The Greatest By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

January 7, 2011
The Greatest By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
YOU know that a new year has truly arrived when critics stop issuing all those lists of the best films, books, plays, recordings and whatever of the year gone by. These lists seem to be popular with readers, and they stir up lively reactions. Like other critics I enjoy recalling the pieces and performances that struck me as exceptionally good, or exceptionally bad, during the year in classical music.

Yet in other fields, critics and insiders think bigger. Film institutes periodically issue lists of the greatest films of all time. (“Citizen Kane” seems to have a lock on the top spot.) Rock magazines routinely tally the greatest albums ever. And think of professional tennis, with its system of rankings, telling you exactly which player is No. 1 in the world, or 3, or 59.

Imagine if we could do the same in classical music, if there were ways to rank pianists, sopranos and, especially, composers. The Top 10 composers of all time. Now that’s the list I have secretly wanted to compile. It would be absurd, of course, but fascinating.

Hold on here. I don’t do ranking. As I see it, the critic’s job description does not include compiling lists of greats in order of greatness. What I do is champion, demystify and describe the composers, works and artists I admire, and, as appropriate, puncture inflated reputations.

I am eager to share my enthusiasm for, say, my favorite Britten opera (I think I would pick “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”) or my favorite recording of the Brahms Violin Concerto (Jascha Heifetz, with Fritz Reiner conducting the Chicago Symphony: a minority opinion, I suspect, but what a thrilling performance). To say that something is your favorite is not to insist that it has to be anyone else’s or that it belongs at the top of a list of all-time greats.

My thinking about this was shaken, though, last spring, when Mohammed e-mailed me. That’s Mohammed Rahman, then a freshman at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. He was writing a paper on why people have different musical tastes, and he wanted to interview me. His questions were so thoughtful that I met him at a cafe.

Mohammed picked my brain about how my tastes had been formed, about what I looked for in good music. Inevitably we came to the question of how it gets decided that certain music, certain composers are the best. And of course some really are. I’m open-minded but not a radical relativist.

So if you were to try to compile a list of the 10 greatest composers in history, how would you go about it? For me the resulting list would not be the point. But the process of coming up with such a list might be clarifying and instructive, as well as exasperating and fun.

What criteria might you apply? Would a composer’s influence and popularity factor in? Schoenberg was arguably the most influential composer of the 20th century. That he pushed tonality past the brink and devised a technique to supersede it completely shook up the music of the era. Every composer in his wake had to come to terms with Schoenberg. But on the basis of his actual pieces, many of which excite and move me, does he make the Top 10?

What about a composer whose range was narrow but whose music was astonishing? Chopin, a staggering genius, wrote almost exclusively for the piano. And what do you do with opera? Is that a separate thing entirely?

Do you break music down by the elements and analyze, for example, who was the greatest master of counterpoint? The most inventive rhythmically? And then, of course, there is my personal take on things, which will, of course, factor in strongly but not be determinative.

Anyway, between talking with Mohammed and going through the annual “best of the year” ritual, I have been emboldened. So here begins an open deliberation leading eventually — in later articles, online videos and posts on ArtsBeat (artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com) — to my answer to this irresistible question: Who are the 10 greatest composers in history? My editors urged that if I went down this path, I should go all the way and rank the Top 10 in order. But first I have to narrow the scope, so here are the ground rules:

I am focusing on Western classical music. There are compelling arguments against honoring this classification. Still, giants like George Gershwin, Duke Ellington and Stephen Sondheim are outside my purview here. And on the assumption that we are too close to living composers to assess their place and their impact, I am eliminating them from consideration.

Finally, I am focusing on the eras since the late Baroque. You could make a good case for Josquin or Monteverdi, but I won’t. The traditions and styles were so different back then as to have been almost another art form. I’m looking roughly at the era an undergraduate survey of Western civilization might define as modern history.

So to get things going, let’s start with an easy one: Bach. He would probably be the consensus choice among thinking musicians for the top spot. But why?

