A snappy little song* from Monty Python's Contractual Obligations Album. But also a good place to do a non-Contemporary composers metanode.

Here's a list of some of the ones already noded:

• Johann Sebastian Bach
• Ludwig van Beethoven
• Johannes Brahms
• Frédéric Chopin
• Claude Debussy
• Antonin Dvorák
• Edvard Grieg
• George Frideric Handel
• Joseph Haydn
• Gustav Holst
• Christoph Willibald Gluck
• Franz Lizst
• Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy
• Olivier Messiaen
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• Modest Mussorgsky
• Carl Orff
• Sergei Prokofiev
• Sergei Rachmaninov
• Franz Schubert
• Jean Sibelius
• Bedrich Smetana
• Richard Strauss
• Igor Stravinsky
• Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
• Giuseppe Verdi
• Antonio Vivaldi
• Richard Wagner
• Carl Maria von Weber

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Oolong says: The song is set to Pachelbel's Canon (Pachelbel himself being notably absent from the lyrics)...

On the 150th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven's death, a group of musicologists dug up his coffin and opened it. Inside was a decrepit old man erasing music. The group was mystified until one of their party yelled, "I get it! He's decomposing!"

It's funny that digging up Beethoven recently is mentioned, even in a joke, because it happened. He was exhumed because scientists wanted to to run tests on his corpse for research purposes.

After testing some strands of his hair, it was discovered that Beethoven didn't actually die of consumption or infection, as had been popular theories: the tests showed he died of lead poisoning.