice that Stravinsky's arrangement was different from the traditional ones, but the next day, he found out that someone had noticed. Just before a second concert a Boston police commissioner visited Stravinsky in his dressing room and informed him of a Massachusetts law against "tampering" with national property. The policeman said that officers had already been told to remove his arrangement from the music stands.

Stravinsky countered that if there were a definitive version of the "Star-Spangled Banner" it was not played very often in Massachusetts. But the argument fell on deaf ears, and so far as anyone knows, the Stravinsky arrangement of the National Anthem hasn't been played since.

"It ought to be," Stravinsky once said. "For it makes the linear and harmonic best of the material, and is certainly superior to any other version I have heard."

Every day from nine until noon Gluck attended the rehearsals of his opera. When he returned from them, always in the company of Madame Gluck, he was awash in sweat from his exertions. Without saying a word to him Madame Gluck would take off his wig, rub his head with a towel, and change his clothes. He was flat on his back and didn't say a word again until mealtime.

At one rehearsal the overture and two-thirds of the opera had gone passably well although the composer did find about a thousand things to repeat twenty times ‘from the top.’ But when the time came to work on the third part, Gluck ran around like a man possessed, from one end of the orchestra to the other. Sometimes the violins were the culprits, sometimes it was the basses or the horns or the violas and so on.

He cut them off, sang the passage with the expression he wanted, violins and the rest of the instruments hurling toward his head.

During one of these incidents Gluck was downstage in the vortex of it all, listening to each instrument when the basses made a mistake. He turned his head so fast that his old round wig couldn't keep up and fell to the floor. In his enthusiasm for the music he wasn't even aware of the loss and noticed only that the lead soprano, with exaggerated gravity, picked up the wig from the floor with two fingers, the other fingers extended, and put the wig back on his head.

In his excitement Gluck had once again "taken it from the top."

When Peter Tchaikovsky described his 1812 Overture as “noisy,” he had no idea how loud–and dangerous it could get.

In 1998, more than a hundred years after Tchaikovsky wrote and disdained his overture, the Seattle Times carried the remarkable story of Paolo Esperanza. Esperanza was the bass trombonist with the Simphonica Mayor de Uruguay. He was performing in an outdoor children’s concert and hoped to add a little excitement to the sixteen cannon shots that punctuate the finale of the 1812. His good intentions were unaccompanied by good physics.

Esperanza decided to add to Tchaikovsky’s pyrotechnics by inserting a large firecracker, equivalent to a quarter-stick of dynamite, into his aluminum straight mute, which he then stuffed into the bell of his new Yamaha in-line double-valve bass trombone.

From his hospital bed, through bandages on his mouth, Esperanza explained to reporters that he had expected the bell of the trombone to funnel the blast away from him while firing the mute in an arc high above the orchestra.

The laws of propulsion physics were not on his side. A superheated shaft of air shot backwards from the blast, burning his lips and face. The explosion split the bell of his trombone, turning it inside out and launching the trombonist backwards from his perch on the orchestra riser. The hot gasses shooting through the trombone forced the slide from his hand, hurling it into the back of the head of the third clarinetist, knocking him out.

Because Esperanza didn’t have time to raise his trombone before the concussion, the mute went low, shooting between the rows of woodwinds and violists, and caught the conductor in the stomach, propelling him into the audience, where he took out the first row of folding chairs in a kind of domino effect.

It was probably the first performance of the 1812 Overture in which the cannons were upstaged.

In June 1907 Franz Lehar had a good reason to be nervous about the London debut of his operetta The Merry Widow. Too late, he had found out that the male lead couldn't sing.

The casting for the performance had been a gamble by London producer George Edwards, who had chosen a popular comic actor named Joe Coyne for the part of Danilo. During the rehearsals Edwards had kept Coyne's inability to sing a secret from Lehar by saying that the actor had a bad cold and needed to preserve his voice for the performances. And so a skeptical Lehar had settled for hearing Coyne speak all of his songs.

Many in the audience were used to bold, handsome leading men. When the curtains parted they beheld a rather plain man ambling on stage. The expression on his round face ranged from blank to worried. The audience didn't know what to make of him. Lehar watched with a mixture of wonder and dread, mentally comparing this Danilo with the dark, dashing, exotic leading man he was accustomed to and concluded that they had nothing in common.

It was time for Coyne's first song--praise for the Parisian restaurant Maxim's. Lehar conducted, Coyne spoke. But he spoke in perfect time to the music and so effectively that the audience was charmed.

As the operetta went on it became clear that there was something magical between the two lead characters, Coyne as Danilo and the alluring Lily Elsie as Sonia. The slow waltz they danced was such a hit that the two had to repeat it over and over. By the time Danilo finally spoke the long awaited "I love you," the crowd was completely won over and the London debut of The Merry Widow was a triumph.

Muzio Clementi was one of the most diverse musicians of his time. He was a celebrated pianist, he manufactured and sold pianos. He was a major composer. He was a publisher. And if one account is true, Clementi was also focused to a fault.

In his memoirs oboist William Parke wrote of a hot summer day in 1796 and an outing in which Clementi and a cellist named Crosdill went swimming while visiting the estate of the Earl of Pembroke. Hearing of Clementi’s absent-mindedness, Crosdill decided to test it. While Clementi continued to swim, Crosdill sneaked off with his shirt and took it into the house and let Lord Pembroke in on the joke. Parke continues:

At the expiration of half an hour Clementi returned, perfectly dressed as he believed, and while he was expatiating largely on the pleasure he received by his immersion, a gentleman and his lady (friends of the peer) arrived on an evening visit. After the usual introductions had taken place, the lady expressed a desire to hear Clementi play one of his own sonatas on the pianoforte, to which he readily assented.

Having taken his seat, and fidgeted a little in his peculiar way, he played the first movement of one of his most difficult pieces, and was about to begin the adagio, when, being oppressed with heat, he unconsciously unbuttoned nearly the whole of his waistcoat, and was proceeding, when the lady, greatly surprised, hastily retired to the furthest part of the room while Lord Pembroke, almost convulsed with laughter, apprised Clementi of his situation, who, staring wildly, darted out of the room, and could not by any intreaties be prevailed on to rejoin the party.

The absent-minded Muzio Clementi was also known for going out in the morning wearing one black and one white stocking.