'Why are the greatest composers all German?'

This is really a matter of taste. Even in the increasingly provincial realm of "classical" music--compositions for traditional symphony orchestras and subsets such as chamber groups and string quartets--many of us much prefer the Russian (Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, etc.) and French composers (Ravel, Debussy, Satie, etc.) to Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart.

For starters there is the matter of timing. Admittedly Germany and Italy were hotbeds of musical creativity 150-300 years ago, but to these ears their music sounds 150-300 years old. The tempos are limited, the harmonics are predictable, the structures are rigid. It's great stuff but after a while it loses its ability to hold my interest.

When the rest of Europe came of age musically, experimentation and individuality were in vogue. You have adventurous harmonics, rubato tempos, and iconoclastic thematic structures. To these ears it's simply more interesting music. And I'm not guilty of listening to music technically instead of emotionally, as I've been criticized here. Perhaps one must be a musician to be able to articulate these observations, but not to experience them.

I think one reason that so many musicologists love early classical-form music--which is largely German music--is that the profession naturally attracts people of a conservative nature, people who are more comfortable with the traditional, who are able to keep having new experiences no matter how many times they listen to it. Ravel's "Bolero" and Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain" are now staples of the symphonic repertoire, but when they premiered they were highly controversial. A lot of critics couldn't find it in their hearts to like them because they were just too modern.

I think the greatest German composer of all time is Richard Strauss, such a recent figure that he was still alive when I was born. "Metamorphosen," his greatest work, was written after WWII--and it's not even for a traditional orchestra but for thirteen stringed instruments all playing solo parts. Compare it to Wagner at his finest, and they sound like they're not from the same planet.

This question begs the real question, which is what exactly do we mean by "great?" "Great art" is usually defined as art that transcends its period, that speaks to something timeless inside us, and continues to be appreciated long after its creator and original patrons are dead.

One of the oldest compositions still in circulation is not a "classical" piece at all, but the song "Greensleeves." I can't google a creation date because too many corporations have appropriated the name, but it's often credited to an English king of the 16th Century and predates most of the allegedly "great" symphonic composers. And he very likely was merely the first person to legitimize a much older song: It is persuasively argued that there's only one way a lady can end up with "green sleeves," and that is by lying on her back in a field. The song undoubtedly goes back to the Crusades, when armies of prostitutes walked behind the troops all the way across Europe, with lyrics that grew by accretion as generations of soldiers waxed sentimental about the only women in their lives.

This song, about a topic that rivals "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" for unsuitability for family TV, is a great song by the only viable definition: centuries later we're still listening to it; it still touches something deep inside us.

Popular music can be just as "great" as symphonies. Only time will tell whether your children will continue to sing the songs of Cole Porter and Hank Williams, much less the Stephen Foster songs that were still beloved when I was young. But I have already seen collections of "music for children" than included the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine." Once a song becomes a nursery rhyme, it's immortal. No corner of human culture is more conservative than the one in which our children play--some of their games haven't changed at all in two thousand years. How about Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon"? Billboard had to invent a special rule in order to stop having to list in on the Top Two Hundred. It shows signs of being as unseatable as the Bible and the Boy Scout Manual, which are subject to similar rules to keep them off the best seller lists.

There's been an awful lot of "popular" music composed since the advent of electronic reproduction made music a staple of life. Some of it is really good. Some of it, I venture to say, is "great." As great as "Greensleeves."

 

Uh, no.

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Somewhere in the beginning of that post I said that Germany and Italy were the countries where what we call "classical" music got its biggest start. Nonetheless I think there were a lot more Germans, or at least a lot more of them are still famous today. I guess my point was that it's not the "greatest" composers who were all German, but at that time most composers were German.

I just don't happen to prefer music from that early period, so from my perspective the "greatest" composers are a good assortment from all over Europe. Including Norway, Hungary, Spain, Finland, and of course England.

There are lots of good 20th century American composers, but most people wouldn't put them in the "classical" category. Gershwin embraced the new motifs of jazz, and people like John Downey, Philip Glass, and Frank Zappa are a little too -clastic of people's icons.

 

There is not really any "right spelling" of a proper name that is written in a foreign alphabet. So unless you have the Cyrillic character set don't worry about it.

The Russian-English transliteration system that has become standard goes by the letters of the Russian alphabet rather than the pronunciation, and Russian pronunciation has over the centuries strayed from the spelling as much as any language (except English or French, which are remarkably un-phonetic). So we would render it today as Chaikovski. But it's really pronounced Chaikofski. And today we would write Rakhmaninov, although it's pronounced Rakhmaninof.

A hundred years ago the French and Germans got to decide on transliteration and they tried to make the pronunciation obvious to speakers of their languages. So the French spell the CH sound as TCH, and the Germans as TSCH. That's why you see so many variations and none of them really tell you how to pronounce it correctly.

 

That just circles back to my original point. A lot of people prefer "classical" music from the earliest "classical" period, up through the 18th and early 19th centuries. It just happens that the Germans were most active in the field at that time, so most of the "great" music of that era was by Germans (and to a certain extent Italians).

The other nations didn't start fielding a lot of composers until the late 19th century. The Romantic and Impressionst eras, and then the modern stuff that blurs the boundary between the traditional symphonic and chamber forms and popular music. Russia burst on the scene at that time and America a little later. Some other countries that had had a modest representation in the classical repertoire, like France, fairly blossomed.

To name the country whose composers you love gives away the era you enjoy.

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