Beethoven’s Wig

Price: €12.00

Silly / funny words sung along with classical music’s greatest hits. This grabbed me right from the start:

Beethoven’s wig is long and curly and it’s white

Beethoven takes his wig off when he sleeps at night

Because it’s big

It’s very big

Beethoven’s wig! Is! Big!

… sung to the tune of Beethoven’s 5th, with full orchestral accompaniment. Yeah, yeah I know – it’s pure daft, but it never fails to make me grin and the longest tune takes less than two and a half minutes, so the joke never gets old. It’s made funnier still by the main singer singing in his normal voice while the others sing in “opera” voices.

I hadn’t really realised how catchy some of these tunes are – I suppose without words to sing you’re less likely to sing them in the shower, but now I have words you’ll hear Verdi and Liszt if you stand outside my bathroom door. The words have also attached the titles and composers to the tunes in my head for the first time, so when I hear them on the radio I’m not going “hmmm I’ve heard that before” but rather going “Aha! It’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik!”

The music without the lyrics is on the CD too, and it’s a joy to listen too – well-recorded and played with relish. Classical music purists will probably dismiss this as a trivialisation of something serious and magnificent, but I love it, Niamh and Isabelle love it, and I bet Mozart would have loved it too.