It’s one of the oldest clichés in music that the best artists steal from other artists. It should be a comfort to know that the great classical composers weren’t exceptions. Bach raided Pachelbel; Beethoven stole from Haydn and Mozart; and Mozart, lauded as perhaps the greatest of the great, lifted from Bach and Haydn, and his “Adagio for Strings” has the scent of Handel.
We can safely rank the Beatles among the best – and we can also list them among those who stole from other artists. And not just the great pop stars of their youth; once they got into the classics, they plundered them, too.
Not consciously, mind you, and often times with no awareness whatsoever. But hints of classical works do surface in Beatlemusic – sometimes by design, sometimes not. Here are some of the most conspicuous, and a few that are long reaches...
“Eleanor Rigby” / Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons; Psycho
Many might assume that it was the success of the string ensemble backing on “Yesterday” that led Paul to request the same for “Eleanor Rigby” - but it wasn’t that simple.
In fact, Paul was shooting for drama – something “Yesterday” didn’t have. Yes, he wanted a string ensemble, but he was looking for something that truly soundtracked his tragic, poignant lyric.
Girlfriend Jane Asher, who was born to the style and erudition that beckoned to McCartney, had been introducing him to the classics – and to Antonio Vivaldi in particular. The Four Seasons had impressed Paul with its scope and color, and that’s what he told Martin he wanted.
Martin told a different story:
“My score for ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was influenced by Bernard Hermann’s for the film Fahrenheit 451,” he reported. “Bernard Hermann was the favored composer for Alfred Hitchcock. He’s since been revered for his work. His scoring on Fahrenheit 451 used strings a great deal and also electronics, and I did notice in particular that the strings he wrote were the opposite of syrupy. They were jagged, spiky, very menacing. Psycho was similar. That kind of short attack that you get on his string was very useful on ‘Eleanor Rigby’. It had to be very marcato; it had to be an absolutely tight rhythm, which strings aren’t noted for.”
But Martin misremembered, and later acknowledged his error; he didn’t even see the François Truffaut film until after “Eleanor Rigby” was already complete. So Psycho was probably a strong influence, but in hindsight he admitted that, yes, he’d had the Vivaldi talk with Paul, so it was certainly an influence.
Check it out: You can hear Bernard Hermann’s full Psycho score, as well the score of Fahrenheit 451, on YouTube. Among Vivaldi’s Four Seasons works, seek out “Violin Concerto No. 4 in F minor” - “Winter”.
“Yesterday” / Bach quartet
When it comes to the innovation of using a string quartet, rather than the Beatles themselves, for the backing of Paul’s classic “Yesterday”, it’s Martin that gets the credit. When Paul demoed the song for the band and their producer, it was clear to the other three Beatles that there was really no need for their drums and guitars. Still, a take with just Paul and his guitar sounded too thin. Martin fell upon the idea of putting his classical training to work..
“We agreed that it needed something more than an acoustic guitar, but that drums would make it too heavy,” he recalled. “The only thing I could think of was strings...”
Paul met Martin at his home, and the two of them sat down with the song.
“Paul worked with me on the score,” George said, “putting the cello here and the violin there. There was one particular bit which is very much his – and I wish I’d thought of it! - where the cello groans onto the seventh the second time around.” (This is an egregious modal violation for a serious composer, and Martin told Paul so, but – what the hell! - it sounds gorgeous...)
Paul also insisted that the musicians they booked for the session not use vibrato when they played – which struck the musicians and Martin as curious, but made a tremendous difference. An intuitive choice, but one that truly paid off.
It was during that joint composing session, however, that the inspiration for the score was revealed. Martin articulated the reasons for the choices he was making in placing the string instruments and selecting notes, according to Paul:
“George explained to me how Bach would have voiced it in a choral voicing or a quartet voicing. He’d say, ‘This would be the way Bach would to it.’”
Check it out: Seek out the Julliard String Quartet playing Bach’s Art of Fugue, Contrapunti 1-4.
“The Fool on the Hill” / Schubert
We will later showcase the swapping of major keys for minor ones as a classical music technical go-to, but in making note of the appearance of such a swap in Paul’s Magical Mystery Tour contribution “The Fool on the Hill”, we’ll focus on its emotional impact.
The song begins on a sunny D major verse, then suddenly goes into a darker D minor when the chorus arrives. The impact of this is jarring – and, per Wilfred Mellers, “an effect of a solemnity hardly less disturbing than Schubert’s typical juxtapositions of major and minor.”
