Tunes that will always bring the house down

Ivan Hewett and Rupert Christiansen select 100 pieces sure to stir your heart, from the raw to the romantic

The sheer vastness of classical music, a tradition that is now at least half a millennium old, makes choosing the 100 best pieces an impossible task. Over the centuries, it has become so incredibly varied within itself – spanning everything from a two-minute medieval carol to a two-hour opera written last week – that the phrase “classical music” has almost lost its meaning.

There is an easy way out: swap “best-known” for “best” and you have a far simpler task on your hands. But that would have meant packing this list with the kind of hoary old favourites that fill compilation albums – and those albums depress us. They give the heinous impression that the classical tradition is nothing more than a repository of upmarket background music, beautiful sounds to help us “chillax”.

In fact, so much of classical music is the very opposite of chillaxing – it inspires us to live more intensely, not less. Sometimes it achieves that in a gently beautiful way, but more often it disturbs or excites us, and can even rub our nerves raw.

In the list that follows, we have tried to capture the variety of moods and feelings you can find in classical music, which encompasses just about everything in human experience. Some of those moods will feel familiar, others will not. Pop songs are about the now, and tend to concern us as individuals. So even when the tunes or rhythms seem strange (hip-hop may sound pretty alien to a fan of dad rock) none of pop music is entirely out of reach. Classical music is a more complicated case, because so much of it is historically remote. For every piece that evokes feelings we all recognise – and, for example, brings a tear to the listener’s eye – there are many others that spring from a social situation that has long since disappeared.

Consider the feelings that go with taking part in a courtly ceremony, or with marching in a parade ground in a picturesque uniform. Both activities inspired a mountain of music, some of which has survived and now lives in the concert hall. The situation has all but vanished, but the music remains like a message in a bottle from the past that, when uncorked, releases an enticing scent. Classical music is as mysterious as world music; it’s just that the foreign country to which it gives us access is distant in time, not place.

Any classical “best of ” has to pay attention to these vanished worlds of feeling, even if giving them a name is difficult. Here, “Does Anybody need a lift?” means (mostly) music for ceremonials. “Fighting spirit” evokes the military strain that has been such a huge part of classical music. “The Devil has the best tunes” brings in the diabolical, a favourite area of feeling for the romantics. Consolation is another special service classical music can provide for us, because its language is rooted in church music, even if it has long outgrown that context. In the 19th century, classical music acquired a political consciousness, so “Don’t get mad, get even” is another of our themes. Then there are the dances that are “Guaranteed to get you moving” and the songs designed to drink to.

Alongside these are categories that don’t point to feelings so much as parts of the world or life; these also evoke certain feelings, but at one remove. There’s music inspired by the countryside, by the sea, by the idea of being transported to an exotic part of the world (the Mystic East was a popular imaginative destination, but there were many others). We find another kind of “transport” in music inspired by dreaming or fantasies, or by nostalgia for childhood. Our 100 pieces – recordings of all of which can be found easily on YouTube – dip a teaspoon into this vast ocean; we hope it encourages you to venture further out to sea. Engelbert Humperdinck, 1893

A charming little playground folk song, sung in duet by the titular characters, at the start of the opera.

Maurice Ravel, 1910

The Mother Goose Suite is drenched in nostalgia for the fantasy world of childhood. Among the scenes evoked with tender delicacy are Tom Thumb, a Fairy Garden and the Sleeping Beauty.

Dmitri Shostakovich, 1945

The bittersweet emotional world of Shostakovich shines out with naive clarity in these seven little pieces. Benjamin Britten, 1953-54

Little Miles sings this hauntingly strange melody in his Latin lesson.

Classical music is the opposite of ‘chillaxing’ – it can inspire us to live more intensely

Gabriel Fauré, 1886

The song of the Venetian gondolier has inspired countless piano pieces in a dreamy rhythm. Fauré liked the form so much he composed 13. Edward Elgar, 1899

“The deeps have music soft and low,” says the poem in this song. Its sense of something longed-for and far away is perfectly captured by Janet Baker in her recording. Claude Debussy, 1905

The second movement of these “symphonic sketches” catches the ever-changing heave of waves. Benjamin Britten, 1945

All the moods of the ocean, from morning calm to furious tempest, are brilliantly painted in this suite.

Robert Schumann, 1849 Schumann’s mental state was fragile when he wrote this lovesong to his wife, which pleads with heart-stopping intensity: “Don’t let my dark clouds dim your radiance”. Giuseppe Verdi, 1862

The dying Don Alvaro sings farewell to the man he thinks is his friend, Don Carlo. If the creaky old footage of Franco Corelli and Ettore Bastianini in this scene doesn’t make you cry, nothing will. Ruggiero Leoncavallo, 1891-2

The aria made famous by Caruso, in which Canio the strolling player dons his costume and puts a brave face on his wife’s adultery. Maurice Ravel, 1899

Who is the dead child mourned in this slow, stately, very sad dance? There was none, according to Ravel. He just liked the title. But don’t let that spoil the melancholy. Giacomo Puccini, 1904

Cio-Cio San’s wail as she bids farewell to her young son, knowing that she must die, is pitiful.