10 best classical music composers of all time

This piece inaugurates the nkoda blog’s series of ‘best composers’ articles, discussing the leading figures in a selection of traditions, periods and lineages.

Here we’ll be exploring familiar ground: Western classical music. It’s a thousand-year-old international practice, making it probably the world’s longest and largest ongoing musical tradition to which composers have contributed fixed, written and surviving music.

Moreover, in this world composers have always represented the heart of the practice. The work and its creator reign supreme in classical music, attaining a level of prestige that is not awarded to its other essential contributors. Even performers cannot quite match the mystique.

Below we’ll be reflecting on the legacies of ten vital individuals who helped to fashion that remarkable role of the classical composer. We’ll consider what makes their work special, and how - in their own unique way - each of them changed the course of history.
 

Ten of the greatest composers of all time
 

• Hildegard von Bingen
• Josquin des Prez
• Claudio Monteverdi
• Johann Sebastian Bach
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• Ludwig van Beethoven
• Frédéric Chopin
• Claude Debussy
• Igor Stravinsky
• Kaija Saariaho

Hildegard von Bingen

Classical music has been, for all of its history, a world dominated by men. It still is of course, even if momentous, encouraging changes are well underway. It’s all the more remarkable, then, that from the farthest reaches of the tradition that we can call ‘classical music’, it is a woman’s voice that connects to us. From nearly a millennium ago, Hildegard von Bingen offers modern ears some of the most pioneering and expressive music of the first centuries of the story of classical music.

Middle-Age Europe in general was an enormous boys’ club. Males prevailed in all aspects of life, and together worked to perpetuate their privilege. A bastion of medieval European society was of course the all-powerful Latin Church, which happens to be the very home of the tradition we’re exploring. It also happens to be more progressive than you might expected, at least regarding the empowerment of women. 

In convents scattered across Europe, well-respected communities of nuns studied, wrote, prayed, and served God. As the abbess of two such convents in the German Rhineland, Hildegard would rise to become one of the most revered scholars in Europe. Playwright, theologian, healer, saint - she was a truly extraordinary individual. She was also a composer, of course, whose output consists of 69 works, each with its own original poetic text - one of the largest and most complete surviving repertoires of any medieval composer. 

Her music is entirely monophonic, meaning it features a lone melodic line, like all chant of the period - Gregorian or otherwise - but it’s distinguished by its constructive adventurousness and emotive power. Her use of elaborate melisma is another hallmark, which reflects an unusually close correspondence between music and text. In this regard her work anticipates the innovations that her successors would soon carry out.

Josquin des Prez

One of the most admired of these successors - in fact thought by many to be the greatest composer of early music - is Josquin des Prez. While Hildegard lived in the German states and important composers to follow were to be found in the likes of France and England, the most important musical region in the transition from the late Middle Ages to the early Renaissance was the area now covered by northern France, Belgium and the Netherlands - the ‘Low Countries’. This was Josquin territory.

He was born here in the mid-15th century, just as the transformative waves of the Italian Renaissance were beginning to spread throughout Europe. In his mastery of polyphonic forms that were cultivated after Hildegard, we can witness the last gasp of the region’s heyday. 

Josquin and his art travelled widely throughout Europe, though. He brought his music to the continent’s great courts and churches - especially in Italy - and he served the monarchs of France and Hungary, and even popes at the Vatican. Thanks to all his tourism his impact was felt widely, his music dazzling on a scale that few of his contemporaries matched. His work was revered, performed and emulated across the continent long after his death in 1521. 

Primarily a writer of vocal compositions, especially masses and motets, he achieved new levels of depth and intricacy in his polyphonic handling. While he spurned the melismatic writing that can be traced back to Hildegard, opting instead for the imitative treatment of succinct motifs, his work remains highly expressive - and always mesmerising. 

Claudio Monteverdi

As the Italian Renaissance became a European Renaissance, artists like Josquin began to accelerate musical developments on an increasingly wide scale. This huge flourishing of ideas and creativity in Renaissance music would eventually serve as the transition to the Baroque era in the 1600s, leaving ‘early music’ behind for good and initiating the ‘common practice period’, which then lasted until the turn of the 20th century.

The first and most significant composer in this window, in which so much world-changing music was composed, is Claudio Monteverdi. Born in Cremona, northern Italy in 1567, his great achievements are indicative of the vital role that Italy had played in redrawing the cultural map of Europe at this time - one it would long continue to play. 

