Tchaikovsky, as possibly the most loved composer of all time, epitomizes the first set of criteria. Even casual consumers of classical music are thrilled by his sweeping, romantic, sentimental, and sometimes pathos-filled melodic lines. He penned a great variety of much-performed music in nearly all subgenres of the day, from symphonies, string quartets and concertos, to ballets and operas. He is the kind of composer you might take to a desert isle, the rule being you can take as many recordings by a single composer with you as you want (and something to play them on (D12). You could spend years rotating through his hundreds if compositions without getting bored.
Tchaikovsky, Sleeping Beauty – Introduction: listen about one minute in for one of his most memorable and melancholic melodies.
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Arnold Schoenberg, ca 1947
Photo by Florence Homolka, |
Arnold Schoenberg, on the other hand, is greatly admired for his innovative, experimental, and historically influential
work, and is considered one of the greatest musical theoreticians of all time.
He was one of the principle architects of 20th century modernism, which championed dissonance and "atonality" (a term disliked by Schoenberg), which banished traditional, pleasing harmonies. Over the course of his career, he experimented with the basic elements of music, exploring different scale structures and tonalities. He is largely responsible for the radically different
12-tone or
serialist composition technique. His influence on 20th century music was huge. His music is intellectually challenging and revered by some, though most listeners today still struggle to understand and appreciate it, or don't bother with it at all. I would guess that relatively few people would choose only his music to accompany them on a desert island.
Schoenberg, Verklärte Nacht (1899)– an early, relatively popular work in a romantic style Though Schoenberg's music was radically different and revolutionary, a number of other composers, primarily from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, are also valued for their contributions to the development of Western music. Their music is more comprehensible than that of the modernists, and often quite beautiful, but comes across as dated and limited, and so is little heard today. Schoenberg appears in the consensus list in Tier 3, about halfway through, so not within our core group of greatest composers, but recognized as one of the top-100. Two renaissance composer fare much better. Monteverdi, considered the father of opera, comes in at #16, and Palestrina, who is credited with perfecting the techniques of counterpoint that, composers have followed ever since, comes in at #30.
Their are some ways to measure and compare these two different sets of criteria independent of our gut reactions that go into ranking. If we separate the two out, do they result in completely different lists, or do they agree in some ways?
The first test I call “radio unsilence,” which refers to the frequency with which the works of particular composers are heard on classical music stations. It is similar to Goulding's measure of listings in the old Schwann catalogue of recordings. The second I call “history chatter,” which refers to the frequency with which composers are mentioned in critical musical historical works.
With thousands of classical music radio stations and cable channels, classical music is certainly never silent on this planet. It stands to reason, also, that some composers will be less silent than others, and if we can measure that, it will give us something to compare with our consensus list. This is a relatively easy to do, as many classical radio stations post their daily programs on their websites.
Let’s see what a simple two-day sampling looks like. I compiled the 24-hour playlists of three classical radio stations on two separate days (31 August 2020, Feb. 3, 2022). They were KUSC (University of Southern California), WSMR (University of South Florida, Tampa), and WCPE (an online station). Including only composers who were heard at least three times during the sampling periods, we get the ranked list below. You’ll see that it resembles our consensus list to quite an extent. The exceptions are telling, however.
1. Mozart 34
2. Beethoven 26
3. Haydn 26
4. Vivaldi 23
5. Bach 21
6. Tchaikovsky 15
7. Chopin 15
8. Mendelssohn 14
9. Dvorak 13
10. Händel 10
11. Debussy 10
12. Schubert 10
13. Brahms 10
14. Telemann 9
15. Grieg 9
16. Weber 8
17. Saint-Saëns 7
18. Strauss jr 6
19. Wagner 5
20. Ravel 5
21. Schumann 5
22. Franck 5
23. Verdi 4
24. Rachmaninoff 4
25. Borodin 4
26. Rimski-Korsakov 3
27. Rossini 3
28. Prokofiev 3
Radio programming tends to favor composers with many relatively short pieces, and underrepresents composers of long symphonies, operas, ballets, etc. Mozart wins in this aspect. Haydn and Vivaldi overtake Bach in this survey, maybe for the same reason, or maybe also because much of Bach’s best work is lengthy or perhaps a bit too “brainy” for casual daytime radio fare. Wagner and Verdi fall fairly low on the list, as only excerpts of their operas can find their way into daytime listening, and Stravinsky and Mahler do not appear at all, for similar reasons. This is not to say these latter composers never appear on the radio, just not frequently enough to show up in small, random, samples. A greater number of samples would certainly give a more accurate and informative list, but this brief sample most likely gives a valid picture.
We have to note that most of the composers on this list produced music of great quantity and variety. Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and Haydn (along with Tchaikovsky) wrote every kind of music of their day in great numbers, so they dominate in the survey. Georges Bizet, on the other hand, did not make this list despite having written one of the most popular operas of all time, but relatively little else - how often can a radio station play his Carmen Suite? Schoenberg, other modernists, and very early composers are absent in this test that clearly favors musical pleasure over historical influence.
