Greatest Composers of All Time

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.

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.