Who is the Greatest (Not Favourite) Composer

Definitely! Oh, and I just adore "L'incoronazione di Poppea"! I've seen/heard it three times so far, each time with a great conductor (Marc Minkowski, Ren

Mozart. He was an angel. everything he composed was godly and enchanting.

Beethoven and Bach were great too.

and so are Chopin and Tchaikovsky.

but Mozart rocks the most.

We could even go further back and say Machaut for what distinguishes most Western art music from many other culture's art music is its degree of melodic polyphony. Machaut did this to a great degree.

Be as honest as you can - Greatest must not mean Favourite (unless its Beethoven). :D

Most skilled: Mozart

Could do everything better than anyone else. For details, watch Amadeus and listen to the variety and beauty of the music in it. Sure the story's a bit fudged but the music is well used and beautifully performed by Neville Marriner's Academy of St Martin in the Fields.

It's incredible that the mind that touched on the most subtle of human emotion and showed us how music can express layers of feeling (some of the stuff in his opera's with multiple singers simultaneously singing different things but all making complete sense are utterly mind-blowing) produced this wonderfully crazed and demented sounding piece:

Most raw emotional impact: Handel

Invoked raw emotional highs and lows simply unmatched by anyone else. If music is about invoking intense emotions (sorrow, dread, elation, etc), then, perhaps Beethoven was right to say that Handel really is the greatest of all.

Lovely:

YouTube - Farinelli - Lascia ch'io Pianga

Another musical great who often gets overlooked is Vivaldi. Overall isnt in the same class but wrote some truly beautiful music:

Beautiful:

ps.

I absolutely despise the use of thick, corn syrupy female voices in classical and earlier music. It sounds bad. I'll take a fake castrato who sounds half like a vacuum cleaner any day over that over-wrought super-vibrato nonsense (such as renee fleming, te kanawa, etc).

Most skilled: Mozart

Hot dog, I didn't see that coming.

:>

Hot dog, I didn't see that coming.

:>

I'm not the only nut out there. If you ignore the religous mumbo jumbo the rest is pretty much spot on.

I think it is hard to judge most skilled just by what a composer wrote.

I mean Shostakovich wasn't as prolific as Mozart, but he was very "skilled" in composition.

He was able to reconstruct his entire Festive Overture in a few hours (I think it was that piece), winning a bet and a bit of money in the process.

I respectfully disagree. I think you can judge skill by what people wrote. For example, if someone has a well developed vocabulary it shows in the way they speak and write. Having said that, Mozart wrote the overture to Don Giovanni in a few hours.

In terms of skill I mean that Mozart mastered every style of composition he attempted and this mastery is amply demonstrated in the operas where he demonstrates his full range, demonstrating depths of subtlety and expression never reached before or since. My personal favorite is the Magic Flute. Not much of a story but the music is simply breath-taking.

Overture:

YouTube - Mozart: The Magic Flute - Overture - Sir Colin Davis

Wonderfully overacted Queen of the Night:

YouTube - Queen of the Night Aria - Erika Miklosa

A totally different interpretation of the same aria (and equally wonderful):

YouTube - Natalie Dessay : "Der H

Hmmm....I don't see any Donald Fagen up there...:(

~Kal

i dont think its really possible to compare composers, because if you say that a later composer is better than an earlier composer just because he was more skilled, its like saying Einstein was smarter than Newton because his theories were more complicated.

the time difference makes it hard to compare.

The above two posts are completely true imo. I love the music of Ravel and Debussy for example and although there is a high probability that if Mozart had been alive during the early 1900s, he would have equalled or perhaps even superseded the aforementioned composers, there is also a chance that he would have fallen flat on his arse. There's just no way of knowing!

I do however agree that he was immensely able and gifted.

This is my personal favourite Mozart piece. Although I actually find a lot of Mozart's work to be a tad harmonically uninteresting (personal taste), the above piece is one of the few pieces of music that I would not change a note of (although I would love to write my own version of it).

