In 1934 Edward Elgar died with his mouth shut, leaving inside a piece from 1899 a private joke he never explained. Six musicologists have since written entire books claiming they cracked it. The shortlist runs from Auld Lang Syne to the number π.

Smetana began Má vlast in 1874, the same year he went completely deaf. Hearing nothing, he composed six symphonic poems tracing Bohemian myth, landscape, and history—from the ancient fortress of Vyšehrad to the Hussite warriors sleeping in the mountain of Blaník. Composed in silence, the cycle became the founding document of Czech national identity.

Two flutes open like trickling mountain springs, join into a single melody, pass through a peasant wedding and a moonlit water-nymph dance, and arrive at the broad flow past Prague's ancient fortress. Written in eighteen days by a man who could not hear a single note of it.

Holst gave each planet its astrological character: Mars, the Bringer of War; Venus, the Bringer of Peace; Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity. He composed 'Mars' in 1914, its grinding 5/4 rhythm predicting the sound of mechanized warfare months before the Great War began. He never wrote a movement for Earth—this life, he said, needed no…

Mussorgsky visited a memorial exhibition for his friend Viktor Hartmann and in three weeks composed a raw piano suite depicting what he saw. The recurring 'Promenade' theme is the composer himself moving between the pictures, his mood shifting with each painting. Fifty years later, Ravel's orchestration made the work a permanent fixture of the concert…

Respighi's score contains an instruction found nowhere else: at the end of the third movement, play a gramophone recording of a real nightingale. From children playing at the Villa Borghese to Roman soldiers marching on the Appian Way at dawn, it's a work of pure cinematic spectacle that Toscanini took around the world.