I've recently written about classical composers and performers who were avid athletes; it's only natural that sports have found their way into the repertoire through compositions inspired by the games people play.
By far the best-known sports-inspired piece of classical music is Debussy's 1913 ballet (or, technically, "danced poem") Jeux. The piece's name is French for "games," but precisely which games is a matter of interpretation. Vaslav Nijinsky's premiere dance set to the music involved a boy and two girls playing tennis and quarreling over a lost ball, but Nijinsky wrote that impresario Sergei Diaghilev — who commissioned the work — intended it to portray a homosexual encounter among three men. Suffice it to say that the piece's title can be interpreted as referring to games played both on- and off-court.
Debussy's American contemporary Charles Ives was a fan of the Great American Pastime. Ives enjoyed playing baseball, and he wrote several pieces about the game. His relationship with the sport ran so deep, in fact, that scholar Timothy A. Johnson wrote an entire book about Ives and baseball, subtitled A Proving Ground. In addition, Ives — a Yalie — wrote an 1898 piece called Yale-Princeton Football Game.
The great European pastime, of course, is soccer — or football, as it's called there. Multiple composers have dedicated pieces to soccer teams; among them is Michael Nyman, whose The Final Score was written for a documentary tracing the history of the Queens Park Rangers.
Sibelius, unsurprisingly, took inspiration from the ski slopes — and trails — that abound in his native Finland. The Lonely Ski Trail (1925) scores a recitation based on Bertel Gripenberg's poem with music by piano — or, in a popular alternate arrangement, harp and strings.
Richard Strauss remains controversial for his relationship to the Third Reich, and he fueled his critics' fires with the Olympic Hymn he wrote for the opening of the 1936 Berlin Games. As WQXR points out, other composers who have composed Olympic torch music include Leonard Bernstein and John Williams.
If we're giving prizes, though — and how could we not, given this subject? — the trophy for most "athletic" composition might have to go to Honegger, whose 1928 tone poem Rugby actually dramatizes a game of the eponymous sport, with a theme being "passed" among different sections of the orchestra. Bows up, game on!
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