He provides an analysis in his book “Twilight of the Gods”:
“There’s a one-bar transition (“he never gives an answer”) to the second, four-bar strain, in which there is no dominant-tonic cadence. Alone on his hill, the Fool watches the sun go down (on a Schubertian flat subdominant) and the world spinning round (a tonic minor triad intensified with a dissonant ninth as appoggiatura, which is resolved upwards before sinking into the tonic). The last stanza separates the Fool from the worldly others who are the real fools and, of course, identifies him with a Beatle. The identification is justified by the music: which has the haunting simplicity and memorability of a folk song, though it is strictly without precedent, pristine.”
Check it out: Find Schubert’s Moment Musical Op. 94 No. 2 in A-flat Major on YouTube. “Jarring” is an understatement...
“All You Need is Love” / Bach, Mozart, “Greensleeves”, et al
In the coda of John’s “All You Need is Love”, George Martin went quote-crazy, mashing up all kinds of classical snippets with Glenn Miller and the Beatles themselves. Among his snips:
Bach’s Invention No. 8 in F major makes an appearance – but Martin had to transpose it up from F to G to make it fit, infuriating purists;
The traditional “Greensleeves” is quoted;
In the beginning of the song, rather than in the coda, the French national anthem - “La Marseillaise” is quoted. And as it turns out, that anthem was inspired by the first movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 25.
Check it out: Andras Schiff’s recording of Bach’s Invention No. 8 is worth a listen on YouTube; skip over “La Marseillaise” and go straight to Mozart’s Concerto No. 25 (a live recording featuring Mitsuko Uchida) is worth seeking out. As for “Greensleeves”, it’s best on classical guitar; find the arrangement by Giuseppe Torrisi. “Tomorrow Never Knows” / Sibelius, Symphony No. 7
This one is pretty simple. John’s “Tomorrow Never Knows” is explored elsewhere, but is famously a song built on just two chords – C major and B♭. It is also the Beatles’ first excursion into psychedelia, and consequently offers a backing track that is awash with seagull cries, tape loops, Mellotron and grandfather clocks.
And nestled in that chaotic torrent of sound, in one of the B♭ chords, is a B♭ chord – from a recording of Jean Sibelius’s Symphony No. 7 – that is, a B♭ chord from a symphony that is also in C major.
Check it out: There’s a marvelous live performance of the symphony, with Leonard Bernstein conducting, on YouTube.
“Because” / Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 (Moonlight)15
“I was lying on the sofa in our house, listening to Yoko play Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ on the piano,” John said to Playboy in 1980. “Suddenly, I said, ‘Can you play those chords backward?’ She did, and I wrote ‘Because’ around them. The song sounds like ‘Moonlight’, too.”
John’s recomposition of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in C# minor was noted by musicologists well in advance of his 1980 Playboy interview, however:
“He says it’s the Moonlight Sonata backwards, though I don’t hear that,” wrote Wilfrid Mellers in Twilight of the Gods. “Nonetheless, the affinity between the enveloping, arpeggiated C# minor triads, with the sudden shift to the flat supertonic, is in the Lennon and Beethoven examples, unmistakable,” In retrospect, “‘Because’ is notable for its unresolved, circular harmonic structure,” wrote Kenneth Womack. “Vaguely reminiscent of the transitional nature of a slow movement from a Corelli or Handel sonata – a connection neatly enhanced by the presence of the harpsichord.”
Walter Everett acknowledged “both [“Because” and “Moonlight Sonata”] arpeggiate triads and seventh chords in C# minor in the baritone range of a keyboard instrument at a slow tempo, move through the submediant to ♭II and approach viidim7/IV via a common tone.”
The song does not return to the tonic, but pauses inexplicably with a three-part vocal “Ah” over a Ddim; per Mellers, “causality is released and there is no before and no after: because that flat supertonic is a moment of revelation, it needs no resolution.”
In fact, the pause on Ddim with no resolution sets up perfectly Paul’s opening piano Am7 in “You Never Give Me Your Money”, as the Side Two medley commences.
Check it out: Track down Valentina Lisitsa’s live performance of the Moonlight Sonata on YouTube.
“Blackbird” / Bach’s “Bourrée” (Lute Suite in E minor)
The story is told of how Paul, before solo-recording his gentle racial justice anthem for the White Album, sat in an upstairs window of his London home and serenaded a small gathering of Apple scruffs (female fans who stalked the Beatles’ homes). It’s easy to imagine that scene: the song is a living-room sofa piece, a friendly and welcoming bit of guitar that delights the ear and begs to be repeated.
