Most Intelligent Composers

[karlhenning]

 come on you didn't real believe that I meant that Bruckner and Mahler were praying to Wagner as if he were some god.

Well, your tone here is often unseemly unctuous, Marvin.

Schumann, on the other hand.....

Actually, Schumann was likely "depressed", which back then, you'd be considered "mad".

In any event, trying to diagnose from this temporal remove is . . . doomed to fail, isn't it? 

[ChamberNut]

Can we please have a Top Ten of the following:

Most Intelligent
Dumbest
Craziest

[karlhenning]

Love him or hate him, he was a seminal figure.

Aye, was 

[marvinbrown]

Of course there is great genius in Wagner's work. At the same time, of all the major composers, I can't think of another whose work is (to my mind) as deeply flawed in a number of ways. I spent considerable time arguing my case about the ending of Meistersinger on another thread. No question that all the works from Rheingold on are masterpieces. No doubt in my mind that there are problems in some of these works that I don't hear in some other major composers. But some of the most ambitious undertakings are not necessarily "perfect"; their very ambitiousness almost makes it inevitable that there will be some flaws.

 I was on the receiving end of that Die Meistersinger argument.  We were not discussing if Die Meistersinger was flawed but the "allegedly" malicious way Wagner chose to treat Beckmesser.  You were bothered by it, I wasn't,  I ended that coversation by saying that I respect your point of view- nothing more.  We never discussed whether that work was flawed or not vis-a-vis the treatment of Beckmesser!

  So you don't hear flaws in other major composers works but only in Wagner well I don't agree with you here and I don't believe you.

 marvin

 

[Josquin des Prez]

Not a bit of it.

Ok, let's backtrack here a little. This is what James said:

If practically everyone else within the very same field looks at the creative, original, highly imaginative, substantial & important achievements & accomplishments of a particular individual and collectively and unamiously goes "whoa" that's a sign on the measure of genius.

If you agree with this proposition, then you are agreeing that individual perception can be used as an objective measure in the assessment of genius, because if you don't, it doesn't matter one bit that a lot of people were exposed to Beethoven's 9th and went "whoa", it still is a mere reflection of one's own personal scale, and that, by some freak of chance, or maybe because of social conditioning and brain washing (as some people seem to believe here), this purely personal and arbitrary reflection happens to collide with the purely personal and arbitrary reflection of a million of other people. In short, genius is unassailable, period.

If, however, you concede that personal assessment can be indicative of the inherent objective qualities of a given piece of art, then it means that the principle of general consensus works in the affirmative as well as the negative, for exactly the same reasons. The only exception to this is when a work of art has not received sufficient attention for a general consensus to be formed at all, which is clearly not the case of Saint-Saens, who's works were very well known in his lifetime and are still readily available to this day. It would be absurd to think that if the equivalent of Beethoven's 9th existed among his oeuvre it would have remained undiscovered after all this time.

Now, on to the next point:

All right, so how do we 'measure' the degrees of genius without essentially reflecting one's own scale of preference?

What if one is reflecting his own ability to asses genius outside his personal scale of preference?

[(poco) Sforzando]

 I was on the receiving end of that Die Meistersinger argument.  We were not discussing if Die Meistersinger was flawed but the "allegedly" malicious way Wagner chose to treat Beckmesser.  You were bothered by it, I wasn't,  I ended that coversation by saying that I respect your point of view- nothing more.  We never discussed whether that work was flawed or not vis-a-vis the treatment of Beckmesser!

  So you don't hear flaws in other major composers works but only in Wagner well I don't agree with you here and I don't believe you.

 marvin

 

I made it quite clear I considered Wagner's treatment of Beckmesser a blemish on the dramatic construction of the libretto. Blemish = flaw, right? In your (I'm afraid) apparent Wagner idolatry, you were unwilling to concede my point.

I did not state, or would not state, that no other major composer's work is free from flaws. Beethoven's 9th, for example, is a good case of a work where reasonable questions have been raised as to whether the choral finale is a successful conclusion.

[Sergeant Rock]

Wagner... He was in large part a loathsome, despicable character...

He was in small part a loathsome, despicable character...that's closer to the truth. Had he really been so loathsome, Karl, he wouldn't have gotten all that help and support (emotional, financial) from his myriad friends and supporters.

Sarge

[(poco) Sforzando]

He was in small part a loathsome, despicable character...that's closer to the truth. Had he really been so loathsome, Karl, he wouldn't have gotten all that help and support (emotional, financial) from his myriad friends and supporters.