Sampling YouTube for posted videos provides another measurement, without the restrictions and biases of radio broadcasting, and with a much larger sample size. It is a bit trickier because of inherent search redundancy, different versions of composers’ names, and other people with the same last name. Searching for “Bach” for example, will bring up his several sons, the Bach Society, and anyone else with the same last name, while searching for Johann Sebastian Bach or J. S. Bach bring up only lists that spell out his name exactly in those ways. By searching various ways, however, one can get a general impression of the overall importance of composers on the internet:
1. Wagner
2. Bach
3. Vivaldi
4. Liszt
5. Beethoven
6. Mozart
7. Verdi
8. Schubert
9. Händel
10. Debussy
11. Brahms
12. Schumann
13. Mahler
14. Puccini
15. Mendelssohn
16. Stravinsky
17. Tchaikovsky
18. Chopin
19. Haydn
20. Rossini
Stravinsky and Mahler are here, with Wagner taking a surprising lead. Though not in the same order, the list does mirror the upper part of our consensus list.
What about history chatter? The impact of a composer on the history and development of western music is the stuff of scholars, academics and historians, who generally will not overtly rank composers. There is, however, a hidden form or ranking, or relative importance, that can be gleaned from academic works.
For example, Richard Taruskin’s monumental 5-volume History of Western Music (A6) is available as a searchable online version. One can tally the number of times particular composers are mentioned anywhere in the series. Such a search results in the ranking below, by number of hits. Of course, this is just a sampling, a crude one at that, not a comprehensive survey of scholarly works. Nor does it measure how much is said about a composer in each hit. Each could be a brief mention or a lengthy critical review. For fun, I included Salieri in the sampling. His score is tiny, and even this may be partly at least due to his historical relationship with Mozart.
1. Beethoven 159
2. Wagner 128
3. Mozart 124
4. Stravinsky 122
5. Schoenberg 119
6. Bach 99
7. Haydn 90
8. Liszt 84
9. Händel 60
10. Schubert 59
11. Brahms 56
12. Schumann 51
13. Debussy 43
14. Berlioz 40
15. Monteverdi 40
16. Strauss, R 40
17. Tchaikovsky 36
18. Verdi 36
19. Rossini 35
20. Mendelssohn 33
21. Rimsky-Korsakov 33
22. Palestrina 32
23. Weber 28
24. Mussorgsky 27
25. Gluck 24
26. Ravel 24
27. Donizetti 17
28. Bellini 16
29. Dvořák 16
30. Rachmaninoff 14
31. Vivaldi 13
32. Puccini 12
33. Bizet 10
34. Salieri 7
35. Beach (Amy) 5
36. Hildegard 4
Surprisingly, this list is largely congruent with both our consensus list and the above lists, but with some important exceptions. Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, who was also a major figure in the modernist movement, are front and center near the top of the list. Other innovators, like Weber, Berlioz, Monteverdi, Liszt, and Palestrina, all absent from the radio silence list, rank significantly higher here than they do in the consensus list. Tchaikovsky, on the other hand, comes out at number 17, with only a third of the number of hits as Schoenberg. That confirms my speculation at the beginning of this chapter.
So which is more important in determining the greatness of a composer? Remarkably, most of the top composers in our consensus list are highly rated both for their influence on history and their production of good music, with Beethoven appearing to be in first place. So our gut reactions are not that bad! It is possible to be innovative and also produce music people like to listen to.
Finally, we can get back to the Desert Isle scenario mentioned earlier. Which composer’s works would you take with you if you knew you were going to be stranded for a long time on a deserted island? There is a long-running BBC radio program called the Desert Isle Discs (D12). In the period from 1942 to 2011, the eight most-requested classical composers were as follows:
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Ludwig van Beethoven
Johann Sebastian Bach
Franz Schubert
Giuseppe Verdi
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Sir Edward Elgar
Giacomo Puccini
Sounds pretty familiar, but with a bias toward the native British favorite, Edward Elgar, who only shows up at #31 on our consensus list. Also, there appear to be some opera lovers in the audience, as Verdi and Puccini show up here as well.
The most often requested individual pieces, however, were:
Beethoven - Symphony No 9 in D minor 'Choral
Rachmaninoff - Piano Concerto No 2 in C minor
Schubert - String Quintet in C major
Beethoven Symphony No 6 in F Major 'Pastoral'
Elgar - Pomp & Circumstance March no 1 in D Major 'Land of Hope and Glory'
Beethoven - Piano Concerto No 5 in E Flat Major 'Emperor'
Elgar - Enigma Variations Nimrod
Beethoven - Symphony No 7 in A major
Another feather in Beethoven's cap. Can we now declare him the greatest composer of all time?
There is no absolute basis for whether music is good or bad. If it pleases us in some way, it is good. In that regard humans have a basic instinct for what good music is. A bad piece of rock music will be discarded and forgotten just as quickly as a bad opera or symphony. It has nothing to do with the music’s level of sophistication or technical advancement, but with how it interacts with the human psyche. It does appear though that variety, innovation, and originality are key factors in all forms of great music. More of the same does not cut it over the long term.
Finally, remember that listeners represent the consumer end of the musical food chain. Like any art form, music is a communication between composer and listener, transmitted via performers. If the community of listeners over a sufficient period of time deems one composer superior to another, it is as valid as any assessment by historian, critic, or musician.
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