You hum a tune, and a friend asks where you know it from. Sometimes the answer is a film, an advert or a video game. Sometimes the tune turns out to belong to a different composer from the one everyone says. This page gathers sixteen famous pieces and tells you, in a few plain sentences, what is actually known about each one.
Where scholars disagree, or the record is thin, we say so rather than pick the most exciting version. Each entry ends with a link to a longer article.
Pieces credited to the wrong composer (or with a muddled story)
Mariage d’Amour: Paul de Senneville, Not Chopin
Mariage d’Amour is a piano piece by the French composer and producer Paul de Senneville, written in 1978 and first recorded by the pianist Richard Clayderman. The Chopin label comes from the internet, not from music history: a recording of the piece by the pianist George Davidson was uploaded online under the wrong title, “Spring Waltz,” and credited to Chopin, and copies with that mislabel are still circulating. If a streaming page tells you this is Chopin, it is mistaken.
Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor: Mostly Giazotto’s Work
The Adagio was published in 1958 by the Italian musicologist Remo Giazotto, who said he had built it from a fragment of an Albinoni trio sonata (a bass line and a few bars of melody) that he received from the Saxon State Library in Dresden. He never produced the fragment, and no record of it has been found in that library, so historians still debate whether it existed. What is not disputed is that everything above the bass line is Giazotto’s writing. How much of the bass line, if any, goes back to Albinoni is uncertain.
Air on the G String: Bach’s Music, Wilhelmj’s Arrangement
The tune is by Bach: it is the second movement of his Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068, and in that movement only the strings and continuo play. The famous title belongs to a later arrangement by the violinist August Wilhelmj, made in the 1870s, which moved the music down to C major so a solo violin could play the whole melody on its lowest string. Bach did not write it for one string; that idea came with the arrangement. We do not have a firm date for Bach’s original beyond the first half of the 18th century.
Für Elise: A Beethoven Piece With an Unknown Dedicatee
This little Bagatelle in A minor (WoO 59) was not published in Beethoven’s lifetime. It first appeared in print in 1867, in a book by the scholar Ludwig Nohl, who said the lost autograph was dated April 27, 1810. Nobody knows for certain who “Elise” was. Scholars have suggested Therese Malfatti (on the theory that Nohl misread “Therese”), the singer Elisabeth Röckel, and the young Elise Barensfeld, and none of these has been proven.
Boccherini’s Minuet: Famous Tune, Forgotten Quintet
This is not a case of the wrong composer. The tune really is Luigi Boccherini’s, and the muddle is that most people know the minuet without knowing where it comes from. It is the third movement of his String Quintet in E major, Op. 11 No. 5 (G 275), written in 1771 and published in 1775 for two violins, viola and two cellos. The minuet is often played on its own, and film makers have used it as a quick sign of elegant society, as in The Ladykillers (1955).
Brahms’s Hungarian Dances: Arrangements, Not Inventions
Brahms published his 21 Hungarian Dances (WoO 1) for piano four hands, the first ten in 1869 and the rest in 1880, with no opus number. He presented himself as the arranger, and most of the tunes come from existing Hungarian and Romani-style music; only Nos. 11, 14 and 16 are generally counted as his own. Dance No. 5 is based on a csárdás by the Hungarian composer Béla Kéler, which Brahms mistakenly believed was a traditional folk song. His former touring partner, the violinist Ede Reményi, is reported to have accused him of plagiarism, but the details of that quarrel are thinly documented, so treat the dramatic versions with caution.
Heard it in a film, an ad or a game
Gabriel’s Oboe: Ennio Morricone, The Mission (1986)
Ennio Morricone wrote this theme for Roland Joffé’s film The Mission (1986). In the story, the Jesuit priest Father Gabriel plays his oboe by a waterfall to win the trust of the Guaraní people. Morricone’s score was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score and won the Golden Globe for Best Original Score.
Merry-Go-Round of Life: Joe Hisaishi, Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)
Joe Hisaishi composed the score for Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), recorded with the New Japan Philharmonic. “Merry-Go-Round of Life” is the film’s main theme: a waltz that comes back again and again through the score in different colours and tempos.
Cavatina: Stanley Myers, The Deer Hunter (1978)
Stanley Myers first wrote this melody for the film The Walking Stick (1970). He expanded it into a full guitar piece, which John Williams recorded for his 1971 album Changes. The director Michael Cimino heard that record and used it in The Deer Hunter (1978), which made it famous. A vocal version with lyrics by Cleo Laine is called “He Was Beautiful.”
Somewhere in Time: John Barry, Plus a Rachmaninoff Surprise
John Barry composed the score for the 1980 film Somewhere in Time, starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. Alongside Barry’s music, the film uses the 18th variation from Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini several times. So the “classical” tune many viewers remember may be Rachmaninoff’s, not Barry’s. For the Rachmaninoff side, see our guide to Variation 18.
Married Life: Michael Giacchino, Up (2009)
Michael Giacchino wrote the score for Pixar’s Up (2009), and “Married Life” is its best-known cue. The score won the Academy Award for Best Original Score, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA and a Grammy, and “Married Life” itself won the Grammy for Best Instrumental Composition. It was the first Pixar film to win the Oscar for its score.
Por Una Cabeza: Carlos Gardel, Three Famous Films
Carlos Gardel composed this tango, with lyrics by Alfredo Le Pera, for the 1935 film Tango Bar. The title is a racing phrase meaning “by a head,” and the words are about a gambler who compares horses and women. It is featured in the tango scene of Scent of a Woman (1992), in an early nightclub scene of Schindler’s List (1993) and in True Lies (1994).
Dance of the Knights: Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet
This is the heavy, marching music from Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet, Op. 64, composed in 1935. It appears in the second orchestral suite as “Montagues and Capulets.” Many British viewers know it as the opening theme of The Apprentice on the BBC, which has used it since the show began in 2005.
Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy: Tchaikovsky and the Celesta
The Nutcracker, Op. 71, was first staged at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg in December 1892. The Sugar Plum Fairy’s dance is the number most often linked with its bell-like keyboard instrument, the celesta. Tchaikovsky had already used the celesta in a smaller work, The Voyevoda (1891), so the Nutcracker was not its first outing, but it is where many listeners first heard it.
1812 Overture: Tchaikovsky and the Fourth of July
Tchaikovsky wrote the Overture (Op. 49) in 1880 to mark Russia’s defense against Napoleon’s invasion of 1812, and it was first played in Moscow in August 1882. Its cannon fire made it a favorite for fireworks concerts in the United States, and the Boston Pops’ Fourth of July concerts in the 1970s helped fix that habit. Sources disagree on whether the first cannon performance there was in 1974 or 1976, so we say only that it began in the 1970s.
Morning Mood: Grieg’s Sunrise, Written for a Desert Scene
Edvard Grieg wrote this music in 1875 as part of his incidental music (Op. 23) for Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt, and it opens the Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, Op. 46. In the play the sunrise it depicts is in the Moroccan desert, even though many listeners picture Norwegian mountains. Its simple melody passing between flute and oboe has made it a favourite shorthand for “morning” in cartoons, films and adverts.
Where to go next
New to all of this? Our Start Here guide picks ten approachable pieces for your first week of classical music. For more screen music, see Classical Music Used in Movies: Famous Scenes Explained, or learn the terms behind these pieces with Baroque vs Classical Music and How to Listen to a Symphony.
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