Like our cover star Emma Thompson, Mozart worked for two hours each morning and then went for a walk. Georgia Mann on how the great composers loved a stroll

I take my idling credentials seriously. I would be failing in my duty to you as an Idler columnist if I overdid things during my working day. My daily Radio 3 show is three and a half hours long, and frankly I find it a struggle to do much beyond the school run and cocktail mixing after 1.30pm. I was impressed therefore to read of this month’s Idler cover star Emma Thompson putting in two-hour working days with a strong emphasis on walking. This is my kind of productivity rate, and Emma’s partiality for a promenade places her alongside the likes of Beethoven, Mahler and Tchaikovsky when it comes to working routines.

I’m not really a morning person, which is unfortunate for someone who starts broadcasting every day at 9.30am (though that certainly beats my stint some years back on the Early Riser show at BBC Three Counties Radio, when I would address Beds, Herts and Bucks at an eyelid-challenging 4.30am). Beethoven would have made a great local radio reporter as he rose at dawn and proceeded to make coffee that had the consistency and potency of gunpowder, measuring out six beans for each small cup. Mozart too liked an early start. He claimed that by 6am, “I am always combed. At seven o’clock, fully dressed. Then I write until nine o’clock.” Tchaikovsky’s alarm went off at more like 8am, but Mahler was up at seven, when he would take a cold shower and then set about reading Goethe or Nietzsche – something I wouldn’t dare attempt until I’d had a couple of Beethoven-style macchiatos.

One composer who left us a gloriously satirical take on daily routines was the ever-so-slightly eccentric Frenchman Eric Satie. “I rise at 7.18,” he said, “am inspired from 10.30 to 11.47. I lunch at 12.11 and leave the table at 12.14. A healthy horse-back ride on my property from 1.19 to 2.35. Another round of inspiration from 3.12 to 4.07.” In that same summation of his daily habits, Satie claimed he ate “only white foods: eggs, sugar, shredded bones, the fat of dead animals, rice, turnips … cotton salad, and certain kinds of fish (skinned). I boil my wine and drink it cold mixed with fuchsia juice. I have a good appetite but never talk when eating for fear of strangling.” Give this man a lifestyle blog.

But not all composers got busy in the morning. Johann Sebastian Bach was perhaps the most productive composer in musical history. He wrote over a thousand works in his 65 years on this earth, and apparently would often write in bed. His other major compositional tool was improvisation. Bach and Handel could sit at the keyboard and do things that left audiences slack-jawed in amazement. Bach could improvise six-part fugues, the organ-based equivalent of David Beckham scoring from the halfway line. Handel was so red-hot at improvising that in a 1709 keyboard “duel” with Domenico Scarlatti in Rome, George Frideric’s performance left the Italian composer in reverential awe of his organ mastery.

Handel’s tendency to corpulence suggests he may not have been as keen on a daily walk as other compositional greats have been – Beethoven, for instance, who would set off for a brisk constitutional every day after lunch, or Tchaikovsky, whose biographer said the great Russian “believed he had to take a walk of exactly two hours a day and that if he returned even a few minutes early, great misfortunes would befall him”. Good old Satie also had words on the subject: “I breathe carefully (a little at a time) and dance very rarely. When walking I hold my sides and look steadily behind me.” And Gustav Mahler, at 2.30pm every day, used to walk back from the Viennese opera house where he worked, and would whistle the first theme of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony to let the cook know to serve the soup.

Anna Meredith is one of my favourite contemporary composers – I’ve even used her music to accompany my torturous machinations at the gym. Anna says this of incorporating physical exercise into her daily compositional life: “I’ve never been remotely sporty and had resigned myself to being the person who endlessly gets hit on the head with a football and can never land a piece of paper in a bin, but I’ve become slightly obsessed with Shaun T, the American trainer behind the Hip Hop Abs home workout programme. I still try to work out nearly every day because it’s the only thing that makes me feel I’ve got any structure and it’s something I can feel good about, even if I fail to write a single note.”

So – what of the grooming habits of these briskly walking composers? Well, Beethoven seems to have had a singular approach to bathing. His pupil and secretary Anton Schindler recalled: “Washing and bathing were among the most pressing necessities of Beethoven’s life … he would stand … at his washstand and pour large pitchers of water over his hands, bellowing up and down the scale or sometimes humming loudly to himself. Then he would stride around his room with rolling or staring eyes, jot something down, then resume his pouring of water and loud singing. These were moments of deep meditation, to which no one could have objected but for two unfortunate consequences. First of all, the servants would often burst out laughing. This made the master angry and he would sometimes assault them in language that made him cut an even more ridiculous figure. Or, secondly, he would come into conflict with the landlord, for all too often so much water was spilled that it went right through the floor.”

Of course, before rising and ablutions comes sleep – something else with which Satie had a novel approach: “I sleep with only one eye closed; I sleep very hard. My bed is round with a hole in it for my head to go through. Every hour a servant takes my temperature and gives me another.”

But spare a thought for Chopin, that Romantic-era wizard of all things pianistic. According to his lover, the writer George Sand: “His creation was spontaneous and miraculous … It came on his piano suddenly, complete, sublime, or it sang in his head during a walk, and he was impatient to play it to himself. But then began the most heart-rending labour I ever saw. It was a series of efforts, of irresolutions, and of frettings to seize again certain details of the theme he had heard … and his regret at not finding it again … threw him into a kind of despair. He shut himself up in his room for whole days, weeping, walking, breaking his pens, repeating and altering a bar a hundred times, writing and effacing it as many times, and recommencing the next day with a minute and desperate perseverance.”

Someone should have told Chopin that all he needed to do was walk a bit further, knock back some fuchsia juice and consider some Hip Hop Abs.

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