These discussions are always fun, even though they are quite silly, really. The inclusion of Liszt is absurd for me. I agree with many here who think Stravinsky should be on the list. Another glaring omission, except from Tommassini's list, is Bela Bartok, who is easily in the top fifteen based on sheer compositional craft alone. It would be difficult to find a list of the best pieces of music ever written that did not include his Concerto for Orchestra. Another interesting omission, though much more debatable, is Richard Strauss - again, for me, probably deserving mention on sheer craft alone, though even he once famously referred to himself as "the greatest second-rate composer," which is one of my favorite composer quotes ever. |
Oh, I meant to add that I would beg to differ with the OP - in fact, a great many audiophiles listen to at least some classical music - it is classical music, after all, that provides by far the toughest test for a great system, with it's much greater dynamic range and much greater range of timbres. Perhaps the younger audiophiles do not listen to as much anymore, but I would argue that very few long-term audiophiles (and I mean decades long) do not listen to any classical. |
Hi Chayro - I think we are mostly in agreement, actually. When I mentioned that classical was the best way to test a system, what I was actually driving at is that the type of person that is a total gearhead and is not really into music at all, as you described in your follow-up post to mine, is almost never a classical music fan. I think that there is a great deal of irony in that, since classical would actually show off their toys much more than whatever else they are blasting through their systems. As you say yourself, almost none of those type of guys are listening to classical. Classical music lovers who are audiophiles normally either have a very clear idea of what they want in equipment (as far as how they want it to sound), or they like to experiment, and don't really need suggestions from others. They also often have made more of an effort to train their ears in general, since classical music usually requires more careful listening anyway.
I would also say that this particular forum is a little unusual in it's relative lack of discussion of music period, not just classical. On just about every other board I visit, there is quite a bit more discussion of music than on this one, and much of it is indeed about classical. There's a really good jazz discussion going on on this board right now, but I've never seen a similar discussion about really any other type of music on this board. Just about all of the really good discussions on this board center around gear, or aspects of listening that concentrate on the equipment rather than the music itself. Although of course the main focus of this site is the gear, and I get that, for a professional musician like myself, the almost total lack of discussion of music itself on this board is pretty depressing. |
One interesting thing to me is that unless I am remembering wrong, no one has mentioned Bruckner on this thread. In Europe, he is still considered second only to Beethoven as a symphonist. Rnm4, I mostly like your list, though I personally would not list either Ravel or Shostakovitch. To name two other 20th century candidates, how about Prokofiev and Hindemith? As a horn player, I also must have both Strauss and Mahler in a top ten. Another one of my favorites is the late Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo - no one wrote music as chromatic as his again until Wagner. Anyone not familiar with his madrigals in particular should check them out, especially the fifth and sixth books. For an American inclusion in the discussion, I like to promote Charles Ives, for me a much more quintessentially American composer than say Copland. |
Hi Brownsfan - I would certainly agree that a case for Britten in a top 15 is a very strong one.
@Newbee - it could be argued (and I have, against no less an authority than Robert Greenberg) that Wagner had a greater effect on the development of music than any other artist has ever had on their particular art. He is the textbook definition of a true iconoclast. As influential as Beethoven was, music still developed along roughly the same lines after him - whereas after Wagner, it splinters off into all kinds of different reactions, both for and against what he did. Harmony in particular was changed forever. |
Hi Newbee - Mozart and Haydn indeed did begin writing works in which all of the movements were unified by motivic development. Mozart's last three great symphonies, and also the Prague; Haydn picked up on this further after Mozart's death with the London symphonies. This was not a new thing with Beethoven, though he did it with much smaller motivic units than his predecessors - this was the main difference, as well as his expansion of the symphonic form. Beethoven's Romanticism is often greatly exaggerated - formally speaking, he is a Classical composer through and through. This is even the case with Schubert, when he writes in sonata form in the symphonies, chamber music, etc. It is in the song form where Schubert begins to be Romantic. The Romantic movement in music does not really start until their successors - Chopin, Schumann and Liszt in particular. These are the first composers who are completely Romantic in outlook and form. The late Charles Rosen wrote a great book on this very subject, which I happened to just finish reading a couple of weeks ago.
As far as the horn in Wagner's day - it was actually very little different from our modern horns, except they were mostly single horns, and still used some crooks, as opposed to the modern "double" horn which does not require crooks. But the valves on the horns in Wagner's day were very little different from our own. The Vienna Philharmonic still uses that type of instrument to this day, by the way. I am a big fan, and keep threatening to buy a Vienna one of these days and use it in my orchestra. As a low horn player, I could probably get away with it in many circumstances. If you search the Vienna Horns, they have recorded a couple of great discs. Those instruments are essentially unchanged from Wagner's day.