These were glorious days for Italian music, between the late Renaissance masterpieces of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and the definitive Baroque classics of Antonio Vivaldi. Monteverdi’s right in the middle of that span - the epochal figure between these periods, in whose music Baroque staples such as the use of stricter tonality and the inclusion of a basso continuo part started to be consolidated.

He was a prolific composer of sacred and secular music in a range of forms, but perhaps nothing better speaks for the importance of his artistry than his operas. Opera was a form concocted in late 1590s Florence as a musical reincarnation of ancient Greek theatre, and Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, performed in 1607, is the oldest surviving one that’s still performed. Playing out on an ambitious scale, to a sprawling musical fresco enriched by the classic myth, it signifies the continued expansion of classical music away from the church, and away from secular poetic writing, into a new, more distinct musical space. 

Johann Sebastian Bach

As Josquin is to Hildegard, so Bach is to Monteverdi. The Italian was no slouch, a composer of music far more complex than many realise, but as Baroque techniques solidified, order, refinement and melodic simplicity gradually defined this style that was now preoccupying musicians across Europe. But, building on the middle-period innovations of composers like Buxtehude, Purcell and Pergolesi, Bach would then haul Baroque forms to an unsurpassed pinnacle of depth and complexity. 

Established fairly recently, the emergent principles of tonality were totally exhausted by Bach's musical geometry, through which he crafted countless exquisite articulations of harmony and counterpoint. Genres like the fugue and invention inspired his textbook polyphonic exercises, and his homorhythmic chorales remain the music student’s bread and butter today. He was also well versed in concertos and sonatas, as well as the dance forms that were the cornerstone of Baroque practice. 

Bach's perfect musical machinations are like maths in sound, and it's precisely that quality that inspired the great writer Douglas Adams to offer the definitive summary of his music: ‘Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven, and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe’.

Not merely a composer, he was also a teacher, organist and Kantor at the Thomaskirche in the German city of Leipzig, a position that required him to compose one whole cantata every week. Colossal liturgical works such as the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor, and masterpieces for keyboard such as The Well-Tempered Clavier and The Art of Fugue are probably the most towering achievements of his towering career. 

Bach was acclaimed solely as an organist for almost a century until the ‘Bach Revival’, inspired by Felix Mendelssohn’s historic performance of the St Matthew in 1829. His star has continued to rise ever since, and now he's widely considered the greatest composer in history.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

The next generation of composers - including Johann Sebastian's own son, Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach - reacted against the extravagant complexities of both Bach senior and his countryman and exact contemporary George Frideric Handel. They would start afresh in the mid-1700s. 

In the ‘galant style’ that emerged, basic, song-like melodies and an absence of polyphony prevailed, but this idiom, too, gradually became more complicated. Inspired by ancient principles of grace, balance, poise and clarity, the Classical era proper dawned, and while the trailblazing works of Joseph Haydn defined, advanced and consolidated it, the figure of Mozart endures as the iconic high-water mark of the era. For many he’s the high-water mark of classical (lowercase) music more generally. 

His musical abilities are the stuff of legend. This is the child prodigy - the Wunderkind of Europe. The composer who wrote his first symphony at the age of eight, who could write an entire concerto in a few days, and who notated Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere by ear, a composition that until then was guarded with the strictest secrecy by the Vatican. 

For modern music-lovers, this tremendous reputation has a lot to do with the 1979 play, Amadeus and its cinematic adaptation of 1984. But although they may exaggerate certain aspects of his life and work, there is more than a kernel of truth at their heart. 

Mozart was an enormously prolific, accomplished and influential composer. His diverse output contains pioneering works in a range of genres - operas, masses, chamber music, etc. - and also demonstrates the Classical-era proliferation of so-called ‘absolute’ forms: symphonies, concertos, sonatas, which usurped the predominance of Baroque dances and various sacred-music forms. Through piano sonatas and concertos, Mozart also served to cement the centralisation of the piano (then the fortepiano), which replaced the harpsichord as the keyboard of choice. And in his 41 symphonies - building on the achievements of Haydn’s staggering 104 - he similarly helps to solidify the orchestra.

Ludwig van Beethoven

You may or may not have noticed, but there’s a real Germanic predominance in this phase of classical-music history. With the dawn of the Enlightenment, this part of Europe begins to innovate intellectually and culturally, and the growing power of the Habsburgs in Austria also facilitates the establishment of Vienna as the continent’s musical capital. 

From the era of Haydn and Mozart unti the German annexation of Austria in 1938, many of the world's finest musicians would take up residence in the city to practise their artistry. Beethoven was among the first, making the long journey there from Bonn in 1792, aged 22.

