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i'm not sure about "greats". i would name Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and perhaps Stockhausen. Wagner is an also-ran, Boulez only wrote a couple of good things early in his career, most of the other self-proclaimed greats are worthless. none of those "listenable" composers are alive today, either. the living composers who think of today's music world as a pyramid with "greats" at the top and everyone else on levels underneath with X composer being better than Y composer but worse than W composer etc... whether or not they put themselves at the top of that pyramid, most of them just don't write music that's interesting at all like GF Haas for instance, since his name has come up a couple of times... what is his "21st century masterpiece"? basically just a sanitized mash-up of Grisey and Ligeti with all the spikiness removed, nothing interesting to say or any new ways of saying it, in the words of richard barrett "someone who's studied a lot of scores closely and then thinks what comes into his head are his own ideas rather than an average of all that input". (not that RB is himself blameless on the "striving to create masterpieces" front, look at all those 2+ hour cycles...)

By starting this thread, you gave that Loch Ness Monster tree fitty.

People have said that I have a recognizable style. I don't get it. All my children are unique, I say. I suppose being a Modernest, I work in two minds: originality and technique. I try to let the originality come from the technique, and never from some abstract idea of who I am, a thing that eludes me at all turns. Like the Velveteen Rabbit: “Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.' 'Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit. 'Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. 'When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.' 'Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,' he asked, 'or bit by bit?' 'It doesn't happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. 'You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”

Prior to Beethoven, originality was no-where near as big a worry among (art music) composers as it is now. They simply had to worry about being as competent at composing as possible, in a position more akin to servants. Bach and Mozart's recognisable styles were simply arrived at because of how their genius interpreted the existing musical practices. As time went on, and art music turned into a field so congested with great composers from the past, it became important to be original; after all, why would someone commission someone to write a piece that sounds like Bach, regardless of quality, when they can play Bach's music for free? So now in art music, one must work as hard as possible to achieve an original voice as well as a finely honed one. In the world of commercial composition on the other hand, i'd say things are a lot more similar to the pre-Beethoven days; film directors don't care if you've managed to blend serialism and tibetan throat singing into a gloriously original new art form, they would much rather someone who can sound exactly like Hans Zimmer, without having to pay a Hans Zimmer sized fee.