The Greatest [Who were the top ten composers of all time?]

YOU know that a new year has truly arrived when critics stop issuing all those lists of the best films, books, plays, recordings and whatever of the year gone by. These lists seem to be popular with readers, and they stir up lively reactions.

Yet in other fields, critics and insiders think bigger. Film institutes periodically issue lists of the greatest films of all time. (“Citizen Kane” seems to have a lock on the top spot.) Rock magazines routinely tally the greatest albums ever. And think of professional tennis, with its system of rankings, telling you exactly which player is No. 1 in the world, or 3, or 59.

Imagine if we could do the same in classical music, if there were ways to rank pianists, sopranos and, especially, composers. The Top 10 composers of all time. Now that’s the list I have secretly wanted to compile. It would be absurd, of course, but fascinating. My thinking about this was shaken, though, last spring, when Mohammed e-mailed me. That’s Mohammed Rahman, then a freshman at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. He was writing a paper on why people have different musical tastes, and he wanted to interview me. His questions were so thoughtful that I met him at a cafe.

Mohammed picked my brain about how my tastes had been formed, about what I looked for in good music. Inevitably we came to the question of how it gets decided that certain music, certain composers are the best. And of course some really are. I’m open-minded but not a radical relativist.

So if you were to try to compile a list of the 10 greatest composers in history, how would you go about it? For me

Paganini...for nothing more than the Caprices.

His Violin Concerto No. 1 is really his greatest work. I wore out some old 78 my father had when I was four or five years old listening to it over and over. It might have been Zino Francescatti with Ormandy and Philadelpha. A number of years ago I saw a CD rerelease of this and immediately bought two copies, one for myself of course, and one I mailed to my sister as a surprise. In fact I think I'll take it out and listen to it now.

1) Beethoven

2) Back

3) Schubert

4) Chopin

5) Lennon & McCartney

6) Vivaldi

7) George & Ira Gershwin

8) Rogers & Hammerstein

9) Irving Berlin

10) Willie Nelson

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.

??????

"Traditions and styles?" Sometimes writers dwell so much on "style" they fail to say much about music. Maybe the writer is not very familiar with Dowland, Francesco da Milano, Corelli, Gabrielli, etc. It's OK to limit the list to "late baroque" (starting when?) and later, but the above comment is questionable.

Other than this, it's an interesting article.

Kollman's "Sun of Composers" 1799 (Beethoven was not that famous yet).

What I really find fascinating is that their type of intelligence doesn’t seem to exist anymore. Where is today’s Beethoven? These guys wrote celebrated compositions in DAYS from pen to performance and were unbelieveably prolific in their output (Bach, Beethoven, Telemann, Handel, Donizetti, Mozart). Today is is an endeavor that takes months or years to come out with 1 composition considered noteworthy.

I've had this discussion before regarding the lack of great composers (like Bach, Beethoven, Mozart) in modern times. The answer is so obvious that many people overlook it.

The period that roughly runs from 1600 to 1850 was a unique time in human civilization. For the first time, people with artistic ability were able to completely devote themselves to their craft thanks to patronage - a practice where wealthy individuals (usually in the ruling class) would "sponsor" an artist by either taking him into their household as a servant or providing financial support.

Yet this period of time was also before television, radio, mass media, and the countless other distractions that occupy our modern lives. So these artists and composers were basically working on their craft from sunup to sundown with little or no interruption from outside sources.

It is hard to imagine today what everyday life was like back in the days of Johann Sebastian Bach or Ludwig Beethoven but if we could, we would likely find it incredibly boring. So if you were a composer during those times, well, that is pretty much what you did the entire day (when you weren't teaching students or conducting performances of your compositions).

In sort, there are simply too many distractions in our daily life to ever attain the compositional skill set of even a Handel, Haydn or Schubert. Imagine if Ludwig Beethoven was around today, fighting traffic jams on the interstate to get to and from work, checking his stocks on his home computer, watching the NFL playoffs on TV, flying to places like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles to meet with orchestras performing his works, downloading the latest John Grisham novel to his Kindle, playing Wii video games with his nephew, meeting with film directors who have contracted him to score their movies, trying to get his laptop to boot up so he can get a little composing in before the Jets-Colts game...and on and on.

While Beethoven would still be a very successful composer today based on his abilities, he'd likely never be able to produce works on the scale of the Fifth Symphony or Missa Solemnis as he did back when there were not all these distractions of modern life.

Oh, this is fun, and purely subjective:

1. Mozart

2. Ralph Vaughn Williams

3. Charles Ives

4. Sergei Prokofiev

5. Franz List

6. Henry Purcell

7. Giacomo Puccini

8. Claude Debussy

9. Beethoven

10. Gustav Mahler

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