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Four Truths and a Lie

Guess which piece of composer trivia is false

1. J.S. Bach once called a rowdy student a “nanny goat bassoonist” and got into more than one physical altercation over music.

2. Tchaikovsky had a severe phobia that his head was going to fall off and would conduct with only one hand, so the other hand could hold his head.

3. After encountering Henri Matisse at a salon, Claude Debussy went through a phase where he wore exclusively blue clothing and would only answer to a nickname very few people knew. Even important correspondence went unanswered during this time, and it was his friend Maurice Ravel who snapped him out of it by bringing by a very attractive brown hat he thought Debussy would like.

4. When Erik Satie died, they found an extraordinary hoard in his apartment, including two grand pianos stacked one on top of the other and hundreds of umbrellas.

5. Beethoven got lost on the way to a performance in Baden, so he started peering into windows, desperate to find the right place. He looked so disheveled that the police were called; apparently he was muttering to himself in the rain, and the community mistook him for a vagrant.