Yesterday, I was listening to Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin when I had the following thought: I mean no disrespect to Couperin, but how many MORE people know Tombeau than ANYTHING by Couperin?
The Classical Music world has a number of these pieces that touch on other less-famous artists (and it's by no means limited to composers and musicians). So I thought I'd open the floor to mention of other examples of this. Go ahead...
(Note- I'd like to exclude opera from this discussion as I think discussion of operatic examples of this phenomenon are sufficiently numerous to merit its own thread.)
I'm not sure if its true for most people, but Hindemith's symphonic metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria Von Weber is maybe in the ball park? Maybe it was originally intended as such.
For the longest time, knowledge of Vivaldi was through whatever Bach felt like doing with his music.
And how about "I'll make me famous through your work and not give you credit?" Say melodies from Brahms's hungarian dances? Not to derail the thread, OP is the most important and interesting.
Strauss' "Sinfonia Domestica", just as good as his other more famous tone poems for my taste. Also his Oboe Concerto and Duett-Concertino for Clarinet and Bassoon.
When I first saw this thread, I immediately thought of the almost infamous violinist Fritz Kreisler, who wrote a bunch of pieces and passed them off as the work of other composers--reverse plagiarism, if you will. Highlights include Vivaldi, Tartini, Boccherini, Martini, Pugnani...and those are just the composers whose names end in "NI!"
And yes, most of the composers he "wrote for" were largely unknown in his day, hence his writing in their name; he admired them and wanted to get others to know them.
And with that in mind, Mahlerians who know about G.M.'s on-again/off-again perspective on denoting music as programmatic (or not) cannot get through program notes on Symphony #1 without mention of the otherwise obscure novel Titan by pseudonymous German author Jean Paul.
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