As for Bach:

YouTube - 'Air' from Suite No.3 in D major - Johann Sebastian Bach

Hopefully this piece will live on forever... :sadtears:

famous composers usually arent famous for no reason.......

just saying......

I can't believe Tchaikovsky and Grieg received more votes than Schubert and Brahms!

^Well, Grieg is hard to believe, but Tchaikovsky is understandable.

I was disappointed by the lack of choices. In the end, I was forced to pick Mendelssohn.

I just love how only one baroque composer is represented... because (sarcasm implied) Bach was obviously the greatest of his time...

Let's just ignore Vivaldi, who basically invented the entire concerto form and who finally broke away from modal tonalities to create the major/minor system that's still in use today...

We could also ignore Handel, who knew more about how to write for voices than anyone before or after him, who had an innate knowledge for orchestration, and managed to bring together the past and the future (seriously, Orlando's mad scene can get pretty romantic, harmony-wise), and who could hold himself hands down as one of the top five keyboard improvisers of all time (when other composers who have heard you state that your improvisation sounds better than anything you've ever written, then I think that's enough to back up said statement... Arne said something like that about Handel's music).

Hmmm, Corelli, who actually started instrumental music, Lully who invented the declamation style used in french opera, Rameau who quantified harmony... etc etc.

How could I forget Palestrina, the man whose counterpoint has been studied as the "model of perfection" for the past 400 years. Gesualdo probably wins the "most ahead of his time" award by predating Romantic (and atonal) harmonies many centures before they were used.

If I had to state who the "Best" composer was who's up there, it would be Bach... His sense of form is formidable to Beethoven's (in the St. Matthew and St. John Passions, along with the Art of Fugue, and reusing the same music for both ends to his Mass in b Minor wasn't the worst idea in the world...). Orchestration-wise, just look at his Actus Tragicus, the Brandenburgs, and definately the rest of his cantatas and orchestral suites.

If I need to discuss his contrapuntal ability and his melodic inspiration, this site would not be named "youngcomposers," and he could write entire pieces out of half-measure-length motives... Beethoven never wrote pieces with simply one motive (at least none that I've heard yet- I've only heard the symphonies; so I claim ignorance if he wrote a piece that uses, like, a single note as a motive).

Again, if I had to vote up there, I'd vote with Bach first, Mozart second, Haydn third, and Beethoven fourth... If I got to write the list, Handel goes first, Bach second, Mozart third, Haydn fourth, Vivaldi fifth, and Beethoven sixth...

There really can be no "greatest" composer... each has their merits (even Schoenburg). Beethoven can only be called "greatest" if he managed to do what he did without help... As I hope that we are all well-informed as to Beethoven's education, he did in fact build greatly upon foundations which were created by Mozart and Haydn... in fact some of his symphonies can be traced back to symphonies by those composers. The fact that he changed music from an aristocratic pleasure to the art for the people does constitute some amount of greatness, although he did not do it single-handidly (he had the Enlightenment to thank for some amount of help).

Each major of their composer of their era takes what is given to them, perfects it (or at least gains some ounce of mastery over it), and then creates something new for the next generation. This is why they are remembered. I could be a complete jerk and state what my personal beliefs are about the talents of composers- that Bach and Handel divide the world between them; there is no third... but that would still be my opinion.

Therefore, the greatest composer...... I don't think that any of us are qualified in any way, shape, or form to give that answer: we're all extremely biased towards our favorite eras of music, and towards our favorite composers... One man's Schoenburg is another man's Scarlatti, and vice versa....

wow... this was a long post... Hopefully I haven't offended anyone too badly... my apologies if I have, but trying to answer the question "who is the greatest (not your favorite) composer?" usually melts down into a "how many people can I convince to raise their hand for my favorite guy" contest.

^Well, Grieg is hard to believe, but Tchaikovsky is understandable.

I was disappointed by the lack of choices. In the end, I was forced to pick Mendelssohn.

im glad you picked mendelssohn, even if you were forced to. ;)