Here are the links to my whole top 10 list of the greatest composers (inspired by Anthony Tommasini's New York Times series):
10, 9 (with rules for the list)
8, 7
6, 5
4, 3
2, 1
Honorable mentions
(The complete list.)
[UPDATE: The New York Times author, Anthony Tommasini, just finished his top 10 list.]
2. Mozart
What's so great about Mozart? Why is it that he's routinely ranked one of the top 2 or 3 composers, and no one would dare leave him off the top 10? Like Bach, he didn't invent a new style; he fit comfortably into an existing one. But has there been any other composer, before or since, whom notes seem to flow out of with such beauty and grace?
Here's Sharon Kam playing the Clarinet Concerto, Mozart's last instrumental composition:
His piano sonatas are not Mozart at his very greatest, but they have an understated wonderfulness. This is Vladimir Horowitz playing the first movement of K. 330:
In the last movement of the "Jupiter" Symphony (#41) (conducted here by Jeffrey Tate), Mozart develops several different melodic themes, ending with a Baroque-inspired outburst of polyphony where all the themes seem to meld together. Sheer genius.
As with everyone on this list, there's so much more to him than I can do justice to here. He was the king of the piano concerto. There are his masses, his chamber music . . . All this would be enough to cement his ranking even if he hadn't been one of the greatest opera composers. He did all that in his cruelly short 35 years of life.
1. Beethoven
Tommasini, the NYT author, says there's a consensus among "thinking musicians" (which surely means "people who agree with me") that Bach was the single greatest composer, but to me Beethoven far surpasses any of the others. He's traditionally classified along with Haydn and Mozart as belonging to the "Classical" (capital C) era, but it's hard to fathom what an advance he was over Haydn, his partial contemporary. (Beethoven started writing in the 1700s, and Haydn was productive until his death at age 77 in 1809.)
Beethoven internalized all the existing concepts in Western music up to the beginning of the 19th century, stretched them almost beyond recognition, and probably gave more inspiration to the next 200 years of classical music than anyone else. Later composers could emulate him (Mendelssohn, Schumann), or stand on his shoulders to progress further (Wagner, Brahms), or react against him (Chopin, Debussy), but no one could ignore him.
His stylistic and emotional range was amazing. He could be wild and visionary, as in the Grosse Fuge . . .
. . . tragic, in the second movement of the 7th Symphony . . .
. . . or joyous and replenishing, in the first movement of the "Pastoral" (6th) Symphony.
I think of the whole history of classical music as a mountain. You start at the bottom of one side, which is medieval chant. You climb up the mountain, go down the other side, and when you reach the ground again, you're at late 20th century minimalism.
Higher up the mountain doesn't necessarily mean "better." It has more to do with how structured the music is. When you go from Baroque up to Classical, the arc of a piece becomes more dramatic. (As the musicologist Donald Francis Tovey said, you can randomly drop into a Classical piece you've never heard and have some clue about whether you're hearing the beginning, middle, or end of the movement; this doesn't work with Baroque.)
In the Romantic era, you start going downhill, with plenty of that old Classical form, but also a looser, more improvisational sensibility.
The 20th century goes steeply downhill, challenging all expectations of structure, harmony, melody, and rhythm.
At the top of the mountain — fusing the best aspects of Baroque, Classical, and Romantic (with a dash of prophetic modernism) in magnificent, awe-inspiring structures — is Beethoven.
(The complete list.)
4. Bach
Bach composed during the late Baroque, so he didn't forge a new style the way Haydn or Debussy or Schoenberg did. And the Baroque style itself is more limited than the music that would follow him. Yet he's so widely called one of the top 3 composers of all time that I feel slightly apologetic at ranking him "only" #4. Evidently, greatness is not just about originality. Bach transcended the limitations of his era and brought an intellectual depth previously unknown to Western music.
