Download 400,000 Free Classical Musical Scores & 46,000 Free Classical Recordings from the International Music Score Library Project
This aesthetically and intellectually rewarding process of seeking out and comparing — and indeed, the enterprise of classical music-listening itself — has become much easier with the advent of resources like the International Music Score Library Project. Founded in 2006, it has by this point expanded to contain "123,134 works, 404,963 scores, 46,610 recordings, 15,404 composers, and 445 performers," all online and many free for the downloading. Just search for the name of a piece or composer with the window on the upper right — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, for instance — and the IMSP will show you all the related items it currently has.
You can listen to them right on the site, or download them by first clicking on the down arrow (↓) next to the words "complete performance," then on the down arrow (↓) that appears to the right of the volume controller when the file starts playing.
Or if you're not in the mood for a little night music, perhaps the IMSP can interest you in Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 or Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations. But then, as the San Francisco Symphony's Michael Tilson Thomas once said, "You can't have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers. They simply define what music is!" So if you'd prefer to go beyond the definition and hear more of the variations classical music has to offer — variations being one of the prime sources of its aforementioned pleasure — the IMSP's vast archive has plenty of recordings to satisfy that desire as well, with more added all the time.
