June 8, 2011 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • Page 25 (1797–1828) was so completely overlapped by the older and more dramatic Beethoven that Schubert never heard many of his own works performed. He was, however, a very great composer of everything from completed symphonies to his famous “Unfinished Symphony” to the music for songs whose text came from Johannes Wolfgang von Goethe. Children all over the world know the dramatic opening and relentless cadences of “Erlkoenig” – sometimes referred to as “the father, the boy, and the ghost” by people who know the words only in translation. Schubert belongs on this list. Claude Achille Debussy is the fifth composer on the list and whose native language wasn’t German. Tommasini cited Debussy’s contribution as breaking away from the strictures Bach started, Beethoven sustained -- even as he revolted and took them to the outer limits, and Brahms brought to utter culmination. Debussy was a sort of “musical impressionist” and he wrote some beautiful orchestral pieces that hold a permanent place in the repertoire. But he probably would not have taken the course he did if it hadn’t been for the genius-scoundrel Richard Wagner. Music was never the same after Wagner, so I would have swapped Debussy for Wagner or Brahms, both on the second fold of the list. Reach for the delete key: Igor Stravinsky as number six? If ever a composer got by on revolution and subsequent reputation without much real talent, it was Stravinsky. I remember once listening to him describing how, when he was working on a typical dissonant composition, a little kid in the neighborhood would cry out, “That’s wrong!” Stravinsky found this amusing, but the kid was right. People in Stravinsky’s time may have realized that nobody was getting beyond Brahms and Wagner in writing great music, and gave Stravinsky points for not bothering to try. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky wrote music that was profoundly melodic and not dissonant, but was dismissed as facile by some critics simply because people who weren’t trained musicians found it profoundly enjoyable. I haven’t gotten through a Christmas season in 30 years without at least one tour of “The Nutcracker.” Tchaikovsky also wrote several great symphonies. The sixth, which was written before what was probably suicide through depressed carelessness, is immensely moving. I would have put Tchaikovsky in Stravinsky’s place – and I can think of a half-dozen other Russian or Czech composers, notably Dvorak, who would have been a better choice than Stravinsky. For “classical light,” pick up a DVD of Walt Disney’s original “Fantasia” and check out how Disney handled Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky. Tchaikovsky provides background for cute creatures dancing. Stravinsky provides background for ugly creatures eating each other until they all go extinct. Tchaikovsky didn’t need Disney to save him, and even Disney couldn’t save Stravinsky. Once we skip over Brahms, we find Giuseppi Verdi and then Richard Wagner. I sense someone smiling: Verdi and Wagner are like hostile musical twins separated at birth. Both were born in 1813, and both suffered losses in the end-game of the Napoleonic Wars. The infant Verdi and his mother had to hide to avoid rampaging Hungarian troops of the Austrian Army. Wagner lost his father to an outbreak of cholera after Napoleon’s penultimate defeat at Leipzig. Both were originally anti-clerical nationalists and both married women who had had children with other men. Both later went on to write religious music. Both worked almost entirely in opera and neither wrote an important symphony or concerto. They were so much alike that they just had to hate one another, and their younger partisans in Europe sometimes got into first-fights. The three operas Verdi wrote at his peak in the 1850s continue to hold the stage at every opera house in the civilized world. “Rigoletto” is a steady sequence of hit melodies one after another, with subtle orchestral touches that explore the psychology of the action on stage. Verdi kept producing important music until he was 84. Wagner died at 70, but every opera he wrote from “The Flying Dutchman” to his four-opera “Ring of the Nibelungs” and “Parsifal,” Wagner’s final opera of Christian redemption, is still performed on a regular basis. There is one catch with Verdi and Wagner. You have to understand the languages they or their librettists used to fully appreciate their artistry. The effort is worth it. I got past the pleasantries and menu entries learning both German and Italian so I could enjoy Wagner and Weber (and some Mozart operas and Schubert songs) in German, and Verdi, Puccini, Mascagni, and Leoncavallo in Italian. The Italian verismo operas – those true to ordinary life – were heavily influenced by Wagner. So was Hollywood. Walter Lantz was constantly using Wagner themes in the background of his cartoons, and he did a whole cartoon with Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny as Wagnerian hero and heroine set to Wagner’s music. Even John Ford made a tongue in cheek allusion to Wagner’s “Ring.” The blacksmith at Fort Starke in “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” is named “Wagner” and has an assistant who is a virtual dwarf. When the blacksmith and his assistant are detailed to help arrest the formidable Sergeant Quincannon they leave the forge while the theme of the dwarf blacksmith from Wagner’s “Ring” is playing. Ford had some fun with this, because the Irish Sergeant Quincannon is actually played by Victor McLaglen, an Englishman and former boxer who once fought Jack Johnson and lived, and the “German” blacksmith is played by Mickey Simpson, a former U.S. Navy man of Irish ancestry. In last place was Béla Bartók. They left out Handel, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, and Dvorak. Smetana and Tchaikovsky were bumped off the list for Bartók? Why? Was this an unpopularity contest? Picture this: You spend the first 10 years of your adult life eating dry bread and moldy cheese and freezing in a garret in Paris like somebody out of “La Boheme” – that’s “Rent” to Broadway devotees – and 100 years later, you get bumped from the list of the Top 10 Composers because, long after you have become famous, rich, and dead, too many people like your music. Don’t say it can’t happen here. It happened in at least a few cases just recently as WQXR aired Anthony Tommasini’s choices for the top 10 most influential composers since the beginning of the 18th century. Tommasini is the chief classic music critic for The New York Times, and his Big Three at the top of the list were spot on, but the rest of the list included some questionable choices. People who aspired to be cultivated used to talk about “the three Bs” – Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms – as if these three names covered the whole field of classical music. Bach was Number 1 on the list WQXR list, and Beethoven was Number 2 – and that’s about right. Before Johann Sebastian Bach, what we would call “classical music” existed, but Bach expanded the range and quality of music in such a wide number of styles, both secular and religious, that no respectable list could be without him, and since his lifetime (1685-1750) began and ended before any of the other great names, he was a logical choice for first place. Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was born the same year as Napoleon Bonaparte and Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington. His music marked the transition from “classical” to “romantic,” and featured a bigger orchestra, various different instruments, and a huge infusion of powerful and sometimes violent emotion. He was a transitional figure perhaps even more than Bach had been. Brahms came in third in the List of Convenience, but Tommasini put him in seventh place, which is probably about right. Brahms took the traditionally harmonic structure of German symphonic music to the ultimate level of composition – and he was also a kindly and devoted mentor of Antonin Dvorak and an admirer of Johan Strauss. Number three went to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and that choice was inevitable and just. Mozart was so utterly gifted in so many different fields – symphony, opera, concerto, religious music – that he had to be in the top five, I think really in the top three. Beethoven wrote only one opera, and except for the overtures it wasn’t all that great. Mozart wrote a dozen operas, the first when he was 12 years old. The last five, three of which were in Italian and two in German, are recognized works of genius that still hold the stage today. The movie “Amadeus” was a delightful introduction to a somewhat hyperbolized version of Mozart’s career. He wasn’t really as silly as Tom Hulce played him, and the idea that Antonio Salieri murdered Mozart at a safe distance is hokum invented by the Russian poet Pushkin. Mozart thought he had been poisoned, but not by Salieri. The most likely killer, according to some experts today, is infectious disease rather than envious homicide. Number Four was Franz Schubert. Schubert’s brief life The Top 10 Composers Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: The Wyckoff School of Dance is a gem in the town of Wyckoff. Diane Dana has created and sustained her vision of creating a better world through the arts. Both of my daughters have spent many hours experiencing the joy of dancing and as a result both have developed poise, self-confidence, body awareness, and a love of dancing. It was a bittersweet moment for me to watch my daugh- Bittersweet applause ter perform her senior solo a few weeks ago and realize this was the last of many dance recitals. As she moves on to other adventures, I am pausing to acknowledge the Wyckoff School of Dance for the valuable contribution made to my daughters’ life experience. They both have benefited in many ways. A special shout out goes to Jean Martin, a tap instructor extraordinaire! Nancy Murray Wyckoff