Cats in Opera and Classical Music: From Rossini’s Cat Duet to Prokofiev’s Clarinet

Cats in classical music have a longer and stranger track record than most concert programmes admit. There is a duet of pure meowing that has been encored for two centuries and was not written by the composer whose name is on it. There is a harpsichord fugue built on a melody a cat allegedly invented. There is a Soviet children’s piece that permanently assigned the cat a clarinet. Behind each one there is a real date, a real document, and usually a story that got prettier with every retelling.

Here is what actually happened, legends separated from paperwork.

What You Will Find Here

• Cats in Classical Music Begin With a Duet Rossini Never Wrote
• The Cat Fugue, the Cat Waltz, and the Cat on the Keyboard
• Prokofiev Gave the Cat a Clarinet
• Ravel’s Cat Duet Upset Paris in 1925
• Cats on the Ballet Stage: Tchaikovsky’s Claws and Diaghilev’s Constructivist Cat
• Stravinsky’s Cat Lullabies and the Novelty Piano Cat
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Cats in Classical Music: The Short Version

Cats in Classical Music Begin With a Duet Rossini Never Wrote

The Duetto buffo di due gatti, the “humorous duet for two cats”, is the piece everybody knows even if they cannot name it. Two singers, usually sopranos, spend roughly three minutes singing one single word at each other: miau. They flirt with it, argue with it, and finish it off with a coloratura shouting match. It has been a reliable concert encore for close to two hundred years.

Gioachino Rossini did not write it. The piece is a compilation assembled in 1825 out of existing material, and the compiler is generally identified as the English composer Robert Lucas Pearsall (1795 to 1856), working under the pseudonym “G. Berthold”. The attribution comes from the scholar Hubert Hunt, and Pearsall’s authorship is the accepted account rather than a proven signature on a manuscript.

What Is Actually Inside the Duet

The stitching is easy to trace once you know where to look. The opening section is the “Katte-Cavatine” by the Danish composer C. E. F. Weyse. The rest comes from Rossini’s Otello of 1816, specifically the act one duet “No, non temer, serena” for Rodrigo and Iago, and a cabaletta from Rodrigo’s act two aria “Ah, come mai non senti”. Both of those were written for tenors. The cat duet takes two heroic tenor lines, hands them to two women, replaces every syllable with a meow, and lets the comedy do the rest.

Why It Survived Two Centuries

Because it is a technical exam disguised as a joke. Strip away the text and you still have Rossini’s actual writing, which means the singers have to deliver real agility, real breath control, and real ensemble timing while sounding like two animals on a wall at 3am. Audiences hear a gag. Voice teachers hear a test. Felicity Lott and Ann Murray performed it at the BBC Proms in 1996 with Andrew Davis at the piano, which tells you the piece is welcome on serious stages.

The Cat Fugue, the Cat Waltz, and the Cat on the Keyboard

There is a recurring plot in music history: a cat walks across a keyboard, the composer hears something worth keeping, a masterpiece follows. Wonderful story. Also, in almost every documented case, a nickname invented by a publisher long after the composer died.

Scarlatti and Pulcinella

Domenico Scarlatti’s Fugue in G minor, K. 30, was published in London in 1739 and is known almost universally as the Cat Fugue, or Fuga del gatto. The subject is genuinely odd: a rising line of wide, chromatic, unpredictable intervals that sounds less like a composed theme than like something found by accident.

The legend says Scarlatti kept a cat named Pulcinella, after the Neapolitan puppet character, and that Pulcinella liked walking the keyboard. Scarlatti supposedly wrote down one of these walks and turned it into a fugue subject. The problem is the timing. Scarlatti never called the piece anything of the sort. The nickname only appears in the early nineteenth century, pushed along by editors and publishers including Muzio Clementi, Carl Czerny, and later Alessandro Longo, all of whom understood that a story sells sheet music.

The piece had a long afterlife regardless of who invented the theme. Anton Reicha wrote his own fugue on the same subject in his 36 Fugues of 1803, and Franz Liszt played it in Berlin in the early 1840s after coming across it through the manuscript collector Fortunato Santini.

