Busoni vs Mozart vs Bach

[emrysmerlin]

Who's the Most talented composer? My vote would go to Busoni as he can compose almost all types of music and imitate others with near perfection. His concerto also shows how effectively he can make use of different timbres of instruments. I didn't go for Bach as he didn't compose as many different types of music (though being born the earliest gave him a disadvantage) and because many of his works contained not very memorable tunes. I personally see him as an improviser though that doesn't mean I don't listen to his music everyday. I didn't go for Mozart either because his composing techniques are often limited despite perfection in all of his works.

[hstjkd]

Busoni vs Mozart vs Bach? That's like Agatha Christie vs Dickens vs Shakespeare!

And to disregard Bach as 'an improviser' -- do you imagine he improvised 3-part invertible canons? Listen to the art of fugue and the musical offering and tell me that they are the work of an 'improviser'.

[j_menz]

the musical offering

actually started it's life as an improvisation.

Otherwise:

[emrysmerlin]

I do not disregard Bach's works as I listen to them a lot more than I do with Busoni's, possibly due to the fact that Bach has composed more. However, while not trying belittle Bach I would like to say that Busoni might be as, or even more talented, when talking about varied compositional skills.

I do find most of Mozart's and Bach's melodies very not memorable. Bach's mass in b minor took me more than several listens to remember while not having a particular liking and I still find Mozart's flute quartets not very satisfying. Busoni's concerto, on the other hand, is one of the very few non-vocal works that I do not get bored with after 20 listens. It is possibly one of the most original pieces in the history of music. Also, the art of fugue is not someone who is incapable of improvising fugues can write out.

I've read in another thread some time that great composers are either massively prolific while sustaining a good overall quality, or that they compose little and have major compositions. Mozart and Bach are the former and Busoni is the later.

While Bach's and Mozart's talents, being able to improvise fugues and being write down an entire orchestral score after 1 listen respectively, are undisputed, (which Busoni apparently doesn't have) doesn't mean Busoni isn't as talented in composing and making use of different timbres. His musical sense has many times been compared to Liszt, who is only inferior to Alkan in terms of interpretation.

Otherwise we can narrow it down to Mozart vs Bach if Busoni is really that un-great.

[outin]

Busoni vs Mozart vs Bach?

It' a bit hard to tell about the amount of talent when they are all dead...So are the people we could ask.
We only see the end product...who knows what means they might have used to get there (talent, hard work, money, booze...)

[redbaron]

I agree with j_menz, this is a ridiculous thread. Talent, like beauty, is entirely in the eye of the beholder, therefore the original question is meaningless.

[the_technicalman]

Its simply impossible to rate any composer by an standard against Bach. Bach, by all forms and possibilities, can only be the greatest, for every great composition originates through him. Harmonically, structurally, and melodically, he is at the root of every great composition from the classical period onwards. Read Murray Perahia's essay on him.

[hstjkd]

actually started it's life as an improvisation.

Only the first fugue. Not the canons; not the six-part fugue. Indeed, the story goes that Frederick the Great challenged him to improvise in six voices and he declined. It probably took him twenty minutes or so to write that whilst he was eating his breakfast.

But my point was that he came up with things far beyond his ability to improvise, even though he was probably the most skilled contrapuntal improviser who ever lived. The amount of intellectual artifice that went into even many of his short, frivolous works is astonishing.

[49410enrique]

improv was mentioned some,just waned to contribute my little bit.

i think it helps to understand that the definition of improvisation in our modern common context/understanding can  and is frequently different  (and i'd say 'limited' ) than improvisation as practiced in the 17th and 18th centuries.

the fact that composers were trained extensively in, and encouraged to 'improvise' is well established and understood to be an important contributing part of how they were able to compose so many works in such a short amount of time (relatively, and for those that did published extensively).