Bach came at an intersection in music history. He was born in 1685, when the Baroque period was thriving yet vestiges of the Renaissance age of polyphonic music were lingering. By the time he died in 1750, opera, for which he had no interest, was a century and a half old, music was getting hipper, and elegantly decorous styles like the Rococo were widespread. Even some of Bach’s sons, who revered their father, thought he was a little old-fashioned as a composer. Bach did not care how he was perceived. He was too busy being a working musician, a composer who wrote pieces to order for whatever his job at the time, whether in a church or a court, demanded.

Bach stood right in the middle of this historical crossroads. His music is an astonishing synthesis of what had been and what was coming. Elements of the high polyphonic tradition run through his work. Yet the era of simpler Baroque textures and clear, strong tonal harmony had arrived.

In just the collected Bach chorales — the four-part, hymnlike settings of church tunes that crop up in his oratorios and cantatas — he codified everything that was known about harmony and anticipated the future, including wayward chromatic harmony à la Wagner. In the opening measures of the chorale “Es Ist Genug,” the one Berg incorporated into his final work, the Violin Concerto, Bach even anticipates atonality.

The 48 preludes and fugues of “The Well-Tempered Clavier” are the ultimate exploration of counterpoint in all its complexities, yet also a dazzling collection of quirky, sublime and sometimes showy character pieces.

What composer before or after Bach could have written the opening Kyrie of the Mass in B minor? It begins with choral cries of “Lord have mercy” (“Kyrie eleison”) as harmonically wrenching as anything in Brahms or Mahler. Then, with transfixing calm, the winding Kyrie theme is heard in the orchestra over a steady tread of a bass, as the inner voices build up. One by one the sections of the chorus enter, until Bach has constructed an intricate web of counterpoint at once intimidating in its complexity and consolingly beautiful.

Another candidate for this list was also born in Germany the same year as Bach: Handel, who lived nine years longer. Whereas Bach came from generations of musicians and was expected to go into the family business, Handel’s father was a barber and surgeon with aristocratic clientele who was determined to see his son become a lawyer and discouraged his studies of music. But Handel’s talent could not be denied.

After receiving thorough musical training in Germany, Handel learned the ways of Italian opera in Italy. In one of the curious twists in music history, he wound up living in London and writing Italian operas for English-speaking audiences who were wild about this exotic art form. Handel was a masterly composer in this genre and a savvy businessman who eventually became an opera-house manager and made more money than Bach ever could have imagined. When tastes shifted and box-office receipts dwindled, Handel found a new career as a revered purveyor of oratorios in English.

Thanks largely to the early-music movement Handel’s operas, which had mostly lapsed into obscurity, have been rediscovered and championed by formidable conductors, directors and singers. They are now rightly seen as psychologically astute and musically rich. Handel’s instrumental and large-scale choral works were well known to Mozart and Beethoven, who admired Handel tremendously.

Still, at least in the operas, Handel mostly hewed to convention. In less-than-inspired performances, the operas can come across as pro-forma works, with dialogue in recitative to advance the stories and set up the inevitable strings of da capo arias (structured with a Part A, a contrasting Part B and an embellished return of Part A). I prefer the operas in which Handel took more risks, as in the astonishing “Orlando,” which has as wrenching a portrait of a man’s descent into madness as you will find in any art form of any era.

Handel is a giant. A music theory teacher looking for a perfect example of three-part contrapuntal writing, with basso continuo, can do no better than to show students the main allegro section of the instrumental sinfonia that begins “Messiah.”

Still, does Handel make the cut for the Top 10? I don’t know. I think he should pay a price for churning out all those da capo arias.

Including Bach is a no-brainer. But remember, the point is to come up with a list. Move ahead a bit in history, and we are in danger of having four places among the Top 10 given to composers who worked in Vienna during a period of roughly 75 years, from 1750 to 1825. What was going on in that town at that time to foster such awesome creativity?

Let’s see.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 9, 2011


A cover article this weekend about choosing the Top 10 classical composers misstates, at one point, the length of time that opera had existed as of 1750, when Bach died. As the article correctly conveys in other references, opera had been around for roughly 150 years then, not “a half-century.”