Greatest Composers of All Time

Learsfool,

The tuba player/violinist story was a bit of a cheap shot. My point was of course that absent familiarity and appreciation with a wide range of classical forms and formats, one is not really in a position to rank composers. My tuba player friend loked and was most interested in what he got to play, and thus rather blinkered him. Me, I don't play any instrument well enough to count as a musician in any sense, but I am familiar, even intimate, and love very side range of music, classical and otherwise.

All of what you say about Wagner is at least arguably true, and I telescoped my agreement in my first couple of sentences. But I think that, unless you have a quite technical sense of what "classical" means (a perfectly good sense, of course, but not the only one), many 20th century symphonies and concertos and string quartets, etc, get to count, not just Prokofiev 1.

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.

I think the op's question is nearly unanswerable in any specific way(I also don't think it needs an answer), I just have a tangential thought. I'm a classical musician, and I play in orchestras a lot. As such, I have a lot of repertoire that I need to listen to and practice. I have found over the last few years in music school that you simply cannot listen to, for example, Mahler the same way you would listen to Mozart. You have to approach every composer with his aesthetic firmly in mind. It might seem obvious, but when we approach classical (lowercase c) music with the general mindset of "I'm going to listen to x symphony" we are setting ourselves up for a sub-optimal experience.

Greatest Composer? Hard choice. But the one Classical Composer that has the largest iconic status of all time is Beethoven. He has more books published and in print on him than any other. Mozart comes in second. His Symphonie's, Concerto's and Sonata's are globally recognized as the greatest ever wriiten. His music has been played more in motion picture's, TV Commercials and radio ads than any other composer. By 1805 the People of Vienna referred to Beethoven as the King of the Piano. Between 1792 and 1797 Beethoven beat the top three piano player's in Europe in competition's in the Palace's of Vienna. Those player's were Joseph Gelenek, Lipavsky, and Josef Wolffi. Winning competition's back then would secure you a one year contract to live in a Palace apartment as a house composer with a monthly salary and a horse and carriage. Beethoven never lost a competition. Beethoven is responsible for designing and giving birth to the first early Grand Piano due to his deafness. Around 1809 he drew sketches on paper of a piano with larger hammer's, longer piano string's, and more key's and sent his sketche's to the John Broadwood and Son's piano company in London. Broadwood built the piano. First of its kind.

Yes, but more than anything that simply says that LVB grew up a generation later than WAM. He came along as music was emerging from a church and court medium to a point where the newly-emerging middle class was creating an outlet that previously did not exist.

Personally, I'll take Beethoven over Mozart most of the time, but that's just my opinion. Again, there is no one absolute best.