Sarge

So he was just a basically nice guy with a few foibles? (Like megalomania, financial dishonesty, adultery, and rabid anti-Semitism.) You sure about that?

[Don]

He was in small part a loathsome, despicable character...that's closer to the truth. Had he really been so loathsome, Karl, he wouldn't have gotten all that help and support (emotional, financial) from his myriad friends and supporters.

Sarge

O.J. Simpson has many friends that provide support.

[karlhenning]

He was in small part a loathsome, despicable character...that's closer to the truth.

I suppose, Sarge, we must say simply, he was, in part, a loathsome, despicable character.  To reference an obviously exaggerated example, Hitler was good to dogs and children, and there were people who would have sworn as to the quality of his character.

[Haffner]

Marvin, I think you are unclear as to the meaning of worship.  "Very strong influences, more so than other composers" is not worship.

I dont condone this behavior at all, but Bruckner did tell Wagner (in person no less) that he worshipped him.

Overall I'm really glad that the members on this forum never feel the need to have to defend their favorite composers. We all seem to know that the greats really don't need anyone to defend them.

[(poco) Sforzando]

Overall I'm really glad that the members on this forum never feel the need to have to defend their favorite composers. We all seem to know that the greats really don't need anyone to defend them.

Well, some of us do.

THE MONSTER

He was an undersized little man, with a head too big for his body-a
sickly little man. His nerves were bad. He had skin trouble. It was
agony for him to wear anything next to his skin coarser than silk. And
he had delusions of grandeur.

He was a monster of conceit. Never for one minute did he look at the
world or at people except in relation to himself. He was not only the
most important person in the world, to himself, in his own eyes he was
the only person who existed. He believed himself to be one of the
greatest dramatists in the world, one of the greatest thinkers, and
one of the greatest composers. To hear him talk, he was Shakespeare,
and Beethoven, and Plato, rolled into one. And you would have had no
difficulty in hearing him talk. He was one of the most exhausting
conversationalists that ever lived. An evening with him was an evening
spent in listening to a monologue. Sometimes he was brilliant;
sometimes he was maddeningly tiresome. But whether he was being
brilliant or dull, he had one sole topic of conversation: himself.
What he thought and what he did.

He had a mania for being in the right. The slightest hint of
disagreement, from anyone, on the most trivial point, was enough to
set him off on an harangue that might last for hours, in which he
proved himself right in so many ways, and with such exhausting
volubility, that in the end his hearer, stunned and deafened, would agree
with him, for the sake of peace.

It never occurred to him that he and his doing were not of the most
intense and fascinating interest to anyone with whom he came in
contact. He had theories about almost any subject under the sun,
including vegetarianism, the drama, politics and music; and in support
of these theories he wrote pamphlets, letters, books...thousands upon
thousands of words, hundreds and hundreds of pages. He not only wrote
these things, and published them-usually at somebody else's expense-
but he would sit and read them aloud, for hours, to his friends and
his family.

He wrote operas; and no sooner did he have the synopsis of a story,
but he would invite-or rather summon-a crowd of his friends to his
house and read it aloud to them. Not for criticism. For applause. When
the complete poem was written, the friends had to come again, and hear
that read aloud. Then he would publish the poem, sometimes years
before the music that went with it was written. He played the piano
like a composer, in the worst sense of what that implies, and he would
sit down at the piano before parties that included some of the finest
pianists of his time, and play for them, by the hour, his own music,
needless to say. He had a composer's voice. And he would invite
eminent vocalists to his house, and sing them his operas, taking all
the parts.

He had the emotional stability of a six year old child. When he felt
out of sorts, he would rave and stamp, or sink into suicidal gloom and
talk darkly of going to the east to end his days as a Buddhist monk.
Ten minutes later, when something pleased him, he would rush out of
doors and run around the garden, or jump up and down on the sofa, or
stand on his head. He could be grief stricken about the death of a pet
dog, and he could be callous and heartless to a degree that would have
made a Roman emperor shudder.

He was almost innocent of any sense of responsibility. Not only did he
seem incapable of supporting himself, but it never occurred to him
that he was under any obligation to do so. He was convinced the world
owed him a living. In support of this belief, he borrowed money from
everybody who was good for a loan-men, women, friends or strangers. He
wrote begging letters by the score, sometimes groveling without shame,
at others loftily offering his intended benefactor the privilege of
contributing to his support, and being mortally offended if the
recipient denied the honor. I have found no record of his ever paying
money or repaying money to anyone who did not have a legal claim upon
it.