there's visting lecturer coming to school next week to give a special topic discussion on this very topic. if anyone is interested i can give you the contact information via pm to the school contact for the lecture series, they might be able to put you in contat with the professor or even provide access to a recording or transcripts/notes, etc if those are available.  i want to attend and would post my own notes but i have a class conflict.

also, this might be good reading on the matter for some.

pdf attached.

excerpt
"...The Baroque period thus saw a number of institutional and socioeconomic changes that impacted upon improvisation, and as such it will be my principal focus here.8 But what do we mean precisely when, as performer, musicologist or—as in the case of many of us historical performers, embodier of both roles—we invoke the phrase ‗Baroque improvisation‘? Do we mean, as Paul Berliner asks rhetorically, ‗picking notes out of thin air‘,9 perhaps in this case the spontaneous generation of an entirely new piece indistinguishable from a 17th or 18th-century composition? Do we mean the composition of new melodic parts above a provided ground bass, a new set of diminutions or a double for a 17th-century air de cour, or the addition of new material in a more limited fashion, such as a cadenza in a sonata or concerto? Or does Baroque improvisation imply only the addition of a few ornaments to a previously-composed score, based on an assimilation of the surviving written-out examples and treatises from the period? Is it acceptable to term such ornaments and cadenzas ‗improvisation‘ if they are written down, memorized or sketched out in advance, or must they literally be performed on the spot? Would we include in a discussion of Baroque improvisation the realization of a basso continuo part, even though the chords are usually indicated above the bass line, and good voice- leading rules and contemporary treatises place significant constraints on interpretation?10 Where exactly do we draw the line between spontaneity and pre-planning, and between interpretation, composition and improvisation? Improvisation, as Bruno Nettl suggests, would seem to occur on a continuum; its definition is socially determined and dependent on cultural context.11 This is true, I would argue, not only for non-western musics, jazz and other genres, but also for European music composed from 1600 to 1750—as practiced by 17th and 18th-century musicians, but also by 20th and 21st-century musicians in the early music revival....

[landru]

Most talented? To me that would mean being able to compose masterpieces in every genre, instrumental solo, orchestral, chamber, songs, opera/masses.

Mozart, definitely. Bach, definitely. Busoni? Not so sure about the unequivocal masterpieces.

How about Shostakovich and Britten? Accounts of both of them are filled with awe of how easy composing came to them - and their works speak for themselves!

[slobone]

I guess one of the joys of the Internet is that somewhere you can find somebody who believes almost anything -- Obama is gay, the Holocaust never happened, Busoni is a better composer than Bach...

[emrysmerlin]

Yes the internet is in fact quite a large place, possibly having more things to see than even your own town, but let's not start insulting before reading what others are about to say. Yes, Bach was greater, Mozart was greater, but IN TERMS OF TIMBRE CONTROL IN WHAT THEY CAN OFFER US AND THE UTILIZATION OF INSTRUMENTS TO THE FULL EXTENT (which is what I've been arguing about this whole time), Busoni, it seems to me, have more control over it as he could do more than putting a brass marching bass rhythm whenever the music gets a little louder, unlike a lot of other composers. Some of his elegies has more texture than even Chopin (the 4th elegy for example). Busoni would change the whole symphonic structure when expressing different musical languages while using the same instruments. Bach for instance, produced textures that are unbelievably complex, but is inferior to Mozart in terms of pushing the use of instrumental properties. Mozart, however, has many works which all the instruments are replaceable by another. This is what I refer as "deficient in timbre control." Bach, as shown in his mass in B minor, seems to only be able to effectively use 3 types of instruments - strings, flute and oboe.

Talent is measurable if we're talking only about what composers can offer us. This of course would not be very accurate and would be biased.

To clarify once more, I do not think of Busoni as a greater composer than Mozart or Bach, it's just that after Bach and Mozart wrote everything, Busoni could still find other music he could produce and he could vary instrumentation so much. The only reason I chose Busoni over Bach in this subject is simply because Busoni's music has more variety. Also I didn't like what Bach did to some of the most wondrous melodies one could possibly find in his WTC.