It’s also a splendidly skillful bit of composition. The upper-register melody and the lower-register counterpoint share the same rhythm, but are distinct from one another – another testimony to Paul’s sheer compositional skill. But it’s not something he conjured; it’s a trick he learned from his careful listening:
“The original inspiration for ‘Blackbird” was from a well-known piece by Bach, which I never know the title of, which George and I had learned to play at early age,” he said. “We felt that we had a lot in common with Bach. For some reason we thought his music was very similar to ours.”
The similarity between “Blackbird” and Bach’s inspiration for it - “Bourrée”, from his Lute Suite in E minor - is not immediately obvious. Paul is in a major key, Bach in a minor one, for starters. But when you play them one after another, it becomes clear that the intertwining of the upper and lower melodies follows a very similar pattern: Paul is emulating, especially in his accents, Bach’s melodic rhythms.
So successful is “Blackbird” as a guitar piece that it has taken a place alongside Kansas’s “Dust in the Wind” as one of those pieces that every guitarist must teach themselves.
Check it out: First, listen to classical guitar virtuoso Andrès Segovia’s rendition of “Bourrée”; then, for fun, watch Jethro Tull performing it on YouTube.
“A Day in the Life” / Lutoslawski’s Symphony No. 2
The orchestral mayhem of that dissonant explosion in the middle of (and at the end of) John’s “A Day in the Life” is certainly the most notorious presentation of classical instruments in a Beatles recording. But where did that idea come from?
The effect, in the song, emerges from Martin’s score of 24 empty bars in the middle of the song, “a very slow semitone trill for the strings, bowing with a gentle portamento and increasing gradually in frequency and intensity,” he wrote.16 “This gives a suitably mysterious effect.” In the individual scores, each instrument was required to start at its lowest-possible note, then glissando improvisationally and with crescendo at random pace until all instruments finish on a final, blistering E.
This wildly unconventional idea was drawn, not from classical canon of centuries gone by, but from Martin’s contemporary, Witold Lutoslawski. His Symphony No. 2 uses a similar effect; the word for it is aleatory, the musical use of randomness, and it is a central feature of jazz. Lutoslawski had been experimenting with it in the Sixties – as, consequently, did Martin.
The result is, of course, one of the most magnificent musical moments in the Beatles catalog.
Check it out: Studio recordings of Lutoslawski’s Symphony No. 2 are readily available on YouTube. You can hear the cacophony erupting in the first minute.
“Penny Lane” / Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F major
The lead break in Paul’s joyful nostalgia fest “Penny Lane”, one of the most beloved of all Beatlesongs, came about when the band and Martin puzzled over how to fill the lead break. There was a false start or two, until the night of January 11, 1967, when Paul happened across a performance of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 on BBC2. And he heard “a fantastic high trumpet,” as he relayed to Martin the next day.
“Yes,” Martin replied, “the piccolo trumpet, the Bach trumpet. Why?”
“It’s a great sound! Why can’t we use it?”
“Sure we can,” Martin agreed, and he booked David Mason of the London Symphony Orchestra – the very musician who had been featured in the concert Paul heard to come in and play a piccolo trumpet lead break in the middle of “Penny Lane”.
The piccolo trumpet isn’t exactly a Fender Stratocaster; its players don’t wail out improvisational leads. Mason would require a score. They actually worked it out one phrase at a time, Paul tapping out on the notes he was hearing in his head, Martin, Martin writing them down on a piece of manuscript paper, then handing them to Mason, who figured out how to play them.
In his autobiography, Martin writes that many professional musicians brought in for Beatles sessions were stuffy and condescending, muttering that they weren’t real musicians, because they weren’t presented with properly scored music. But Mason’s attitude was very different. He was pleased to have been invited, intrigued by the task at hand, and delivered a performance that we can all agree is iconic.17
So iconic was this ingenious choice that Barry Manilow, in producing his own megahit “I Write the Songs”, backed his bridge lyric “...and I wrote some rock and roll, so you can move” not with the obvious choice – a hot guitar riff – but with a piccolo trumpet: a clear homage.
Check it out: You can hear the Brandenburg concertos everywhere, of course; but you can also see an interview with David Mason himself – later as a professor at the Royal College of Music - on YouTube, describing the experience. Seek it out!