Like Monteverdi, Beethoven - initially grounded in Classicism but dying as the first Romantic composer - is a transitional figure. But through the sheer magnitude of his innovations, he is able to usher in the Romantic era almost single-handedly. And because he’s impossible to classify as belonging to one or the other he arguably occupies a historical period all of his own. For this reason, it becomes more practical to subdivide his work itself, which falls into three stages: Classical, Heroic and late. 

Emulating Mozart and Haydn in his Classical phase, it is in his Heroic and late works that his most seismic innovations occur: expansion of the orchestra, subversion of formal structures, the enrichment of harmony and dissonance. His piano sonatas and string quartets are monumental bodies of work, but his symphonies are emblematic of his contribution.

Most significantly, there is an unprecedented emphasis on expression. On the notion that music can capture the emotion, pain and triumph of the composer - Beethoven’s personal torment in coming to terms with his worsening deafness is widely regarded as a catalyst for this great breakthrough. Because these values are everything that Romanticism stands for, he then becomes a paragon for later artists. 

He immediately influenced Franz Schubert and Hector Berlioz. Both factions in the ‘Wars of the Romantics’ - Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt on one side, Johannes Brahms and Robert Schumann on the other - laid claim to his legacy. As the (extremely Romantic) painting above shows, every composer had a bust of Beethoven in their study. He still represents a pinnacle for many, and while his greatness relative to other masters may be up for debate, few would contest that he’s the supreme iconic figure of Western classical music. 

Frédéric Chopin

Although Frédéric Chopin is an archetypal Romantic, he's one of very few composers of the period who drew little influence from Beethoven. They did have a few things in common, however, not least their love and mastery of the keyboard. While Beethoven’s titanic symphonies would symbolise his achievements, piano music would be totally definitive of Chopin’s legacy as a composer and musician. Not only is he perhaps the greatest composer for the instrument, but his special relationship with the piano is one of near exclusivity - it features in every piece he ever composed, and only a handful of works include other instruments.

More than being a quintessentially Romantic individual (the troubled, lonely, frail genius), Chopin achieves perhaps the textbook articulation of the Romantic musical idiom in his music. This music offers the ideal blend of lyricism, complexity, elegance, whimsy and pathos. 

The art of melody and accompaniment is expressed magnificently in his music, with its rich harmonic palette, organic rhythmic handling, and unflappable grace. Chopin was influenced in the main by Bach and Mozart, but also the virtuosic ‘brilliant’ piano miniatures of the day and later by Italian opera and the folk music of his native Poland. He brought his sophisticated style primarily to the various forms of salon music popular at the time, elevating the modest nocturne, ballade and prelude to concert genres. 

Beethoven can be clumsy at times, Mozart repetitive, but it’s hard to find fault in Chopin. All you can point to is his loyalty to the piano - maybe if he’d composed with more versatility, his status as the great Romantic composer might be more assured. But Chopin makes his piano his universe, sometimes no less expansive and multifaceted than an orchestra. And moreover, with the 19th-century emergence of the modern instrument, the piano comes to reign supreme, and writing for it becomes an acid test for any aspiring composer. As the undisputed master of this art, Chopin proved to be a touchstone for all. 

Claude Debussy

In Germany, the Wars of the Romantics raged through the 19th century. In France and Italy, opera dominated practice. Other nations, like Russia, Bohemia and Britain, would discover their own musical identities. At the century’s end, composers such as Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Jean Sibelius were expanding Romantic frameworks to breaking point. 

Meanwhile, a young French composer was beginning to sculpt a whole new language altogether. One that for many musicologists signalled the world-changing onset of Modernism in classical music. 

In works such as Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, La mer and the Suite bergamasque, Claude Debussy exercised techniques that generated music like nothing that had ever been heard before. Dense and vivid harmonies - toying with just the right amount of dissonance - parallel fifths, ninths and other intervals that would have horrified the Baroque masters of old. 

All these techniques generated ethereal, hazy colours, a distinctive and unmistakably dreamlike quality. Many listeners felt that it captured in sound what the earlier Impressionist artists had captured in paint. And so the style that Debussy cultivated and the movement he subsequently triggered became known as Impressionism - a label he always hated.  

This music swiftly catalysed the developments that led to some of the most pioneering works ever composed. Mahler, Strauss and Sibelius all took their efforts up a few notches. The pioneering works of Schönberg and Stravinsky were just around the corner. And in France composers such as Ravel and Boulanger were the ones to take up the Impressionist mantle, helping to make Paris a vibrant centre of the early 20th-century avant-garde. 