I think of him as generally mild-mannered and contemplative, but he was also capable of overwhelmingly intense emotion. Here's "Herr, Unser Herrscher" ("Lord, Our Master") from the St. John Passion, conducted by Jos van Veldhoven:
Bach's Cello Suites allow the cellist to explore melody alone, in a way no other composer has equalled. Here's Hidemi Suzuki playing No. 5 in C minor:
If you wanted to choose one little piece by anyone that perfectly distills the idea of pure, simple music for music's sake, it would be hard to do better than the 1st Prelude of the Well-Tempered Clavier (played here by Lang Lang):
3. Brahms
Schoenberg famously wrote, in an essay called "Brahms the Progressive," that Brahms had been misunderstood as one of the more conservative composers of the Romantic era, and that in fact he foreshadowed the atonalism of the 20th century. Fortunately, we don't need to take a stance on this musicological issue to become immersed in the autumnal world of Brahms, where every note seems to be aching or yearning or striving for something. Brahms, who died in 1897, often sounds to me like he's saying a long farewell to pre-Modern classical music itself.
The first movement of the Piano Trio #1 (Op. 8) has one of the most beautiful melodies I've ever heard (played here by Alexi Kenney, Oliver Herbert, Roman Rabinovich):
Here's the first movement of A German Requiem, where the non-religious Brahms put his individual spin on a traditionally Christian genre. Here's the whole thing, conducted by Jeffrey Thomas. The first 2 movements are spell-binding.
Here's Brahms's 4th Symphony (his last), conducted by Klaus Mäkelä. Does music get any better than the first movement of this symphony?
(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:
(The complete list.)
8. Chopin
The quintessential lone pianist exploring his soul through the instrument. The most intimate and introverted of the greats.
Some of the most characteristically Chopinesque pieces are his 58 Mazurkas. (A mazurka is a traditional Polish folk dance that might have been fairly obscure if not for Chopin.) Here are 7 of them, played by Evgeny Kissin (for a list of the specific pieces, click through to YouTube):
Here are Chopin's 24 Preludes, played by Yuja Wang:
7. Schubert
Impossible to neatly label or summarize. Is he Classical or Romantic or what? Who cares? His body of work is fascinatingly varied and staggeringly huge, yet he died at only 31 — a terrible loss to music.
He's known for his over 600 songs (in the traditional sense of "short pieces that are sung"). But I'm more interested in classical music without vocals, so here are a few of my favorites:
Schubert's 5th Symphony is like the best Mozart symphony Mozart never wrote. He was only 19 when he wrote this (conducted by Andrés Orozco-Estrada):
His String Quintet (for the unusual lineup of string quartet plus an extra cello, instead of an extra viola) is at the highest level of any chamber music by anyone. It was his last instrumental composition, written just two months before he died. This performance by the Afiara Quartet plus Joel Krosnick starts at 8:20, after Krosnick's introduction:
I had lent a few CDs to a friend who was getting into classical music, and he brought up the last movement of the "Trout" Quintet (which also has an unusual lineup: piano, violin, viola, cello, and double-bass). I've talked before about how it's the rare piece of music that gives me a strong feeling of: "Aha, this is it!" My friend essentially told me he felt that way about the "Trout" finale. So do I, and here it is (played by Julian Rachlin, Mischa Maisky, Mihaela Ursuleasa, Nobuko Imai, and Stacey Watton):
The "Unfinished" Symphony has a profound sense of completeness:
That question has prompted over a thousand readers of the New York Times to give their opinions (here and here and here and here). [Update: Commenters on my mom's blog are also opining.] The Times writer Anthony Tommasini still hasn't given his list yet; he's running a series of pieces where he agonizes over who should be in the top 10 (also at those links).
I'm going to follow Tommasini's rules:
I am focusing on Western classical music. . . . [G]iants like George Gershwin, Duke Ellington and Stephen Sondheim are outside my purview here. And on the assumption that we are too close to living composers to assess their place and their impact, I am eliminating them from consideration.Now, here's my list. I'll add 2 a day from now to Friday.
Finally, I am focusing on the eras since the late Baroque. You could make a good case for Josquin or Monteverdi, but I won’t. The traditions and styles were so different back then as to have been almost another art form.
