Composers with Cool Names

When I first started buying Classical albums I didn't possess a great deal of information concerning music. At one point I got my sweaty little hands on a compilation called One Hundred and Fifty Golden Classics which assembled (obviously) 150 short excerpts from the most popular pieces of music from the Classical, Romantic and Baroque eras. At last I could match names, titles and music.

Before this acquisition, I was a sucker for cool names. Charles-Camille Saint-Saens, who composed a familiar item entitled Danse Macabre, pulled off a double-whammy with a cool-sounding name and a cool-sounding piece of music. Ludwig Von Beethoven--you know this guy was cool. Rachmaninoff: you imagined a monocle-wearing Count. Another composer who packed a one-two punch was Janacek, who composed an opera entitled From the House of the Dead. Wow.

Not every composer entered posterity with sonorous tags. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky composed many great symphonies, ballets and other pieces of music. But in my opinion, he did not have a cool name. His name is hard to pronounce, and even harder to read. I'm still not sure of the correct pronunciation. Don't get me wrong--I love his music; just not a fan of the name. Nor did Vivaldi have a cool name. For that matter, his music was kinda bland.

I could go on and on about the relative coolness of lack thereof of various composer's names. Why? you ask. I'll you you, I respond. Because when I was a kid, this was one of the few determining factors I had when selecting albums from the bargain rack at the bookstore. The coolest names and most attractive album covers were more likely to catch my teenage eye.

Most of the Italian composers had great names: Leoncavallo. Monteverdi. Puccini. Verde. But my all-time favorite composer’s name, quite apart from the truly terrific music he composed has to be:

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

Now that is a cool name.