Favorite Symphonies Quiz

1. Brahms 2.Haydn 3.Mozart 4.Schubert 5.Beethoven 6.Schumann 7.Dvorak. 8. Sibelius 9. Vaughan Williams
Hard to live Tchaikovsky out but Vaughan Williams (or Elgar) wrote the best of modern English Symphonies .

IMO he wrote the most just plain beautiful piece ever written .

https://youtu.be/-mHgucSz1hs?t=1

It seems not possible to me to make such a marriage of pure love
between a violin and the sublime winds .
In the over 8,000 recordings I owned and 2,000 live Classic concerts I’ve been to in the last 60 years this is the Zenith for me .

I’ve heard it live 3 times and many tears flew in all .Listen to it every day and will in the little time I have left.God Willing
.Vaughan Williams started this just before WW I started and though he was to old to be a soldier , he spent the entire war as a ambulance man and saw many thousands of wounded and dead British and Canadian soldiers.
He finished it when he came back and as a combat soldier myself I am sure was not the same man.
A lark takes off in a long , high spiral , I think of the piece as the soul of a soldier wending his way to heaven .

@rvpiano1, you are correct,  the request was for your choice as to the best 1st symphony, the best 2nd symphony ... the best 9th symphony, while using nine composers. I was only commenting on the irony of your complaining about having to leave out some composers while giving two slots to one composer.

@schubert , yours is a very nice list, but do you really think Haydn wrote the best Symphony #2, and Mozart wrote the best Symphony #3?

Other Composers who exceeded 9 include Havergal Brian, who I think wound up in the thirties but who is best known for his First, the Gothic, which calls for Mahler Eighth like playing forces, and Edmund Rubbra, a very under rated Symphonist well worth your attention, who made it into double digits.
  I’m struck by the paucity of references here to composers such as Nielsen, Sibelius, and Rachmaninov, and Brahms didn’t seem to get a lot of love either.  Mahler seems to be a clear favorite, and no one will get a rebuke from me about that....This being an Audiophile site, I wonder how much that enters into the equation?  Mahler’s music, with his full use of the Orchestra and spatial effects, is tailor made for a good system