What money he could lay his hands on he spent like an Indian rajah.
The mere prospect of a performance of one of his operas was enough to
set him to running up bills amounting to ten times the amount of his
prospective royalties. On an income that would reduce a more
scrupulous man to doing his own laundry, he would keep two servants.
Without enough money in his pocket to pay his rent, he would have the
walls and ceiling of his study lined with pink silk. No one will ever
know-certainly he never knew-how much money he owed. We do know that
his greatest benefactor gave him $6,000.00 to pay the most pressing of
his debts in one city, and a year later had to give him $16,000 to
enable him to live in another city without being thrown into jail for
debt.

He was equally unscrupulous in other ways. An endless procession of (men and)
women marches through his bed. His first wife spent twenty years
enduring and forgiving his infidelities. His second wife had been the
wife of his most devoted admirer, from whom he stole her. And even
while he was trying to persuade her to leave her first husband he was
writing to a friend to enquire whether he could suggest some wealthy
woman-any wealthy woman-he could marry for her money.

He was completely selfish in his other personal relationships. His
liking for his friends was measured solely by their devotion to him,
or their usefulness to him, whether financial or artistic. The minute
they failed him-even by refusing a dinner invitation-or began to
lessen in usefulness, he cast them off without a second thought. At
the end of his life he had exactly one friend left whom he had known
even in middle age.

He had a genius for making enemies. He would insult a man who
disagreed with him about the weather. He would pull endless wires in
order to meet some man who admired his work, and was able and anxious
to be of use to him-and would proceed to make a mortal enemy of him
with some idiotic and wholly uncalled-for exhibition of arrogance and
bad manners. A character in one of his operas was a caricature of the
most powerful music critic of his day. Not content with burlesquing
him, he invited the critic to his house and read him the libretto
aloud in front of his friends.

The name of this monster was Richard Wagner. Everything that I have
said about him you can find on record-in newspapers, in police
reports, in the testimony of people who knew him, in his own letters,
between the lines of his autobiography. And the curious thing about
this record is that it doesn't matter in the least.

Because this undersized, sickly, disagreeable, fascinating little man
was right all the time. The joke was on us. He was one of the world's
great dramatists; he was a great thinker; he was one of the most
stupendous musical geniuses that, up to now, the world has ever seen.
The world did owe him a living. People couldn't know those things at
the time, I suppose; and yet to us, who know his music, it does seem
as though they should have known. What if he did talk about himself
all the time? If he had talked about himself for twenty-four hours for
every day of his life he would not have uttered half the number of
words other men have spoken and written about him since his death.

When you consider what he wrote-thirteen operas and music dramas,
eleven of them still holding the stage, eight of them unquestionably
ranking among the world's great musico-dramatic masterpieces-when you
listen to what he wrote, the debts and heartaches that people had to
endure from him don't seem much of a price. Eduard Hanslick, the
critic whom he caricatured in DIE MEISTERSINGER and who hated him ever
after, now lives only because he was caricatured in DIE MEISTERSINGER.
The women whose hearts he broke are long since dead; and the man who
could never love anyone but himself has made them deathless atonement,
I think, with TRISTAN UND ISOLDE. Think of the luxury with which for a
time, at least, fate rewarded Napoleon, the man who ruined France and
looted Europe; and then perhaps you will agree that a few thousand
dollars' worth of debt were not too high a price to pay for the RING
TRILOGY.

What if he was faithless to his friends and to his wives? He had one
mistress to whom he was faithful to the day of his death: Music. Not
for a single moment did he ever compromise with what he believed, with
what he dreamed. There is not a line of his music that could have been
written by a little mind. Even when he is dull, or downright bad, he
is dull in the grand manner. There is greatness about his worst
mistakes. Listening to his music, one does not forgive him for what he
may or may not have been. It is not a matter of forgiveness. It is a
matter of being dumb with wonder that his poor body didn't burst under
the torment of the demon of creative energy living inside him,
struggling, clawing, scratching to be released; tearing, shrieking at
him to write the music that was in him. The miracle is that what he
did in the little space of seventy years could have been done at all,
even by a great genius. Is it any wonder that he had no time to be a
man?

--Deems Taylor, from OF MEN AND MUSIC, 1937.

All this and anti-Semitism too! 

[Haffner]

  So you don't hear flaws in other major composers works but only in Wagner well I don't agree with you here.

 marvin

 

I'm trying hard not to defend anyone here, but Marvin has a point as legitimate as James and Karl and all the rest. Bach and Mozart repeated themselves in their later works to a quite noticeable (at times tiresome) extent. Many of the atonal/twelve tone composers tended to sound very contrived/trying-too-hard-to-be-"different" at times. Wagner was dizzyingly inconsistent and at times ouright incoherent in his libretti, and more than several times his music could put a Crystal Meth freak to sleep.

