It’s likely that, in today’s society and culture, every one of us feels that we could use a crash course in classical music, if only so that we don’t embarrass ourselves in front of more knowledgeable people--because, after all, nobody likes to look like an idiot!  The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Classical Music by Robert Sherman and Philip Seldon takes our stupidity for granted and equips us with all that we need to know to understand more about this form of music.

In this entertaining read, you will find out how to do everything from recognizing a symphony to knowing when you’re at a classical concert.  There are also frequent boxes interspersed within the text labeled “Bet You Didn’t Know,” “Warning,” “Music Words,” or “Important Things to Know.”  The “Bet You Didn’t Know” boxes contain obscure facts or stories about the subject matter; “Warning” boxes, as they put it, “caution you about things in the music world that can cost you money or may cause you grief”; “Music Words” define important musical terms in a way that most people can understand.  “Important Things to Know” simply contain, well, important things to know.

You also get to know a lot of major composers while reading, along with their dates, important contributions to society, and general life stories.  You will definitely enjoy reading about people like Paganini (a violin virtuoso who supposedly kept the souls of his dead mistresses in his violin bow), Haydn (who lost his first job because he cut off a girl’s ponytail as a joke, which nobody except for Haydn found amusing), Schumann (who tried to drown himself in the Rhine but was thwarted by a friendly passer-by), Vaughan Williams (whose family thought that his music was dreadful), and Jose Carreras (an opera singer who always wanted to be a professional soccer player).

In addition to information about types of orchestral arrangements, instruments, composers, and singers, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Classical Music also contains various guides to things like orchestras, chamber groups, and really good recordings. After the information about a composer is a list of his music that you might be interested in listening to, and, usually, their choices are good.  Nobody will always like everything that somebody else picks out, but, usually, the list contains the biggest and most well-known pieces of a certain composer’s work.

Unfortunately, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Classical Music isn’t written by Christian authors, and some of the composers had rather interesting immoral lives, which aren’t glossed over at all.  However, nothing is very glaringly bad, and it doesn’t take away from the overall witty effect of the book.  The book just went out of print, but I checked Amazon, and you can get copies for not much money, so what are you waiting for?  Read, and become enlightened about the wonders of classical music!