Disclaimer: The following rankings are completely my opinion. I don't put composers in the higher tiers because their music is better than the music of lower-tier composers; I put them there because their music is better than the music of lower-tier composers for me. There is no particular order within each tier.
S tier: This is the tier that is probably the least controversial. Most classical music lovers would agree that J.S. Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven are the summits of classical music, but here I want to go into detail for the reasons these three are, in my opinion, a cut above the rest.
Let's start with Bach. Most people would say that he is the greatest of all the classical composers, and I can agree with this to some extent. He is certainly the most influential classical composer of all time, and his music is the bedrock of music as we know it in the Western world. Name any pop song and I can probably find a piece by Bach with similar chord progressions. He's that influential.
However, what really makes Bach great is the otherworldly structure of his music. Forget Bach for a moment and think about how modern popular music is structured: there's usually a lead vocal and some type of instrumental or electronic accompaniment, where the accompaniment is just decoration for the lead part. Now imagine that the accompaniment is another lead line, and both lead lines sound good on their own as well as together. Bach does this with all of his music, except he uses 4+ leads simultaneously instead of just 2. Crazy, right?
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Bach once wrote a piece of music where if you played the music forwards and had someone else play the music backwards at the same time, it still sounded amazing. He wrote another piece where flipping the entire sheet of music upside-down would create an entirely different, but still musically coherent, piece. And the upside-down version could be played together with the normal version and still create something musically coherent.
He even signed his own name into his music using note names. In German musical nomenclature, the note we call "B" is called "H", and the note we call "B flat" is called "B." So in German, the notes "B flat, A, C, B" actually spell out "BACH." And these four consecutive notes show up everywhere in his music.
However, Bach's music is far more than just intellectual tricks. One of my favorite pieces of music is Bach's Chaconne in D minor.
In just sixteen minutes, Bach takes you from utter despair to bittersweet joy and everything in-between. What's really breathtaking about this piece, besides its sheer emotion, is its sense of economy: no note feels wasted or out-of-place; Bach takes as many notes as necessary to tell his story, and he shuts up when the story has concluded (frankly, I wish more composers had this attitude). His music is far more emotional than most lay-people give it credit for, though this view is not completely unsubstantiated.
Every composer has flaws, and even good ol' J.S. is no exception. Several of his pieces, particularly the earlier ones, are relatively dull and feel more like intellectual exercises than music. However, most of his music is so mind-blowingly amazing, both emotionally and intellectually, that it's easy for me to overlook that.
Next we have Mozart, a composer who has, in my opinion, been very unfairly treated by both his admirers and his detractors. His admirers think he's some musical Jesus whose ejaculate will make their kids smarter, while his detractors think his music is the equivalent of 18th-century muzak: lightweight, bland, and inoffensive.
I've written before about how wrong and potentially damaging the former view is here: https://ashih91.wixsite.com/theclassicalremixer/post/mozart-and-mythology, so I won't bother explaining it again. Instead, I'll refute the latter view.
Although today we may view Mozart's music as a pristine porcelain doll, during his lifetime it was viewed as anything but. Reviewers of the time complained about many things in his music: that he overloaded the instrumentation so that you couldn't hear the singers in his operas, that his music was "too highly seasoned", that Mozart would never be satisfied with one melody at a time and would instead overwhelm the listener with one melody, and then another melody, and then another melody, and then another one...
Essentially, Mozart was viewed as a musical genius, but a very eccentric one. And it isn't hard to see why. No one was writing anything like this before Mozart came along:
The finale to his opera Don Giovanni is also incredibly dark for the standards of the time:
The entire opera centers around a man named Don Giovanni who's basically an adrenaline junkie with no morals. He kills a man, and the dead man's spirit possesses a statue, visits Don Giovanni, and drags him down to hell in the finale. The music from 4:42 to 5:26 in the clip perfectly ratchets up the tension of the scene as you see Don Giovanni repeatedly refuse chances to repent. And right when Don Giovanni starts to see the punishment that awaits him at 5:35, the music picks up again in a rush of adrenaline that perfectly mirrors the sadistic joy you get from seeing Don Giovanni finally get punished for his lawless ways. It's one of the most satisfying pieces of art ever created.
No explanation of Mozart would be complete without mentioning his operas. They're something I could write an entire research paper praising, but I'll summarize my thoughts here. If there were one word I could use to describe his operas, it would be empathy. In my opinion, Mozart is the greatest opera composer not because he pushed the boundaries further than anyone else (though he certainly pushed them quite far), nor because of his technical wizardry (although he has plenty of that as well); he's the greatest because his operas make me feel like I'm a part of the story more so than operas from any other composer.
Many later Romantic-era operas are more emotional or philosophically profound than Mozart's, but in those it feels like you're being lashed back and forth between emotional extremes; moderation is only an afterthought, and some of the empathy gets lost in the process.
My favorite Mozart opera is probably Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro). One of the arias, "Porgi Amor", is one of the most heartbreaking pieces of music ever written:
Mozart even manages to perfectly capture emotions that words fail at describing. You know that feeling when you've been caught in a lie, but you lie again, digging yourself into even deeper shit? In my opinion, no piece of music excels more at portraying that "oh shit" feeling than this part of Figaro:
At this point in the story, Figaro has been caught in a lie and has lied some more to save his ass, and both the Count and Figaro know this. The Count pulls out some letters that Figaro claims are his, and without giving Figaro the chance to see the name of the sender, he asks Figaro who the sender is. The music becomes eerily quiet and tense as Figaro tries to stall.
And of course, I absolutely have to mention what most musicians consider to be Mozart's greatest work: his Requiem. The "Lacrimosa" section from this piece is almost morbidly beautiful:
Lacrimosa means crying in Latin, and Mozart is very aware of this; he cleverly uses the natural rhythm of the piece to imitate the sound of crying in the first few seconds.
Towards the end of his life, Mozart started incorporating more and more Bachian counterpoint (Bach-style simultaneous melodies) into his music. His first attempts were not very successful, but eventually he successfully assimilated it into his own style. Many composers over the centuries have tried to incorporate Bach-style counterpoint into their music, but the result sometimes ends up being a clumsy mess. But whenever Mozart does it, the music soars over the clouds:
Here, in one of the most dazzling displays of contrapuntal skill in music history, Mozart effortlessly shuffles 5 simultaneous melodies together.
Finally, Mozart is unique in the classical canon because he's one of the few composers who doesn't suffocate all of the wind players and singers who perform his music. Despite my love for Bach and Beethoven, they are extremely inconsiderate composers for woodwinds, brass, and voice, often forcing their performers to quickly suck breaths in the middle of long passages. Not only does Mozart always keep breathing in mind, but his music feels extremely natural for wind players and singers. He doesn't just insert breaths whenever he feels it's necessary; he also pays special attention to the specific idiosyncrasies of each instrument. For example, in Le Nozze di Figaro, there's a scene where the Count begs his wife the Countess to forgive him for his unfaithfulness. Mozart specifically writes the Count's part in the upper ranges, deliberately making the part a bit harder to sing so that it sounds like the Count is struggling to get his words out. Isn't that genius?
In my opinion, Bach is the most profound composer, but Mozart is the most magical. I am always amazed by the depth of his imagination, and his music has a unique angelic anguish that pulls at my heartstrings in all the right places and in just the right way.
The explanations for Beethoven and all of A tier will be in the next post.