It speaks volumes that this is some of the most revolutionary music ever, but remains wildly popular. Even those who have no time for classical music will have a soft spot for Clair de lune. Few compositions in the canon can boast that kind of omnipotence.

Igor Stravinsky

It’s a small step in time, but a giant leap in music from Debussy’s visionary works of the 1890s and Stravinsky’s wildly radical pieces of the 1910s. The young composer etched his name into classical music notoriety forever when his devastating ballet The Rite of Spring sparked a riot at its 1913 Paris premiere - or so legend has it. Only a handful of works, if any in history have hauled the frontier of musical endeavour so far forwards in one hit. In the 35 minutes that the work took to perform, the world of classical music was changed. Changed utterly.

The Rite was the third of five ballets by Stravinsky that were staged in the period 1910–20 by the provocative Ballet Russes, a Paris-based Russian ballet troupe. Assimilating all the Modernist innovations simmering away in the noughties works of Debussy and Schönberg - reflecting the unease of a continent on the verge of the biggest war the world had ever seen - Stravinsky subverted everything in the Rite, The Firebird and Petrushka: tonality, metre, melody, structure, even the very concept of beauty. Intense dissonance, polytonality and the manipulation of time signatures are some of their most important and innovative attributes.  

But he’s not just known for causing one of the most scandalous performances in history, or for these works alone. Ever the chameleon, he was always experimenting, always innovating. His last Russes ballet, Pulcinella, heralded the onset of his Neoclassical phase, an amazing reversal - he reincorporated, and then undercut all the musical characteristics that distinguished the music of the Baroque and Classical eras. 

Many composers followed suit and experimented with Neoclassicism, such as Paul Hindemith and even Richard Strauss. Finally, in the 1950s, he experimented with serialism, the challenging Modernist technique pioneered by his rival Schönberg - though of course Stravinsky waited until Schönberg’s death to try it out. Dying himself in 1971, Stravinsky was the great compositional beacon of the seven decades of the 20th century that he lived through. 

Kaija Saariaho

Kaija Saariaho was nineteen when Stravinsky died, deep in the process of honing her own compositional craft. Progressing through the Sibelius Academy in her own Helsinki, and then the conservatory in Freiburg, Germany, she grew frustrated with the serialist method that Stravinsky had until recently practised, and which remained quite dogmatically à la mode in this period among Europe's composing elite. Striving to find that unique voice and creative style that one day would be so distinctive of her art, she finally found a breakthrough in 1980.  

That year she discovered the music of the French spectral composers, Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey, who were discarding conventional notation by using sound’s raw acoustic properties as a basis for composition. Inspired by their work, Saariaho began to experiment with computer assisted composition, questioning the very practice of writing music. And so she would follow in Cage and Nono’s footsteps on the path of Postmodernism, and become one of the most important electronic-music innovators since Schaeffer and Stockhausen.

Then came her masterpieces. She drew these electronics into orchestral textures, engineering vast and overwhelming soundscapes that the listener struggles to rationalise. At the other end of the spectrum, in chamber and solo repertoire, she scales new heights of intricacy and virtuosity through her impossibly dense polyphonic constructions. 

850 years on from Hildegard, going into the 21st century, Saariaho stands as the greatest living composer - at least if this 2019 composers’ poll by BBC Music Magazine is anything to go by. 

We come full circle by ending as we started - with the achievements of a woman composer. Such were the obstacles that held countless women back in the intervening period, few were in a position to rise to the profile of a Monteverdi or a Beethoven, to build a platform from which their music could proliferate, influence, be historic and achieve what we all normally think of as ‘greatness’. We celebrate a selection of these women who had all the ability, but none of the opportunity, in the countdown of female composers. 

Let Saariaho’s artistry resound as a sign of changing times.

Access sheet music from your favourite classical composers
 

What has led these great women and men to earn a place on this list? Of course it is their art itself. Their wonderful music, which you can find, analyse, play, emulate and admire in the nkoda library, along with that of tens of thousands more artists. 

This is music that spans all periods, all instruments, and - exceeding the boundaries of classical music alone - all genres. Muzio Clementi, Benjamin Britten, Giuseppe Verdi, Dmitri Shostakovich, Duke Ellington, Carole King, Stevie Wonder, The Beatles, The Monkees… 

All this content is only a click away. Start your free trial now to access it all, and see if this is a collection that you could get used to perusing.