“Hey Jude” / John Ireland’s “Te Deum”
This one might rattle a cage or two. So deeply embraced is “Hey Jude” - probably the greatest rock anthem of all time – by millions, the world over, that the idea that Paul nicked it from someone else might prove offensive.
But hearing just 30 second of John Ireland’s take on the classic Latin Christmas hymn “Te Deum”, which dates all the way back to 1907 (and was endlessly performed in England), will convince most listeners that Paul was, in fact, inspired by the song (he would certainly have sung it in his choirboy days). The melodies are identical in many places, the only real difference being the underchords (still I-V in the opening phrase, then different).
Walter Everett provides a substantive analysis of this connection in The Beatles as Musicians Vol. II, noting the identical melodic passages and pointing out that Paul’s is ultimately better than Ireland’s, “improved by McCartney with the unprepared leap from the V7 to a nonharmonic eleventh of that chord” at “take a sad song.” Everett points out that at this point, Paul has stopped nicking Ireland and has started nicking The Drifters’ “Save the Last Dance for Me”.
“Regardless of its provenance,” Everett concludes, “the ‘Hey Jude’ melody is a marvel of construction, contrasting wide leaps with stepwise motions, sustained tones with rapid movement, syllabic with melismatic word-setting, and tension (“don’t make it bad”) with resolution (“make it better”) - all graced, of course, by its composer’s gift for a natural tune.”
Check it out: The impact of the similarities is greatest when you look up an actual live choir performance of Ireland’s “Te Deum” on YouTube. The urge to substitute Paul’s lyrics is overwhelming.
“Let It Be” / Pachelbel’s “Canon in D”
Paul is far less likely to have been nicking Johann Pachelbel when he constructed the melody of “Let It Be”. The melody, in fact, bares no real resemblance to the latter’s “Canon in D”; but the underlying chords (setting aside that “Let It Be” is in a lower key) follow a very similar descending pattern:
("Canon in D”)
I – V/VII - vi – I/V - IV – I/III - IV – V
("Let It Be”)
I – V – vi – IV – I/V - V – IV - I
The two phrases are the same length, but differ here and there (Paul reverses the order of the fourth and fifth chords in the progression, for instance); and Paul returns to the tonic, where Pachelbel makes his piece endlessly circular by ending on the anticipatory V, which begs a repetition.
We can call this resemblance superficial, of course, and it is; it’s just fun to think about.
Check it out: Just for fun, pull up Rick Wakeman’s live presentation of “Canon in D” at the opening of his Rick Wakeman 2000 show.
“Mother Nature’s Son” / Chopin “Raindrop Prelude”
A subtler similarity emerges between Paul’s White Album ballad “Mother Nature’s Son” and one of Chopin’s most famous works, his “Raindrop Prelude”.
In the B section of Paul’s song, at 1:09 (after the first two verses ), he changes up his melody, supporting a meandering doo doo doo doo lyric – just sounds, not words. This passage repeats twice in the song.
Listen to that bit, then listen to Chopin: in measure 9 of his prelude, you’ll hear the same melody, varying only by a single different note.
It doesn’t jump right out, for although the songs are in almost the same key (“Mother Nature’s Son” is in D major; “Raindrop” is a half-step lower), “Raindrop” modulates to A♭ at the point where the melody begins, throwing off the ear. The descending walk-down from IV, however, leaps out, though Chopin’s chords go minor at that point, and he renders the descent again in the minor.
Incidental? Perhaps. But, once again, fun to think about.
Check it out: There’s an exquisite live performance of Chopin’s prelude by Lang Lang, on YouTube.
“Golden Slumbers” / Peter Warlock: "Cradle Song”
Paul openly raided Elizabethan playwright Thomas Dekker for the lyrics to Abbey Road’s “Golden Slumbers”, a segment of the famed Side Two medley. They come from his poem “Cradle Song”.
It had been set to music a number of times before Paul got his hands on it. British composer Peter Warlock (not his real name) wrote a melody for it in 1918; W.J. Henderson offered a take as far back as 1885.
Check it out: Look up “Cradle Song”, Peter Warlock, on YouTube. It’s endearing to hear a completely different version of Paul’s song echoing across decades.
“I Me Mine” / Johann Strauss’s “Emperor Waltz”
We have yet to hear from George in the Quoting Classics arena. But he did, in “I Me Mine”, from Let It Be.
