Eccentric classical musicians biography

To paraphrase a famous fridge magnet, you don’t have to be eccentric to be a composer, but it helps. Actually, you don’t at all — it's a cliché, isn’t it, this image we have of the whimsical lives of the men and women who wrote the music we love.

There are plenty of composers who definitely aren’t or weren’t eccentric and they wrote fantastic music. But it’s fun to hear the stories of those characters who did or do choose to live interesting lives.

The most obvious place to start is with Mozart.

Geoff Brown tells the story of the maverick composer Lord Berners, whose flamboyant lifestyle went hand-in-hand with a major talent.

He had a notoriously silly sense of humour — like that of a man-child, to use a modern phrase. His humour often centred around the bottom and the noises that would emanate from it after too many schnitzels.

He was also often eccentric in how he composed — famous stories of leaving an overture to the very last minute, for example.

He enjoyed winding up fellow musicians — his friend Josef Lautgeb was the player for whom he wrote the