Top Ten Pieces of Music Written Before 1900

Me ^ | 12-05-01 | Pharmboy

[Pharmboy]

Ask the question this way: If you were stranded on a desert island with a CD player and a good sound system, what ten pieces would you take with you that were written before the 20th Century?

My list:
1) Beethoven's Appassionata sonata for piano
2) Bach's Partita Number 2 for solo violin
3) Mozart's Symphony Number 41
4) Wagner's Overture to Tristan und Isolde
5) Beethoven's String Quartet Opus 131
6) Chopin's Ballade Number 4
7) Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto (IMO the only worthwhile thing he ever wrote)
8) Schubert's Impromptus (all of them)
9) Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata
and 10) Bach's Mass in B Minor

[bwteim]

The Ellington adaptations are available, as I say, on an album called Three Suites. Best place to look is in the jazz section under Ellington and in the subcategory of Columbia/Sony Records.

Hey, thanks for the great directions, BluesDuke. The only thing you left out is your card number to give the clerk when I pick them up today! :)

[VillageBlacksmith]

You have good taste, Joanie.

You have FreepMail.

[NewAmsterdam]

What a delight to see so many people interested in classical music! Thank goodness that the love of music isn't dead yet after decades of bombardment with pop-rubbish.

My suggestions:

Beethoven's 31st and 32nd piano sonatas (probably the most beautiful music I have ever heard)

Beethoven's Razumovsky quartets (opus 59)

Bach's cantata 'Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland II'

Rachmaninov's Preludes (esp. no. 24, what a lovely piece of classical kitsch)

George Enescu's Sonatas for violin and piano

I could go on for a while, if you wish.

[Pharmboy]

Thanks for the post. Never heard of Enescu--will check him out, though.

[NewAmsterdam]

George Enescu (1881-1955) was a Rumanian who lived and worked in Paris quite often. He intergrated Romanian folk music into his pieces, just as Bela Bartok did with Hungarian folk songs.

Of a very special (difficult to grasp) beauty is the 15th string quartet by Shostakovic. It is a gloomy but serene piece written in 1975, I think. Beautiful, though.

Oh yes, Wagner's 'Wesendonk Lieder', don't forget those.

[IronJack]

The Chorale ("Ode to Joy") from Beethoven's Ninth
Beethoven's Violin Concerto in D Major
Overture to The Marriage of Figaro by WA Mozart
Beethoven's "Consecration of the House" Overture
"Siegfried's Funeral" from the Ring of the Niebelungen by Ricard Wagner
The "Fra Diavolo" Overture by Daniel Francois Obert

Oh yeah, and anything else by Ludwig von Beethoven, including, but not limited to: the Egmont Overture, the Eroica Symphony, the Pastorale, the C Minor (Fifth) Symphony, and recordings of the maestro humming in the shower.

[IronJack]

Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings.

[IronJack]

the second movement from ???, y'know, in the hall of the mountain kings, and all that.

Edward Grieg, the Peer Gynt Suite.

[IronJack]

I do think that Beethoven's 9th is the best piece of music that man has created

Second that motion. Every note was wrung from the tears of angels. It isn't music, it's God thinking aloud.

[wozzeck]

Sokay intolerant- most people don't know that. He was also pretty torn up over his religion too. Mahler was born a Jew but converted to Christianity because he thought his music would be more widely accepted. You really start to hear this in #5. The trumpet solos (after the initial funeral march) are where you can really hear this. Mahler walked around with the voices in his sick head going, "Chistian! No Jew! No Christian! Dammit I'm Jewish! Oy Vey I'm A Christian! No, A Jew! Or.....A Christian! No, Jewish!" (You get the point) This was all on top of the fact that all Mahler really wanted in life was to be Richard Wagner......Is that too much to ask for a composer?

[wozzeck]

Yes- Do a 20th century music thread- I will help you!! BWAH-HAHAHAHAHAHA! Webern, anybody? Perhaps even, dare I say it.....Zemlinsky???

[freebilly]

Lot's of dreck was composed in the 20th century as well as the 19th, 18th, 17th, etc.

For every 1000 talentless hacks there's a Gershwin, Copeland, O'Connor, or Holst.

For every freebilly there are 1000 wozzeck's. LOL

[BluesDuke]

Hey, thanks for the great directions, BluesDuke. The only thing you left out is your card number to give the clerk when I pick them up today! :)

Nice try, but thou art not dealing with a dumb genie!

[BluesDuke]

all Mahler really wanted in life was to be Richard Wagner......Is that too much to ask for a composer?

Yes.

[BluesDuke]

Another entry for the list, in case no one else has plugged it in yet:

Richard Strauss, Also Sprach Zarathustra (the full composition, not just the famed overture from you know what film...)

And...

Gyorgy Ligeti, Requiem for Soprano, Mezzo Soprano, Two Mixed Choirs, and Orchestra and Adventures. (I have recordings of the complete scores of each piece, not just the edits used in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Ligeti is perhaps one of the most underrated of the 20th Century classical avant garde...)

[epow]

I'm afraid my taste in music isn't refined enough for this "high brow" thread, but I'll give my mostly low-brow romance-era choices for that desert isle anyway just so the aficianados of cerebral music can have some laughs.

1. Almost any Pavarotti cd of 19th century Italian and French operatic arias.

2. Beethoven: 5th Symphony

3. Beethoven: 9th Symphony

5. Rachmaninov: 2nd piano Concerto, preferably by Artur Rubinstein

6. Liszt: Hungarian Rhapsody # 2 (in his original piano version)

7. Greig: Piano Concerto in A minor

8. Handel: Messiah

9.Grieg: Peer Gynt Suite

10.Tchaikovsky: Romeo and Juliet (no, I'm not gay)

[downwithsocialism]

What I want to know, pretty lady, is---Can you PLAY any of these? ;-)

Check your mail.

[Pharmboy]

10.Tchaikovsky: Romeo and Juliet (no, I'm not gay)

Not that there's anything wrong with that...;-)

[Bob Quixote]

BTW have you ever heard Wilson Pickett's cover version of "Sugar Sugar"? He made it sound like a real song!

[Intolerant in NJ]

This was all on top of the fact that all Mahler really wanted in life was to be Richard Wagner......poor mixed up guy...there was a good biography on him a year or so ago, maybe on PBS, which explained his conversion as a result of his ambition to become director of (I think) the Vienna Opera, which would not hire a Jew to the post...they pretty much played down his apparent emotional/mental problems except for his morbid preoccupation with his children's mortality...he seems one of the more vivid examples of the composer's music reflecting his life....