A recent article by Anthony Tommasini for the New York Times took on the impossible (and in some ways pointless) task of picking a “top ten” list of composers from the millennium-plus span of Western music. I noticed that he was falling prey to the shortcoming of thinking in terms of should instead of is — he was putting folks in there that should be considered Top Ten, in his opinion, for various educational/music-apprish reasons. Thus his election of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, put there, I suspect, due to his thinking that there really should be some 20th century composers on his list.
And he’s welcome to his opinion. Nor am I going to soil my nappies by attempting such a list myself. But it occurs to me that there are composers who absolutely must appear on any “best” list, creators whose achievements place them beyond discussion concerning their merits. To put it differently, these are composers whose absence from such a list would hoist red flags in my mind; were they to be missing, I would immediately suspect the list’s compiler of either harboring an agenda or having a few bats in the belfrey.
So let’s consider those folks: they should come to mind instantaneously. I would suggest that if you have to think about them, then they aren’t it.
Johann Sebastian Bach
I can’t imagine an honor roll of Western music without JSB. What an amazing journey he has had in public esteem — from a hardworking life as an underappreciated civic, church, and courtly kapellmeister to a virtually unassailable position amongst the greats of Western music. His instrumental music is foundational to the training of any young performer; imagine trying to raise a keyboard player without the Inventions or the Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach or the Well-Tempered Clavier or the French Suites — and then trying to imagine life as a grown-up artist without those same works plus the other suites, the Goldberg Variations, the concertos, and the like. Where is the violin without the solo partitas, or the sonatas, or the concertos? The cello without those suites?
And that’s just the instrumental music. Consider Western music without the Mass in B Minor, the two great passions, the Brandenburgs, the orchestral suites, the Christmas Oratorio, the motets, the chorales, the cantatas, the Musical Offering, the Art of Fugue: the mind reels.
But even more to the point, it’s hard to imagine our musical world today without Bach’s example. His counterpoint remains the gold standard, despite its often radical and downright freaky solutions to thorny problems. Harmonically he remains without peer, imaginative at an almost supernatural level. A lot of our notions of good harmonic practice are based on his music. In effect, he is the final arbiter of craftsmanship: if Bach does it, then it’s allowable. If Bach avoids it, then so should we. I am a middle-aged man and Bach’s music has been in my consciousness for as far back as I can remember. That music has never lost its fascination, never grown stale, never failed to inspire, challenge, and move me.
If by some weird twist of fate I was obliged to restrict myself to studying, playing, and hearing the music of only one composer for the rest of my life, I would choose Bach in a heartbeat.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Could there be any argument about Beethoven’s place in the honor roll of Western music? We are still coming to grips with the sheer scope of his achievement. His major works are foundational in their respective bailiwicks: the piano sonatas, the string quartets, the symphonies, the concertos, the sonatas for violin and for cello, the piano trios. Every kid who plays the piano plays Beethoven, from little kiddie pieces early on to the lifetime challenge of absorbing the piano sonatas and the concertos.
He can be one tough cookie, especially in those transcendent late works, and sometimes the undertow of violence in his works becomes a tidal wave. That can really bug the fastidious types. But he is also capable of aching tenderness and intimacy; also, he possessed a tonal imagination second to none. Beethoven can never be all one thing or another. And he has his lesser moments (Wellington’s Victory, anybody?) But he more or less defines what we mean by Great Composer — in fact, the whole concept seems to have arisen during the 19th century in the wake of Beethoven’s colossal achievement.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
While it’s undeniable that the Milos Forman/Peter Schaffer film Amadeus turned Mozart into a movie star, neither flick nor play could have come about without the esteem in which Mozart is held. In so many ways, Mozart is our collective human mirror: the flawed, well-meaning but sometimes inept little guy who alternated between periods of volcanic creative power and crippling writer’s block, the composer who was as equally at home with church music as with opera as with chamber music as with symphony as with concerto as with piano sonata, the stunning craftsman who could conjure passages of such intimate lyrical beauty as to leave the listener dazed.
Mozart’s music threads through the entire weave of Western music. The world’s opera companies could not get along without him, neither could the symphony orchestras, the keyboard players, the chamber groups. His earliest music is that of a gifted child rather than a master, but when you get down to it all of his surviving music is early. His death at age 35 robbed us of the great works of his full maturity, such as his singspiel of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, or perhaps his great choral Bonaparte Symphony, or his two-part grand opera Faust. But what we have is imperishable.
So those are my no-argument guys. Two others come very close to making the grade for me, Franz Joseph Haydn and George Frideric Handel. But I had to think a bit about both composers, and by my own rules that disqualifies them. Certainly they belong in the highest category, but maybe not in that rarefied, unassailable company. Haydn may not be well known enough, and certainly he had his weak spots, such as opera. And Handel’s nasty little habit of plagiarizing other composer’s music has to be taken into account as well. So while I would certainly include both gentlemen in a Top Five list, I can’t give them absolute, no-argument-here status.
Thus my personal Trinity: no Three B’s for me, but two B’s and an M instead.