Chopin, George Sand, and a Waltz in F

Chopin’s Waltz in F major, Op. 34 No. 3, picked up the nickname “Cat Waltz” through the same mechanism. The claim is that a cat jumped onto the piano while Chopin was working and traced out the melodic idea, and about a minute into the waltz there is indeed a scampering run up and down the keyboard that sounds like paws in a hurry. The cat in the story belonged to George Sand’s household, where Chopin was living at the time. There is no contemporary evidence that any of this happened, and the nickname sits in the same category as the Cat Fugue: unsubstantiated, durable, commercially useful.

If you want a sense of why these stories stick so hard, it helps to understand what music actually does to the brain. We covered that in how music affects the brain, and the short answer is that we are pattern-matching machines who love a narrative attached to a sound.

Prokofiev Gave the Cat a Clarinet

Of all the cats in classical music, the most influential one has no name and about ninety seconds of material. In 1936 Natalya Sats, director of the Central Children’s Theatre in Moscow, commissioned Sergei Prokofiev to write an orchestral piece for children. Prokofiev wrote Peter and the Wolf in four days. Sats contributed ideas for the text.

The premiere took place on 2 May 1936 in the Large Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, with Prokofiev conducting the orchestra of the Moscow Philharmonic Society. It went badly. Three days later, on 5 May, it was performed at the children’s theatre with Sats narrating, and from there it became one of the most performed orchestral works of the twentieth century.

Why the Clarinet Was the Right Answer

Each character in the piece gets a fixed instrument and a fixed theme. The bird is a flute, the duck an oboe, the grandfather a bassoon, the wolf three horns, Peter the string section. The cat is a clarinet playing staccato in its low register.

That choice is more precise than it looks. The clarinet’s low chalumeau register is dark, dry, and slightly hollow, and staccato articulation in that range produces short padded attacks with almost no ring. It is the sound of something heavy moving quietly. Prokofiev needed an animal that is both soft and dangerous, and he found the one orchestral colour that does soft and dangerous at the same time. Because Peter and the Wolf is often the first orchestral piece a child ever hears, generations of listeners now carry a hardwired link between low staccato clarinet and cat, which is a remarkable amount of cultural real estate for four days of work.

Ravel’s Cat Duet Upset Paris in 1925

Maurice Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges premiered at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo on 21 March 1925, conducted by Victor de Sabata. The libretto is by Colette, who wrote the text in eight days. Ravel then took from 1917 to 1925 to finish the music, which is a fairly accurate summary of both their working methods.

The opera’s plot involves a badly behaved child whose furniture, wallpaper, books, and animals come to life to complain about him. Somewhere in the middle, two cats sing a duet, the “Duo miaulé”, made entirely of vocalised meowing over a slow, sliding, deeply physical orchestral texture.

It caused trouble. The Monte Carlo audience was enthusiastic, but Paris a year later was much cooler, and the cat duet in particular drew consternation and outrage. The suspicion at the time was that Ravel had written a parody of a Wagnerian love duet and given it to two animals. Arthur Honegger publicly defended the opera and singled out the duo des chats as the moment worth defending. A century later it reads as one of the most tender two minutes Ravel ever wrote, which is usually how these scandals age.

Cats on the Ballet Stage: Tchaikovsky’s Claws and Diaghilev’s Constructivist Cat

Ballet gave the cat two of its best roles. Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty premiered at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg on 3/15 January 1890, choreographed by Marius Petipa and conducted by Riccardo Drigo. Act three is the wedding, and the wedding guests are fairy tale characters. Number 24 is the Pas de caractère for Puss in Boots and the White Cat, marked Allegro moderato.

Petipa’s instructions to Tchaikovsky were not subtle. He asked for “mutual caresses, miaowing and scratching their claws”, ending with the cry of a scratched cat. Tchaikovsky delivered exactly that, including the yowl. The number was received well enough at the premiere that it was encored, which means an 1890 Russian audience demanded to hear two dancers pretend to be cats fighting a second time.

La Chatte, Monte Carlo, 1927

Thirty-seven years later the cat got the full avant-garde treatment. Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes premiered La Chatte in Monte Carlo on 30 April 1927. Music by Henri Sauguet, libretto by Boris Kochno under the pseudonym “Sobeka”, choreography by George Balanchine, and a plot taken from an Aesop fable: a young man loves a cat, Aphrodite turns her into a woman, then tests her by sending a mouse across the stage. The mouse wins. She returns to being a cat.

