Well-known music you've somehow overlooked (or never got round to hearing)

[Pat B]

I'm gonna be honest: I don't think the argument over the semantics of "master" and "masterwork" is all that interesting.

I started listening to classical about 25 years ago but I took a several-year hiatus.

Some that come to mind:
Bach: most cantatas
Haydn: many string quartets
Schumann: Carnaval, maybe some other piano music, most chamber music
Chopin: 3rd sonata. I haven't heard the 1st sonata either, but nobody calls it a masterpiece. I have a disc with both on order.
Bruckner: Symphonies except 3 and 4. I might have heard one or two of the others but it would have been a long time ago and I don't remember much
R.Strauss: most
Sibelius: Symphonies except #2

And like several others, a lot of opera.

There's also a lot of things I have only heard once or twice, not enough to really know.

[bwv 1080]

Baroque - most everything that ain't Bach, Scarlatti or Rameau
Classical - most everything that ain't Mozart or Beethoven
Romantic - most everything that ain't Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt, Wagner, Mahler or Reger

[Gurn Blanston]

I have been listening to classical music for almost 2 decades and avoiding most of it. 

Braggart

[aukhawk]

It seems to me, reading this thread, that the bar for 'masterpiece' has been set rather low.

The reason Bach, Mozart and Beethoven are so often mentioned in the same breath is that they each composed several masterpieces.  That's 'several' as in 'more than five or so'. 
I don't believe there are many other composers that fall into that category. 

There is a consensus about hundreds or even thousands of masterpieces.

Thousands, I think not.

As thread duty - well in 50+ years of listening I'd never heard (or heard of) Ravel's Gaspard until Brian's lightning blind last year - I must have listened to it a dozen times since then, so thanks, Brian!

[Henk]

I appreciate your effort!  Now, I have some preliminary remarks (only preliminary, because I have not listened to the music, myself):

Myriad composers, good, bad and indifferent, manage a balance between silent (soft) and loud, between fast and slow.  These points, in themselves, do not tell me anything about whether the music is great.

As to adventurous, this is rather subjective and contextual.  This is still reading more like "I dig this composer!" than like "Here is why this composer is as great as Bach."

Repetition can be artful (is, in fact, one of the things which create coherence in music).  The avoidance of repetition can be artful . . . or it can be a tic.  Here again, the point itself does not mean one thing or the other, and needs more discussion.

All composers breathe, too   Seriously, something of a de minimus point, and not anything to shake Bach from his (well-earned) pedestal.

Appeal to The Anxienty of Influence is soooo 20^th century!   Many a great artist wears his influences well.  Another point which I consider ambiguous.

Well, that last one can hardly be a point of comparison to Bach, Mozart or Beethoven, right? 

In a sense, no 20^th-c. composer can be "as great as" Bach, Mozart or Beethoven, each of whom had a far-reaching impact on later generations of composers.  It is simply a river we cannot step into again.

So I think you over-reached with that bit of hyperbole (perhaps that sentence is redundant).  And something I have to share about myself is:  I tend to resist hype, and my hype-o-meter is a finely tuned instrument.

Karl, I am well aware of my limitations in describing the quality of music. No need to stress that.

I apreciate your reply however.

[Mookalafalas]

I don't listen to Mahler. I'm not sure why. I listened to Kubelik conducting his third, and liked it, kinda-sorta, but decided not to listen to anymore until some as-yet-undetermined time in the distant future. Perhaps very distant.

[Karl Henning]

Karl, I am well aware of my limitations in describing the quality of music. No need to stress that.

I apreciate your reply however.

While I did not mean to harp, it does underscore the challenge facing a layman who wishes to claim that [ unknown composer N. ] is "just as great as" Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven.

[Karl Henning]

I don't listen to Mahler. I'm not sure why. I listened to Kubelik conducting his third, and liked it, kinda-sorta, but decided not to listen to anymore until some as-yet-undetermined time in the distant future. Perhaps very distant.

I've come around to liking Mahler much better than I used to;  but I don't think he'll ever make my "first string."  No knock against him;  just a matter of this listener, and that body of work.

[Henk]

While I did not mean to harp, it does underscore the challenge facing a layman who wishes to claim that [ unknown composer N. ] is "just as great as" Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven.

OK, understood!

[Jay F]

I don't listen to Mahler.

I've come around to liking Mahler much better than I used to;  but I don't think he'll ever make my "first string."

If there had not been Mahler, I don't know how long my interest in classical music in general would have lasted. Certainly there are enough different bodies of work I've listened to nearly as obsessively (Beethoven's and Schubert's piano sonatas and string quartets; St. Matthew Passion; Mozart's piano concertos; Die Zauberflote), but there is no other single composer all of whose works I have liked as much as I like Mahler's.

[Karl Henning]

Once again: there's more ways to the woods than one!

[Gurn Blanston]

I don't listen to Mahler. I'm not sure why. I listened to Kubelik conducting his third, and liked it, kinda-sorta, but decided not to listen to anymore until some as-yet-undetermined time in the distant future. Perhaps very distant.

Ditto

[Madiel]

It seems to me fairly evident that labelling something as a masterpiece is going to depend on its aesthetic goals matching your own aesthetic ideals.

It also would, I hope, depend on how well it achieves those goals. But it's fairly fundamental that you can't assess a piece of music's 'success' at doing something until you've decided what it's actually trying to do.  And I think it's just wrong-headed to make an assumption that all music has the same goals.

