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Read on to discover 15 composers who loved their food<\/strong> \u2013 and their often strange and picky tastes…<\/strong><\/p> However ethereal or profound their music, composers need food just like the rest of us. Not surprisingly, though, these geniuses tended to go to extremes when it came to meal times, and musical history is littered with gourmands and bon viveurs<\/em> at one end of the table, and ascetics and picky eaters at the other. <\/p> Admittedly, given that composers are largely remembered for what they wrote on the stave rather than what they cleaned off the plate, our knowledge of their eating habits is far from comprehensive \u2013 quite what poultry Byrd tucked into between motets and galliards has been lost in culinary history. <\/p> However, in a surprising number of instances history has recorded, often in some detail, what they ate, and we\u2019ve plundered the archives to reveal 15 of the more interesting examples here. So, if music be the love of food, as Shakespeare so nearly wrote, play on\u2026<\/p> Of all composers, Rossini<\/a><\/strong> was surely king of the dinner table. His love of food was evidenced not just by his ever-expanding waistline, but also the number of dishes named after him, including Tournedos Rossini <\/em>and Eggs Rossini<\/em>. <\/p> The corpulent composer claimed he only cried three times in his life: once when his first opera was a fiasco; the second time when he heard Paganini<\/a><\/strong> play; and the third time when sailing to a picnic lunch and seeing a turkey stuffed with truffles, his favourite treat, fall overboard.<\/p> Handel<\/a><\/strong> likewise did nothing by halves when it came to the finer things in life. He once received a bottle of very fine port and a brace of pheasant from a royal duke the same night that his friend Anne Dewes was bringing some admirers to supper. <\/p> Mrs Dewes recorded that during the evening he would suddenly claim he had had a moment of inspiration and must leave the party to write it down. \u2018No one wished to interrupt the divine Muse,\u2019 she recalled, \u2018until one member of our party took it upon himself to look through the keyhole where he saw Handel with a bottle of port that the Duke had sent him that morning. <\/p>1. Gioachino Rossini \u2013 corpulent composers who loved their food<\/h2>
2. George Frideric Handel – partial to a bottle of port<\/h2>