Also, the size of the orchestra Wagner ideally liked for his works was indeed the equivalent of the modern large symphony orchestra, though he often had to make do with less earlier in his career - but this was not by his choice. In fact, Wagner loved to triple the winds when performing Beethoven, making the orchestra even larger, something which is not done anymore generally (though again, it is sometimes done in Vienna in certain cases, for instance the third movement of the 6th). Mahler also liked to do that. |
Hi Tubegroover - the main thing about the 5th symphony is what I alluded to in my previous post. Instead of a longer melody, the "theme" that is developed is simply that four-note motif at the opening of the work. This was the radical aspect of it, if you will, though interestingly there is nothing "Romantic" about that part of it - in fact, it is a concentration of a very Classical procedure. It also has the expanded codas, and the interesting transition between the scherzo and final movement. But despite these things, it is a very Classical work, in form. A better choice for your argument would have been the Eroica symphony, with it's vague association with Napoleon, and the "heroic" concept, though again, very Classical in form. Or the Pastoral symphony. But even with those two examples, Beethoven was very insistent that there was not real "program," as there would be in Berlioz Symphony Fantastique, a much more "Romantic" work, or the tone poems of Liszt. These are the sorts of steps Beethoven pointedly refused to take into the Romantic era.
In style, yes he is quite a bit different from Mozart and Haydn, though Mozart also foreshadowed the Romantic era in many ways in his operas, especially in Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute. In his symphonies, Beethoven used a wider range of dynamics and a wider variety of articulations, and took full advantage of new innovations in the instruments themselves, deliberately pushing these boundaries, and in this way he is closer to the Romantic era in spirit. And of course there is the innovation of the chorus and soloists brought into the realm of the symphony. But that said, he is essentially a Classical composer - he did not experiment in new forms, as the early Romantics did. In fact, a great many early Romantic composers decided Beethoven had done all that could be done with what they considered an essentially Classical form, the symphony, and avoided it altogether, Wagner being the most famous case in point. Others disagreed, particularly Brahms, who is of course considered a very conservative composer because he stuck to the Classical forms.
Sorry for the rambling post, need to get to bed. |
Hi Rnm4 - I'm gonna have to call shenanigans on one comment you make, the one about the violinist and the tubist. Your story speaks more to the people involved, not the instruments they happen to play. A person is no more inherently musical because he plays the violin rather than the tuba. To argue otherwise is absurd.
That said, lets get to your legitimate points. Yes, some 20th century composers wrote symphonies, but they are not Classical in any sense (with the exception of course of Prokofiev's famous first symphony), including structurally. Wagner's influence on the composers that followed extended for many decades on music in general, not just opera (in fact, the development of opera did not at all happen as he envisioned it, a fact his detractors love to point out - this fact, however, does not diminish his actual influence on the history of music). Pretty much every composer after him had to deal with what he had done, either for it or against it, well into the 20th century (in great contrast to Beethoven, who everyone loved). Current, 21st century composers are free of this, of course. But there are many reasons why Wagner was as late as the 1980's the third most written about figure in the Western world, behind only Christ and Napoleon. Not sure if he still is, but as of his centennial in 1983 he was indeed. Some of these reasons don't have anything to do with music, but let's not get into all that here. Speaking of him as an artist, I still maintain that there has never been a greater iconoclast in the history of the arts. After Beethoven, music went in new directions, definitely, but after Wagner, it was never the same, splintering off in countless directions from the possibilities he opened up.
@Tubegroover - the above statement was exactly what Greenberg and I got into a great debate about when I was taking a seminar from him in grad school. I deliberately made it (during my required presentation, for which I had chosen Wagner) to bait him into that argument, just to see how much time I could get him to waste on it, because I knew he wouldn't be able to resist it. Who won? Take a wild guess, it was his class, and he had to keep control of it. But afterwards, he admitted being very impressed by my argument, which was really nice of him to say, and he didn't penalize me for the wasted time, either. I did like him alot and I do highly recommend his stuff - he has a great way of presenting things in very clear ways to musical laymen. |
Hi Rnm4 - yes, we were indeed using the term Classical in a much narrower sense earlier in the thread. And it is also true that almost no symphonies written in the 20th century had the same type of form that they did in the Classical and even Romantic eras. Some composers still called their works symphonies, and I am not saying they are not symphonies - but I am saying that they do not the same structure anymore as a Classical era symphony. A symphony by Nielsen, or Shostakovitch, or Henze bears only a surface resemblance to a Haydn symphony. Same with concertos, string quartets, etc. To use an analogy with a different art form, think of the term "novel," and how it's various forms developed over the centuries.
Now some composers did deliberately write some works in what is called a Neo-Classical style, where the form is closer, but other aspects of the works, particularly harmony, are still very far removed from the Classical era. No one would mistake Stravinsky's Rake's Progress for a Mozart opera, for instance.
Speaking of making "best" lists, I actually when I was in school did two different surveys of hundreds of musicians each time where I asked them to list their ten "favorite" composers, sort of a desert island kind of thing. The big difference being it was specifically "favorite," not "best." When stated in that way, you do get much more variation in what professional musicians will answer, not to mention students. Though interestingly, the two times I did the survey the total results came out quite similar, despite it being two completely different groups of musicians, with a very wide variety in both surveys. Enough so that it was kosher with the stat people, anyway, as far as being statistically significant, or whatever the term is. |
Audiozen, your statement in your first post today is incorrect. Wagner is the most written about figure in classical music, by miles. In fact, at one point, he was the third most written about figure in the Western world, behind only Christ and Napoleon. This was true in the late 1980s, anyway, and I seriously doubt any other composer has passed him in the 45 years or so since. |
Thanks for the clarification, Audiozen! To the subject of Mozart's piano concertos - one of the very underrated things about them is that they were actually used by him as laboratories of orchestration, particularly wind orchestration. His last symphonies and operas, etc. would not have been the masterworks they are without this type of experimentation. |
