The top 10 greatest classical composers (6, 5 . . .)

(The complete list.)

6. Haydn

Haydn is known as "the father of the symphony." He might not have actually invented the symphony, but he made it great. The same is true of the string quartet.

Most 19th century composers paid little attention to Haydn, but it's hard to imagine Mozart or Beethoven without him.

He claimed he wasn't a very happy person, but who else has ever produced so many compositions (over 1,000) that sound so much like sunshine? Here's the first movement of his 104th Symphony, conducted by Achim Holub:



His comical approach of toying with your expectations was especially strong in his finales; for instance, here's the last movement of the 96th Symphony, with Jan Caeyers conducting Le Concert Olympique:




5. Debussy

You could easily pigeonhole him as a composer of pleasantly "impressionistic" music on the borderline of Romantic and Modern. I prefer to think of him as the most revolutionary composer of the 20th century. If you had to pick just one composition that gave the Modern era permission to disregard everything that came before, you might pick Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (Prélude à L'Après-Midi d'un Faune). It flows along gently instead of hammering you over the head the way other revolutionary pieces (like the "Eroica" Symphony or the Rite of Spring) do. Here's François-Xavier Roth conducting the London Symphony Orchestra:



A more overtly Modern work is the 12 Etudes. Here's #9, For Repeated Notes (Pour les Notes Repétées), played by Christina McMaster:

Haydn's brilliant blandness

I've been on a classical-music kick lately. I was just listening to Haydn's "London" Symphony (No. 104), and longing for the days when the second movement ("Andante") could be considered the height of entertainment.



The first couples minutes of the movement are about as ploddingly bland as you could imagine: slow, major key, regular meter, etc. But the blandness is worth it for the section starting at 2:45, where he incongruously switches the main theme to a minor key as a way to segue into the energizing pay-off.

Then, at 3:20, the energetic section gets abruptly cut off, and there's an awkward pause -- one of Haydn's wonderful trademarks. For the next few seconds, you feel like it's going to go back to the plodding blandness -- but no, it's still energetic for a while. Then, at 3:50-4:00, he transitions back to the slow theme from the beginning of the movement -- a smooth, gentle transition that's the perfect foil to the earlier awkward pause.

At that point, we really are back to the slow, quiet music that we started out with, but -- this is the beauty of classical music -- the original theme takes on a new, richer character now that we've been through the adventure in the middle.

I find it hard to imagine something like this being written today, with this much trust in the listener's attention span. I don't mean by a contemporary "classical" composer (since classical music has stopped having much cultural relevance), but by a popular songwriter. There'd be too much concern about the audience losing interest before the pay-off.