The lasting shock of the production was the design, billed as “architecture and sculpture” and made by the constructivist artists Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner out of transparent and reflective material. Serge Lifar danced the Young Man, with Olga Spessivtseva and Alicia Nikitina alternating in the title role. The whole thing lasted around ten minutes. The Ballets Russes kept it in repertoire until the company’s final performance on 28 July 1929 in Ostend.

Stravinsky’s Cat Lullabies and the Novelty Piano Cat

Igor Stravinsky wrote the Berceuses du chat, four cat cradle songs, in 1915 and 1916 while living in Clarens, Switzerland, during the First World War. The texts are Russian folk material drawn from the collection of the folklorist Pyotr Kireevsky, and Stravinsky helped his friend C. F. Ramuz produce a French translation for publication.

The scoring is the interesting part: a medium voice, usually a contralto, and three clarinets. An E flat clarinet, an A clarinet, and a bass clarinet in B flat. The four songs are “Dors sur le poêle”, “Intérieur”, “Dodo”, and “Ce qu’il a, le chat”. Stravinsky was writing about a cat asleep on a stove, and he chose an ensemble that can purr, wheeze, and rumble across three registers of the same instrument family. Twenty years before Prokofiev, he had already worked out that the clarinet is the cat instrument. If you enjoy this kind of instrument-level thinking, our piece on six musical instruments so weird they barely count as instruments goes further down that road, and the history of the theremin covers what happened when composers went looking for sounds no acoustic instrument could make.

The piano bench got its own cats in the same era. Aaron Copland’s first published work, The Cat and the Mouse (Scherzo humoristique), was written in 1920 and published by Durand, based on Jean de la Fontaine’s fable of the old cat and the young mouse. It uses the full keyboard, glissandi, grace notes, and blizzards of sixteenth notes to run a chase in miniature. One year later, in 1921, Zez Confrey published “Kitten on the Keys”, the novelty piano hit inspired by a cat walking a keyboard, in this case his grandmother’s cat rather than his own. Confrey’s cat is the only one here with a plausible, contemporaneous origin story, which is a fine irony given that it is also the least serious piece in the set.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Rossini write the cat duet?

No. The Duetto buffo di due gatti is a compilation put together in 1825, generally credited to Robert Lucas Pearsall under the pseudonym “G. Berthold”. The music itself is largely Rossini’s, taken from his 1816 opera Otello, plus an opening section by the Danish composer C. E. F. Weyse. Rossini’s name stayed on the cover because it sold better.

Which instrument represents the cat in Peter and the Wolf?

The clarinet, played staccato in its low register. Prokofiev assigned every character a fixed instrument in the 1936 score, and that pairing has stuck so firmly that most listeners now hear “cat” whenever a clarinet does short notes down low.

Did a cat really write Scarlatti’s Cat Fugue?

Almost certainly not. Scarlatti never used the nickname, and it only shows up in the early nineteenth century, promoted by publishers and editors. The subject does have unusual chromatic leaps, which is what made the story believable, but there is no contemporary source placing a cat named Pulcinella on the keyboard.

What is the most famous cat opera?

No full-length opera is about cats, but Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges (1925) contains the most famous cat scene in the repertoire, the “Duo miaulé”. For pure cat content per minute, the Duetto buffo di due gatti wins, since it has no other words at all.

Why do composers write cat music instead of dog music?

Partly range. A cat’s vocal repertoire covers glissandi, trills, sudden dynamic jumps, and long sustained tones, all of which map neatly onto singing technique. Partly narrative. A cat can be comic, seductive, or menacing within the same scene, which gives a composer more to work with than loyalty. And partly proximity, since cats have lived on top of pianos and inside opera houses for centuries.

Cats in Classical Music: The Short Version

Cats in classical music are less a novelty than a recurring technical problem that composers keep enjoying. The cat gives them an excuse to write pure sound without words, to parody grand opera without saying so, and to test how far an audience will follow a joke before it turns into real music. Rossini did not write the cat duet, Scarlatti’s cat probably never touched a key, and Chopin’s cat is a publisher’s invention. Prokofiev’s clarinet, though, is documented, deliberate, and still the sound of a cat crossing a room. Some of these stories are decoration. That one is craft. For more on why cats keep taking over human culture, see our pieces on cats in ancient Egypt and the history of black cat superstitions, or find out why songs get stuck in your head the next time a meowing duet refuses to leave.

---