Great Composer Quiz – June 4, 2020
This time, it’s a Quiz about eternal suffering in the eternal city. This Great Composer won a prestigious award which paid for four years of study at the Villa Medici in Rome. But once in Rome our Great Composer found the environment artistically unfulfilling, the people loud and boorish, the food terrible, and his own rooms “abominable.” He claimed to dislike the operas of Donizetti and Verdi, and before long he became depressed. Within a year of arriving he wrote back to the institution that gave him this grand opportunity saying, “I am sure the Institute would not approve, for, naturally it regards the path which it ordains as the only right one. But there is no help for it! I am too enamored of my freedom, too fond of my own ideas!” So who was this man who gave up on Rome, this Great Composer?
Time’s up, pencils down.The Great Composer who won the Prix de Rome from the Paris Conservatoire, but gave it up after getting a taste of the Eternal City. The answer is Claude Debussy.