Cocktail Party Fact: After its initial private performance, Franz Schubert’s Fifth Symphony was lost. More than half-a-century passed before Arthur Sullivan (he of Gilbert and Sullivan fame), rediscovered the manuscript and arranged for a public performance in London.
Commitment Factor: About 28 minutes.
Vital Statistics: Classical Period. A symphony in four movements.
What to Listen For: Schubert [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Composers have frequently composed some of their best work solely because of their friendship with certain musicians. Schubert composed these pieces for three friends who had started a piano trio: Ignatz Schuppanzigh, Joseph Linke, and Carl von Bocklet.
Commitment Factor: About 30-40 minutes per trio.
Vital Statistics: Early Romantic Period (1827). Two trios [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: More than 40 composers have set Goethe’s famous Erlkonig to music, but no one has ever surpassed this version by the 18-year-old Franz Schubert.
Commitment Factor: About 4 minutes.
Vital Statistics: Early Romantic Period. The official start of the Romantic Period, you might almost say. A song for voice and piano. Nothing quite like [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: This might be the most psychoanalyzed composition in all of music. Just for starters, Franz Schubert composed parts of it in hospital after learning he had syphillis (whether contracted from a male or female partner no one knows). The doomed hero of the Wilhelm Muller poems is often seen as a surrogate [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: One of the most famous pieces of music in the repertoire, the music makes a brief appearance in Stanley Kubrick’s film “A Clockwork Orange,” along with music by Beethoven and Rossini.
Commitment Factor: About 40 minutes
Vital Statistics: Romantic Period (1889). A four-movement “symphonic suite,” meaning that the piece lacks the dramatic structure and [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: When Maurice Ravel played the piano score of La valse for Diaghilev, the great impresario’s judgment failed him for once. He rejected the music, and Ravel had to wait a decade to see it performed as a ballet.
Commitment Factor: About 15 minutes.
Vital Statistics: Late Romantic/Early Modern Period. A symphonic poem for [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: The finale of this ballet score, the barely-five-minute-long “Danse generale,” took Maurice Ravel one year to compose. His relations with Serge Diaghilev, who commissioned the music, were strained to the breaking point when Diaghilev had to postpone the premiere of the ballet twice, only to find that Ravel had written the long-awaited [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Purcell wrote his theater music while he was the organist of Westminster Abbey. In the 17th century, a composer could play the organ in a great national cathedral, compose religious anthems and coronation music, as well as write songs and dances for plays that bore titles such as The Innocent Adulterer and [...]

Commitment Factor: About 30 minutes.
Vital Statistics: Modern Period. One of Prokofiev’s most popular and listenable works.
What to Listen For: The first movement has a sonata-allegro feel to it, but without elaborate thematic development. Listen for the amazing toccata-like piano passage that introduces the recapitulation: it will reappear at the very end of the movement [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Carl Nielsen wrote his Fifth Symphony soon after the First World War ended. Bordering on expressionism in places, it’s the most “modern” of his symphonies, and caused a riot when it was first performed in Stockholm.
Commitment Factor: About 33 minutes.
Vital Statistics: Late Romantic Period. A symphony in two long movements.
What to [...]