Greatest Composers of All Time

Yes, well, Wagner, real important and all that, for sure. Highly influential. His experiments in tonality, chromaticism, and the unification of forms all obviously a big deal. But a) he wrote Opera only (or almost only), and b) the classical forms and formats that he might appear to have transcended in fact lived on past him, while the format his championed did not. Corigliano still writes symphonies, Carter and Feldman wrote string quartets, and many many modern masters have written piano sonatas. Many of all of these still employ classical forms such as sonata allegro, rondo, fugue, and many are rich with counterpoint. But where are the modernists who write anything really Wagnerian? I don't deny the influence of course, but it is easy to overstate it.

Reason (a) above -- writing in either one or only a handful of formats -- similarly for me disqualifies composers like Bruckner, Mahler, Chopin, Verdi, and some others from the list. The composers I listed above mastered all the formats and instruments, and were prolific as well.

Learsfool says many interesting things, most of them very reasonable. but being a horn player no more requires or justifies selecting Mahler than, e.g., being a classical guitarist would require or justify picking Fernando Sor. I had 2 good friends in college, one a tuba player and the other a violinist. The tuba player knew and loved Mahler, Dvorak, Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky-Ravel, Holst, Prokofiev, Strauss. The violinist knew and loved music, period.

If I were a classical horn player, I'd aspire most to play in a performance of Mahler's third symphony !

I understand the perspective but would tend to disagree that the greatest composers wrote all forms. In the case of Mahler, for example, I recall reading that his symphonies were more grand vehicles in which to incorporate many simpler motifs like songs but on a grand symphonic scale.

In other words, if Mahler were around today, he might be doing "concept albums". :^)

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.

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.