As Wimbledon 2024 gets underway, our thoughts have turned to the links between classical music and tennisAnd it turns out there are quite a few.
Composers playing tennis
Benjamin Britten
A versatile sportsman, this British composer played cricket, football and croquet, but he particularly enjoyed tennis. But he was not an opponent to be taken lightly.Well “He was intensely, ruthlessly competitive in an almost sadistic way,” recalls author Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy. “When he beat you at squash or tennis … you literally felt like he was ‘beating’ you.”
Claude Debussy
It’s not really Roland-Garros material, but Debussy I enjoyed an occasional game of tennis with my fellow composer Maurice Fraying. More than that: his ballet Games The plot even takes inspiration from tennis, albeit in a rather vague way. “In the park at dusk, a tennis ball was lost…” the plot begins. And aside from the tennis court setting and the costumes, that’s pretty much it for the tennis theme. After that, any reference to “love” is more related to affairs of the heart than the actual score of the match.
Tennis was not the only stage for The rivalry between Debussy and RavelBesides.
George Gershwin
Gershwin – composer of exuberant music, tinged with jazz Rhapsody in Blue – and Arnold Schoenberg, SerialismGershwin’s austere family man may seem an unlikely pairing. Yet the tennis court at the former’s Beverly Hills home was the scene of a fierce weekly tennis match between the two composers. According to one observer, Gershwin was “nonchalant” and “chivalrous,” “always playing for an audience”; Schoenberg, by contrast, was “overenthusiastic” and “restless” and had “learned to close his mind to public opinion.” We’re talking strictly about tennis, of course.
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Sergei Prokofiev
“My main occupations are playing tennis and composing opera music,” he wrote Prokofievworking hard on his opera The playerwhich he completed in 1917. Despite his apparent enthusiasm for the game, he was not, by any measure, a Russian Novak Djokovic. And according to opera director Serafima Birman, one of the last matches Prokofiev played was a heated one in which he fought for every point. Shortly thereafter, the composer took up volleyball. In this sport he did not excel, unlike chess, in which he excelled.
Arnold Schoenberg
When he wasn’t busy inventing a system for sorting notes in music, the Austrian composer was surrounded by scribbles and sketches for countless inventions. One of them was a notation system for tennis. As an accomplished tennis player, Schoenberg He wanted to be able to record the movements of his tennis games. So, between games of four-sided chess, another of his inventions, he designed his own tennis shorthand, capable of recording everything from “the player’s runs to the net” to “the foot fault.”
And… King Henry VIII
The musical monarch may not have written Green sleeves But he composed and played tennis, which is enough to qualify for the Wimbledon of composers. He was also an accomplished horseman, an archer, a pole vaulter, a high jumper and a wrestler. So there were plenty of distractions to escape his bloodthirsty appetites. Legend has it that he was playing tennis when his wife Anne Boleyn was executed. The score of the time? Amour-Défectueux.
