The top 10 greatest classical composers (2, 1)

(The complete list.)

[UPDATE: The New York Times author, Anthony Tommasini, just finished his top 10 list.]

2. Mozart

What's so great about him? 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 first movement of the Clarinet Concerto, Mozart's last instrumental composition:





His piano sonatas are not Mozart at his very greatest, but they have a quiet, 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 here even if he hadn't been one of the greatest opera composers ever. 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 shortly before 1800, and Haydn was productive up 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 Gross Fuge (Alban Berg Quartett) . . .



. . . tragic, in the second movement of the 7th Symphony (conducted by Keith Salmon) . . .



. . . or joyous and replenishing, in the first movement of the "Pastoral" (6th) Symphony (conducted by Eric Jacobsen).



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 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.