What did King George do when he first heard the in Handel's ?

Even an insect may catch the imagination of a composer: some of these works are on a much larger scale than others, but they are all genuine. One of them is attributed to the wrong composer: which one?

Another 'musical moment' from nature would be the call of the cuckoo. Which of these composers is NOT known to have incorporated the distinctive call of this iconic (if instinctively immoral!) bird into a piece of his music?

Another fairly universal natural observation comes in one of Chopin's Op.28 no.15 in D♭ major (1839), nicknamed by his partner Armantine Dupin (a.k.a. the writer George Sand) after something they had experienced during a holiday in Majorca. What is the subtitle of the piece?

The alternative title to Chopin's Waltz in D♭, op.64 no.1 is most often mispronounced in English to suggest that it can be played in 60 seconds (which it can't, decently, except at a totally garbled and un-waltzable ) ~ 'the Minute Waltz', when its intended title was 'minUte' (as in 'tiny / miniature'). A cogent but pacy rendering, including a brief repeat, usually takes about two minutes rather than one. Apparently the idea for the of this piece came to Chopin after happening to see ... what?

When one is organising as major a music festival as the BBC Proms in London over several weeks, things are bound to go awry occasionally. One evening in the late 1970s the first work on the programme was Mendelssohn's suite of incidental music to Shakespeare's (including the famous ). The overture begins with four slow chords, and the concert could not start because one of the relevant instrumentalists had been caught in a freak summer thunderstorm on her way to the Albert Hall. The entire concert therefore went up several minutes late for want of a few seconds' introductory ensemble playing, while she reached the venue and made herself presentable for the performance. Which instrument was she playing?

No collection of 'musical moments' could aspire to be complete without some reference to the legendary British conductor Sir Thomas Beecham (1879-1961) whose career spanned from the earliest era of recorded music, through two World Wars to the coming of stereo 'LPs'. Alleged stories about him and his sharp wit are very numerous and probably, in many cases, unreliable or at best misattributed (though there is a whole book of them out there, if you are of that cast of mind). He is reliably believed to have observed that 'A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it'; and when, on the occasion of his 70th birthday, congratulatory telegrams were read out from a number of famous living composers ( Stravinsky), he is reported to have asked: 'Nothing from ... [ ]?'

One might fairly claim that Haydn's music is full of surprises, but some are more surprising than others. His Symphony (his 94th ... but then, he was the enthusiastic 'father' of the Symphony!) obviously contains something unexpected by the audience; but what is it?

It is only natural that even the best-prepared performer may have an occasional memory-lapse, particularly when delivering a piece in a recurring form (such as a rondo, or a ballad or 'catalogue song'). One notorious trap comes in the simple ballad (two simple verses of words by WB Yeats; settings by various composers, but probably most familiarly the Benjamin Britten version). A moment's lapse of concentration in one echoing phrase will result in what awkward 'moment'? [?]

The Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman no longer performs in the USA, partly since an incident in 2006 when he arrived at JFK airport with his custom-engineered Steinway instrument to discover, after clearing Customs himself, that he could not collect the piano as it had been destroyed on security grounds by the TSA. What reason was established for the instrument's destruction?