Bach > Mozart > Beethoven

Only nuanced take in this thread.

>This is objective.
No, that was subjective, objectively speaking.

it's not a tie though, Beethoven's late string quartets blow everything else in the genre out of the water

>Mogs them all

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I want a detailed score for string quartets, professor

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Beethoven taken in a vacuum is really good. But he is unforgivable for what his demeanor and the subsequent myth around him has done to the arts in their entirety. Romanticism is a curse, and Beethoven is the engine that drives its central toxic ideals of the "self-contained auter" and "authenticity" defined as every artist undertaking being a sort of total pyroclastic rebirth.
However it's undeniable that Beethoven had the largest effect on music and the world in general, considering both the above, and also the simple fact that his unprecedented attempts at micromanagement within his scores entirely changed the relationship between composer and interpreter.

I don't get Bach's music, especially his organ stuff. It sounds like extremely boring wankery.

It's important to understand it in a historic context. It's like going back and reading something like the Canterbury Tales - if you approach it in entirely the same way you would a modern novel, it will seem lacking. But if you consider it in terms of its place in the greater conversation of its art, what it does with the tools that were available at the time, and how it pushed the boundaries etc, it's an entirely new world to enjoy.

In spite of that, I think what marks Bach is that he has a *few* pieces which are able to be appreciated by a modern listener even without getting on that sort of level. Now, a lot of that has to do with the interpreter/performer, as Bach was a lot more freeform with how he composed than someone like Beethoven. But I want to hope that something like Yo Yo Ma's verson of the Sleeper's Awake chorale or this piano version of one of his cantatas (youtu.be/wcZ5cxYUSJA watch out for the resolution of the A line which is superlative and gets repurposed a lot in music, even up to modern pop music like Celine Dion and Andrea Bocelli's "Prayer") could be enjoyed by anyone, simply as east listening music.

You have to remember that for a very, very long time Bach was considered almost entirely a pedagogical composer - his work was only really approached as learning excersices. But the upshot of this is that his influence weaves through basically everything post-Mozart.

*ahem* FRANZ LISZT

I get Bach's music, especially his organ stuff. It sounds like masterfully constructed, passionate, emotionally powerful, harmonically adventurous and innovative pieces of music.

Bach > Beethoven > Mozart
>The claim is frequently made that Don Giovanni is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, opera ever written and staged. Goethe expressed a sense of the wonder of Don Giovanni in a letter to Schiller on December 30, 1797, in which he wrote these words after a performance in Weimar: “Your hopes for opera are richly fulfilled in Don Giovanni but the work stands absolutely alone and Mozart’s death prevents any prospect of its example being followed” (quoted in Turner 1938: 349). Indeed, when Goethe also declared that Mozart, who obviously possessed deep insight into human nature, would have been the man to compose his “Faust,” no doubt he was thinking of the brilliance of Don Giovanni (Jahn 161).

Mozart would probably be considered the greatest composer if he lived 10-20 years longer.

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all 3 could be considered "the best", it just depends on the standpoint and judging criteria.

For me, it's Tchaikovsky