The Top 10 Composers: The Romantics By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

January 19, 2011, 7:00 am

The Top 10 Composers: The Romantics By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Anthony Tommasini has been exploring the qualities that make a classical composer great, maybe even the best of all time. Watch videos and vote for your own top 10 here and read previous posts here and share your thoughts in the comments field. Mr. Tommasini’s final list will be posted on Friday.

In my exercise of sorting through the great composers of history to determine the Top 10, I have been putting off dealing with the 19th-century Romantic era (except for those giants of opera, Verdi and Wagner, who have already made the cut). But there is a reason. Music lovers have long been understandably enthralled with Chopin, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Brahms and their Romantic brethren. For better or worse, their works still dominate the standard repertory. Yet their music is so personal and idiosyncratic that it is hard to assess it in terms of greatness.

Frederic ChopinThese creators are not called Romantics for nothing. The Romantic movement emerged from the Classical heritage, in which composers expressed themselves through large, formal structures: symphony, sonata, string quartet, concerto. But the Romantic aesthetic emboldened composers to be more passionate, rhapsodic and personal. Formal structures were loosened, as music became a channel for strongly individual, often quirky, even eccentric expression. Literature, nature and history were favorite sources of inspiration.

Chopin, the most original genius of the 19th century, is a good example. Striving for greatness was the last thing on his mind. Chopin had his own select list of past greats he revered, topped by Bach and Mozart. And he loved bel canto opera, especially by that melancholic melodist Bellini.

But the Beethoven symphonic imperative that hung over and intimidated his fellow composers meant nothing to Chopin. He did not care about writing large, formal works, certainly not symphonies. Even his Second and Third Piano Sonatas (the First is an early work), though astounding, are completely unconventional. Chopin respected his composer colleagues, but he was not especially interested in their work. He was a pianist who composed. To him there was no distinction between the activities. And he seldom performed piano works by other composers.

Beethoven consciously strove to be great, even titanic, and he thought he was. His legacy is defined by intimidating bodies of symphonies, string quartets, piano sonatas and more, now canonic. How does an individualist like Chopin “rank” in comparison? Chopin’s ethereal nocturnes, poetic ballades, audacious scherzos, aptly titled impromptus and lacy waltzes often sound like written-out improvisations.

I don’t think Chopin expected his 58 mazurkas to be widely appreciated. On the surface these pieces are lilting Polish dances, but only on the surface. Listen more closely, and even the jaunty mazurkas are quizzical, wistful and poetic. The dreamy ones can be almost unbearably confessional. Of course, when any of his published music sold well, Chopin was delighted.

Schumann was a somewhat different story, since he embraced that Beethoven symphonic imperative. Schumann tried to write big pieces — symphonies, oratorios, elaborate chamber works — and many of these scores are stirring. But he was a troubled soul, with a keen intellect and a fantastical imagination. His music is even quirkier and more idiosyncratic than Chopin’s. For me, his best works are the piano pieces.

During my graduate school years, one of the Schumann works I learned, performed and became almost obsessed with was the “Davidsbündlertänze,” a suite of dances that presents Schumann at his most astonishing. Schumann made up two inner personalities for himself: Eusebius, the dreamer, and Florestan, the impetuous rebel. Each of these dances is signed at the end with an E or an F to indicate which of his alter egos composed it. (A couple of them are signed E and F.) Now try evaluating such a piece in a cool consideration of the greatest composers.

And so it goes during the freewheeling Romantic era.

Liszt? As a comprehensive musician (pianist, composer, conductor, major champion of composers like Wagner), Liszt was arguably the most influential figure of the 19th century. Still, there is nothing to do with his exhilaratingly virtuosic, wildly experimental, moody, restless and radical music other than to listen in wonder. But a top 10 composer? I don’t think so.

Berlioz? Sometimes it is said of a composer that he had great talent but no genius. Well, you could waggishly say the opposite of Berlioz: he had great genius but no talent. There is a little truth to this. Just conceiving pieces as amazing as the “Symphonie Fantastique” (written when he was 26, in 1830, only three years after Beethoven had died), let alone the poetically epic opera “Les Troyens,” took staggering genius. Yet except for the brilliantly imaginative orchestration, the nuts-and-bolts musical elements in Berlioz can often sound awkward.

Tchaikovsky’s enduring popularity has not helped his reputation in intellectual artistic circles. When in lectures and writings Stravinsky spoke so respectfully of Tchaikovsky’s music, his endorsement caused avant-garde modernists who had patronized Tchaikovsky to reconsider. Today Tchaikovsky is both respected by composers and loved by the public.

And then there is Brahms.

Among the Romantics, Brahms — born in 1833, a generation after the Chopin-Schumann first wave — stands out as the one composer who most coveted a place in the Beethovenian lineage. He could be terribly insecure. Brahms destroyed as many of his scores as he released for performance and publication. He was so in awe of Beethoven that it took him a dozen years to write his first symphony. But once he got that off his back, he wrote his next symphony during a few productive months.

Brahms also wrote epic concertos, sonatas and chamber works that at once honored and utterly transformed the Classical forms. In some ways he was a true Classicist. Yet for the Brahms centennial in 1933, Schoenberg gave a talk called “Brahms the Progressive,” pointing to Brahms for examples of harmonic writing that anticipated the breakdown of tonality. Last year the pianist Shai Wosner released a recording of works by Brahms and Schoenberg. At the center of the program, Mr. Wosner plays Brahms’s Opus 116 Fantasies, a set of seven late piano pieces. Between the Brahms works he inserts elliptical movements from Schoenberg’s Six Short Piano Pieces, and it is amazing how easily Brahms’s chromatic harmonies mingle with Schoenberg’s atonal writing. These composers seem to be speaking slightly different dialects of the same language.

Anyway, I’m still in a quandary about where to place Chopin and Schumann and their Romantic brethren. But Brahms is looking pretty good.