He heard the piece on BBC2, in the series Europa: The Titled and the Unentitled. That couldn’t be more appropriate, as George is writing about entitlement.
Check it out: The “Emperor Waltz” is pretty famous. You can find many great live performances on YouTube; look for the one by the Berlin Philharmonic.
“In My Life” / Bach’s Invention No. 12 in A major
Though George Martin reported many times that Bach was his inspiration for the keyboard solo he wrote and performed in John’s “In My Life”, he never specified any particular Bach piece as that inspiration. He was simply going for the style, he said.
Fair enough, but a candidate does emerge: the Invention No. 12 in A major. They are in the same key, of course, and have some resemblance in the appeal to V and the added 7th on I. They both feature the aggressive left-hand counterpoint and flurries of right-hand notes.
Check it out: A harpsichord performance by Peiting Xue for the Netherlands Bach Society is a great presentation of this piece.
“For No One” / Quantz: Horn Concerto in E-flat major
When Paul pouts about Jane Asher, there’s always a winning song on top of it.
That’s definitely the case with Revolver’s “For No One”, an obscure track that is, in fact, one of Paul’s finest. A plaintive lyric lays down a wistful mood, redolent with regret, and alongside very simple instrumentation – Paul on keyboards and bass, Ringo on drums and tambourine. But something else was needed.
“Occasionally we’d have an idea for some new kind of instrumentation, particularly for solos,” Paul recalled. “On ‘For No One’, I was interested in the French horn, because it was an instrument I’d always loved from when I was a kid. It’s a beautiful sound, so I went to George Martin and said, ‘How can we go about this?’ And he said, ‘Well, let me get the very finest.’”
The ‘very finest’ was Alan Civil, a 36-year-old horn player widely regarded as the best in all of England. Martin booked Civil for the session, having been long acquainted with him, and Civil turned up without a clear idea of what was expected.
Paul encouraged him “to make something up,” getting no more specific than to say the song needed something in the Baroque style; true enough, as the song called for something that would at once be winsome, yet serious without being somber. Martin was well aware that few classical musicians were comfortable with this, and so he generated a score that, unfortunately, didn’t land well with Civil.
The song itself “had been recorded in rather bad musical style, in that it was ‘in the cracks,’ neither B-flat nor B-major,” he said. “This posed a certain difficulty in tuning my instrument.” Moreover, Martin and Paul were calling for notes above the instrument’s normal register, and Civil complained about this. There was momentary discussion of slowing down the tape so that could play his horn part in a lower key, but the lower key itself proved almost impossible.
So they had to push Civil to hit a high F – beyond range – by basically daring him to do it. And he did. Session engineer Geoff Emerick called Civil’s solo “the performance of his life.”
The mismatch between Martin’s solo score and Civil’s French horn is in the range of the modern instrument versus its Baroque counterpart. Martin’s inspiration leaned into the latter, found in Johann Joachim Quantz’s Concerto in E♭.
Check it out: A great rendition of Quantz’s concerto on YouTube features Ann Ellsworth as soloist.
“It’s All Too Much” / The Prince of Denmark’s March
Unknown to many, George’s “It’s All Too Much” is found on the Yellow Submarine soundtrack. Having done quite a bit of Indian music at this point in his Beatle career, George finally jumped on the brass bandwagon with this tune, which is a white-noise mush of dirty guitars and drugged-out mantra.
The famous and eminently recognizable “Prince of Denmark’s March” (also widely known as the “Trumpet Voluntary”) is an odd bit to drop into this mix – but there it is, in the song’s coda, as George sings out.
Check it out: Find the Jeremiah Clarke performance of the march on YouTube.
“Revolution No. 9” / Varèse, Schumann, Beethoven, Stochkausen et al
Finally, there’s John’s bizarre sound experiment “Revolution No. 9”, from the White Album.
If “Tomorrow Never Knows” was a repository for everything but the kitchen sink, “Revolution No. 9” can be thought of as a veritable landfill. It contains more than 150 snippets of unrelated nonsense, from John reciting “Number nine” to George naming dances to Yoko talking about being naked to crowd sounds to football cheers – and to a long list of classical music excerpts, including the following:
Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes
Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy
Edgard Varèse: Deserts
Ralph Vaughan Williams’ O Clap Your Hands
Sibelius’s Symphony No. 7
And in a more modern vein,
Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge
There’s also the violin trills from “A Day in the Life”, and a host of other silly noise. Check it out: All of the above are readily available on YouTube.
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