All the great composers had faults, otherwise how could we truly love them? Sometimes I wonder if it's the human quality about them that makes us love them most.

[Haffner]

Well, some of us do.

All this and anti-Semitism too! 

Irony. Good for the blood, right?

[Haffner]

O.J. Simpson has many friends that provide support.

Mike Tyson.

[ChamberNut]

Current statistics clearly show a strong correlation between intelligence and modern works.  An even greater link is shown for American composers.

[head-case]

  head-case You have interefered in a conversation that did not concern you to begin with and then proceeded to insult me with your comment regarding "the most intelligent" poster.  I want to thank you for your good behaviour towards me.

  marvin   
 

I fail to see how you can decide that anything on this public discussion board doesn't concern me. 

In the second place, apparently you failed to notice that the comment you mentioned was accompanied by a "wink" symbol (  ) which indicates that the associated remark is meant to be humorous.  You sense of humor and personal modesty are certainly traits you share with your idol, Wagner.

[head-case]

Of course there is great genius in Wagner's work. At the same time, of all the major composers, I can't think of another whose work is (to my mind) as deeply flawed in a number of ways. I spent considerable time arguing my case about the ending of Meistersinger on another thread. No question that all the works from Rheingold on are masterpieces. No doubt in my mind that there are problems in some of these works that I don't hear in some other major composers. But some of the most ambitious undertakings are not necessarily "perfect"; their very ambitiousness almost makes it inevitable that there will be some flaws.

I'm not sure I like the use of the term "flaw."  Flaw implies a well defined defect.  You could say there is a flaw in a student's composition of a dissonance didn't resolve properly, or if a fugue subject was not compatible with a certain kind of counterpoint that the composer tried to subject it to, or if the orchestration is too thick in a certain section to allow a soloist to be heard.  In Wagner I find long sections which are just awful.  They're boring.  They are there to indulge the composers vanity.  Maybe some people think Wagner is magnificent from beginning to end, but I can't imagine it.  That's a more vaguely defined problem than a "flaw."

[jochanaan]

I dont condone this behavior at all, but Bruckner did tell Wagner (in person no less) that he worshipped him.

Bruckner is a special case.  As far as I can determine--and who can really know what goes on in another's mind, especially one as complex as Anton's?--Wagner indeed was an object of near-idolatry, yet along with that, Bruckner loved the Lord God with all his heart and soul and would never have considered giving to a mere man the devotion he gave to the Almighty Godhead.

As for his music, it indeed shares many characteristics with Wagner's, including monumental orchestration and chromatic harmonies; yet it is by no means a mere translation of Wagner's idioms into symphonic and choral form.  For one thing, Bruckner was also heavily influenced by sacred music from Medieval and Renaissance times, which Wagner would have scorned.  Also, Bruckner's mastery of strict contrapuntal forms went far beyond Wagner's, whose contrapuntal gifts were of another kind.  So where Wagner was entirely Romantic in gifts and nature, Bruckner had a classical discipline that makes him no "mere Wagnerian."

...In Wagner I find long sections which are just awful.  They're boring.  They are there to indulge the composers vanity...

Obviously these same sections are not "just awful" to all Wagner fans, so how can we say they're there merely "to indulge the composer's vanity"?

[Haffner]

Bruckner is a special case.  As far as I can determine--and who can really know what goes on in another's mind, especially one as complex as Anton's?--Wagner indeed was an object of near-idolatry, yet along with that, Bruckner loved the Lord God with all his heart and soul and would never have considered giving to a mere man the devotion he gave to the Almighty Godhead.

As for his music, it indeed shares many characteristics with Wagner's, including monumental orchestration and chromatic harmonies; yet it is by no means a mere translation of Wagner's idioms into symphonic and choral form.  For one thing, Bruckner was also heavily influenced by sacred music from Medieval and Renaissance times, which Wagner would have scorned.  Also, Bruckner's mastery of strict contrapuntal forms went far beyond Wagner's, whose contrapuntal gifts were of another kind.  So where Wagner was entirely Romantic in gifts and nature, Bruckner had a classical discipline that makes him no "mere Wagnerian."Obviously these same sections are not "just awful" to all Wagner fans, so how can we say they're there merely "to indulge the composer's vanity"?

Very interesting clarification. J.