I've been known to rant about this in a pop music context, but I think it's equally true in a classical music context. One need only spend a bit of time reading the thoughts of various composers to find that they sometimes had VERY different ideas of what music was 'about'. Off the top of my head, there's a famous exchange between Mahler and Sibelius about what a symphony should be - and then one finds that Mahler's symphonies reflect Mahler's ideas about symphonies far better than Sibelius' ideas, and Sibelius' symphonies reflect Sibelius' ideas about symphonies far better than Mahler's ideas.  In the 19th century, philosophical battles raged between the Liszt/Wagner 'progressives' and the traditionalists who took Brahms as their figurehead.

You're far more likely to find masterpieces among the works of a composer whose aesthetics of music are close to your own.

[Jay F]

Ditto

Well, the same goes for Haydn, buddy.

[EigenUser]

The more I read this thread (and others, too), the more I am coming to realize that the word "masterpiece" is meaningless. We often say it when we hear something that we really like, but when you think about it, saying that something is a masterpiece really isn't too different than saying something is great. All it does is exaggerate the claim by making it appear that the work in question meets some sort of quantifiable criteria. What quality/qualities does Beethoven's Wellington's Victory (yes, I've heard it) lack that make(s) the his 5th a masterpiece? Does a person have lesser taste for preferring WV over the 5th?

It's a masterpiece if you think it's a masterpiece. There. I said it.

And to use a more serious analogy, comparing composers like Donatoni and Beethoven is like comparing a plumber to an electrician. Is one greater? No. If pipes are leaking, even the best electrician is useless because I really need a plumber. Same vice-versa.

It is fun to discuss, though.

[Sergeant Rock]

The more I read this thread (and others, too), the more I am coming to realize that the word "masterpiece" is meaningless.

Let's throw "genius" in the meaningless pile too 

Sarge

[Sergeant Rock]

Well, the same goes for Haydn, buddy.

I can't get in on this game because...I like Mahler and Haydn equally well 


Sarge

[eoghan]

Re Mahler, I find it's far better to listen to live (or better still, to play) than listen to a recording. That's because it's not great "background" music and suffers unless you give it 100% attention.

[Karl Henning]

100% attention is de rigueur, to be sure.

[Jo498]

The more I read this thread (and others, too), the more I am coming to realize that the word "masterpiece" is meaningless. We often say it when we hear something that we really like, but when you think about it, saying that something is a masterpiece really isn't too different than saying something is great.

The words do not matter. The point some of us wanted to make was, as I understand it, to distinguish between subjective preference and objective evaluation. Now many people want to make their lives easy and simply claim objective aesthetic evaluation is just impossible. There is only subjective preference or a sum/average of such preferences or subjective preferences of experts. But this is far too simple. Of course, aesthetic evaluation is not completely independent of anything (but probably nothing besides a little logic, maths and God is independent in such a way  ).
It is usually connected to an historical framework, like the history of western art music. (There may be ways to get more general aesthetic criteria, but let's leave this out for now.) This is not an external evaluative framework, but it is usually set not only by some "rules" that have been used when teaching people composition etc., but more importantly by influential pieces. Someone already mentioned how "rules" of sonata form were abstracted from actual works by Haydn and others when some theoreticians wrote treatises on musical composition in the late 18th century. Because of such complexities it is often short-sighted and sophomoric to evaluate pieces according to whether they "follow the rules" or whether they disobey the rules in a smart fashion.
As Walther in Wagner's Meistersinger asks "How do I begin according to the rules?" he gets the answer: "You put the rules yourself and then you follow them"
(Wie fang ich nach der Regel an? - Ihr stellt sie selbst und folgt ihr dann!) One could read this as a recommendation for internal consistency, for a kind of fitting parts into the whole that leads to the impression of an unevitable musical development. But these are internal "rules". And of course one could as well say that surprise is nice, so do not structure your piece according in such a fashion that its unfolding seems inevitable. It all depends and music can work in different ways. But I find it plausible that there is a lot of great music where you will find a convincing balance between inevitability and surprise. E.g. Beethoven's 5th first movement is very densely structured, almost everything can be derived from a few motives/intervals/themes. Still, it's not really predictable and there is e.g. the famous passage in the recap with the little oboe solo that seems to "come out of nowhere" and is profoundly moving, because you get this little plaintive oboe passage within the restless storm of the movement without expecting it at all.

All it does is exaggerate the claim by making it appear that the work in question meets some sort of quantifiable criteria. What quality/qualities does Beethoven's Wellington's Victory (yes, I've heard it) lack that make(s) the his 5th a masterpiece? Does a person have lesser taste for preferring WV over the 5th?

I think Wellington's victory is better than its reputation.
But it would not be hard to show that the 5th symphony is a much better piece. First of all, Wellingtons Victory consists of rather short simple pieces that follow the order they have, because of the rather simplistic program: Each side gets its anthem/march, trumpet signal etc. The clash of the armies and the battle are well done, but there is not much of actual musical development. Compare the "battle" (I do not think it is literally meant to depict one) in the development section of the Eroica with the mourning new theme in the minor after screeching dissonances and disturbing of the beat (suddenly it feels like an even beat in half notes instead of quarters/dotted halfs). One of the best thing in WV is the retreat of the french with their march tune in the minor and also rhythmically "torn up", like the wounded staggering on crutches.

The second part, celebrating the victory, is a little more "symphonic", but also rather "flat" if you compare it to other celebrating pieces (like most of the finale of the 5th). I always found the exaggerated "echo" dynamics with "God save the King" somewhat ridiculous. It's still fun and not all that different of what Beethoven could have written as a coda of an ouverture or so. But in such a case there would have been a more complex musical development before the triumphal coda.