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Your thread is about the most important composers in history.

If you meant the most important composers for the piano in history, you'd get a different set of answers from everybody, including me.

Because, in the end, Chopin's influence on non-piano music is virtually zero (just like Paganini's influence on non-violin music is virtually zero).

Do not forget that piano music is a huge chunk of music. Because of the level of quality of Chopin's music and its impact in the world of piano, it deserves a spot in the list. I think.

But we can move on from it. I think we should focus on a much more important subject. Who the greatest are, in order.

My order of the top ten in order, in time-honoured fashion, as of this moment in time (the order may be slightly different tomorrow, but it will still be these ten):

Mozart
Beethoven
JS Bach
Schubert
Brahms
Berg
Stravinsky
Handel
Mahler
Schoenberg

Webern is better than Berg. 😀

Maybe I should keep my mouth shut, but I always return to Fauré. I guess that he hardly ranks among the top-ten composers, but it is very interesting to notice that he starts as a romantic composer, skips over impressionism and ends as a modernist. It is unclear to me how much of this development was self-driven and how much was following the musical trends, but if we use diversity as one of the criteria for greatness Fauré ranks high.

All this said I consider Bach the greatest of the composers. Mozart, Beethoven Schubert and Brahms were great. I know very little about opera, but I guess Wagner should be included. Then Debussy, Schönberg, Mahler, Shostakovich.

Sorry for skipping Chopin. But I love his music.

But his mature music doesn't last long enough for us to appreciate it (assuming it can be appreciated...... ).

He should have stuck to composing late-Romantic music, like Im Sommerwind......then maybe he'd make it into my top ten .

It's not clear whether we're talking about "being great" or "being influential". Both are probably involved in discussing importance.

Anyway, I'd argue that Chopin is a composer whose importance is universal-- not just to pianists. Just as one doesn't need to be a string player to see the greatness of Beethoven string quartets, nor an opera singer to see the greatness of Wagner, so with the piano and Chopin; his worth, IMO, transcends the instrument. I would not say the same thing about Paganini and the violin.

As for greatness, I think the works speak for themselves. As for influence, he may not have been the first to write large single-movement dramatic pieces, or collections of etudes of actual musical significance, or a collection of preludes, and he certainly wasn't the first to write nocturnes. But because of the astonishing quality of the work, he greatly popularized all of these forms, and his influence is clear on Liszt, Debussy and beyond.

This is all subjective, of course. But at least whoever designed Harvard's main recital hall agreed!

Without Paganini and his violin, we wouldn't have Liszt's Pag Etudes (which includes La Campanella), Rach/Pag, Brahms/Pag, Lutoslawski/Pag.....not even Hamelin/Pag or Webber/Pag etc.

Without Chopin, we wouldn't have, er, Chopiniana . (OK, Rach/Chopin.....).


What's Weber (or is that Webern?) doing in such august company as Chopin?

Yes -- It seems there's a distinction between those who changed the landscape and were the first to do something -- for instance, Bach, Beethoven, and may I suggest Scott Joplin -- and those who wrote beautiful music in existing forms -- like Rach or Cole Porter.

Which you value more is very subjective.

Chopin's ideas transcend the piano, and anyone who seriously studies the great composers will place him among the greatest.

"Chopin is the greatest of all, for with the piano alone he discovered everything."

-Debussy

Yeah, but Debussy didn't think much of Beethoven, so I'm not sure that his opinion is a very reliable measure of anything.

Oh, don't even get me started on the lousy quality of Harvard architecture!

You'll never know every nuance of musical evolution - it's far too vast a field for anyone to know that.

But music history classes/intro to music courses are useful overviews of some of the main points. There's at least one from an Ivy League university on YouTube for free - I think it is from Yale.

Here is my list.

Most important composers, not necessarily the order I personally prefer them


Bach
Beethoven
Mozart
Wagner
Chopin
Stravinsky
Brahms
Haydn
Liszt
Schubert


The last few on the list I wasn't quite sure about. Mahler and Debussy could have made the cut.

I agree with this. In the past few decades, Chopin research and analysis has become virtually its own musicological publishing industry: Jim Samson, Jeffrey Kallberg, Zofia Chechlinska, and a host of other music historians and theorists have devoted huge quantities of time and effort to examining Chopin's mature music at every conceivable level of granularity. It is no accident that Schenker devoted so much of his attention to Chopin. The fact that everything he composed (I think) has a piano in it is not an encumbrance and is certainly irrelevant to his standing in music history and tradition. He is a towering figure of enormous importance whichever way you look at him. And he wrote some of the finest music not only of the Romantic period but of any period, again whichever way you look at it.

It's easy for us pianists to have a completely skewed view of the importance of Chopin in the classical music world.

Let's remember that Chopin is heavily promoted in Poland, and they (very successfully) export him around the world - not just with the Chopin Competition, but also with several festivals, all celebrating Chopin. (BTW, Szymanowski etc is totally relegated to the sidelines - quite disgracefully so, IMO). There's the annual Chopin and His Europe Festival in Warsaw, the International Chopin Festival in Duszniki Zdrój (where not all the pianists play Chopin in their program - some only play him as a token encore....) etc. The Fryderyk Chopin Institute in Warsaw doesn't just organize and promote the festivals in Poland and around the world, it also has its own recording industry, and commissions music scholars from many countries to study Chopin.

I attended the Chopin Symposium in London in 2010, and chatting to the attendees, it was clear that everyone played the piano (either as an amateur or student). Not a single person there was playing or learning a string/woodwind/brass instrument, or a singer.

In comparison with Chopin, Sibelius hardly gets any help in Finland, nor Grieg in Norway, nor Nielsen in Denmark. You can't miss Chopin in Poland, even if you're only a casual non-musical visitor, whereas unless you visit the Sibelius Park in Helsinki or his home in Ainola, Sibelius is hardly visible in Finland. Ditto for Grieg in Norway. Even in Denmark, Nielsen is still principally known for his songs, not his great symphonies. (And Elgar is only known in Britain for 'Land of Hope and Glory'......).

I studied music as an academic subject at high school - Chopin was only mentioned as a sideline, well below even the likes of Handel and Mendelssohn, much less the towering figures of the three B's and Mozart. The keyboard piece we had to study was by Bach, the concerto was Grieg's. Some years ago, I took a few cello lessons at the home of a cellist who also played in a London orchestra. She had an extensive CD collection: cello music, orchestral, chamber, vocal, piano/keyboard - but not a single CD was of Chopin (not even "Chopin's Greatest Hits" ). The same for a singer and choral conductor that I know.

So, let's get some perspective of Chopin in classical music, in the non-pianistic world.

Palestrina: Polyphony, the other composer I'd rate as important as Bach
Haydn: Symphony ("Father of the symphony")
Mozart: Opera
Schubert: Art Song
Tchaikovsky: Ballet?
Wagner: Opera, part 2

Have fun telling any non-pianist and any conductor that. As great as late Chopin is, I think hardly anyone outside the piano world will say late Chopin is greater than late Mahler or Brahms or Bruckner. Or Beethoven, for that matter.

Beethoven, sure. But Mahler? Bruckner? Come on.