Who is The Greatest Musical Genius Of All Time?

In my very modest opinion, one cannot say "absolutely"....who was the greatest genius...........ALL THE GREATS have contributed something "magical," something divine, something of genius...and we must be grateful to these MASTERS of every era.

Greetings

saverio

... in my opinion, we should first agree on the term genius.

What do you mean?

I agree with you, I approached the piano by listening to Bach's music; I'll tell you more, unfortunately I am not a believer, but if there is someone or something above us, Bach's music is the right vehicle to approach this thing, whatever it may be.

The composer Rossini said "if Beethoven is a prodigy of humanity, Bach is a miracle of God!"

His music is perfect harmony, perfect order, no one will ever equal the work of Bach... there are many great musical geniuses but Bach is the master!.. The other great musical geniuses (Mozart, Beethoven, etc.) all took "inspiration" from Bach.... his canons, his fugues, his suites, etc..... and who does more things like that?!

@Frank : by genius I mean a unique and inimitable being (an artist in this case) who has reached the highest peaks of artistic perfection whose works will never pass through the centuries... an artist, a genius, never dies... 400 years have passed since Bach died!

His works are remarkable for their intellectual depth, mastery of technical and expressive means, and artistic beauty. (Wikipedia)

DanielePiano wrote:

@Frank : by genius I mean a unique and inimitable being (an artist in this case) who has reached the highest peaks of artistic perfection, whose works will never pass through the centuries... an artist, a genius, never dies... 400 years have passed since Bach died!

His works are notable for their intellectual depth, mastery of technical and expressive means, and artistic beauty. (Wikipedia)

I thought better, if that's the case then Monteverdi satisfies your requirements more

I mean....what did you think?

For starters, 400 years haven't passed since Bach's death, but 262 😉 instead, for Monteverdi it is 369.

Why do I insist on time? Because you are making it a matter solely of the endurance of different musicians' works against the signs of time.

In my opinion, this is not a parameter pertaining to genius, as an opera has not reached us solely because of that; there are also and above all historical, cultural, political, etc. reasons that play their part.

If you look at it only from the perspective of time, you realize that the first and greatest musician can only be Monteverdi.

Since your question is different, I invite you to reflect on 4 musicians ... for example:

Mozart and Liszt on one side and Bach and Beethoven on the other

If we speak only of greatness, one cannot mention musicians like Monteverdi, Bach, Beethoven, Wagner ... some have even made the history of music gallop. But in my opinion, this has little to do with the sphere of genius and rather with greatness ... perhaps influenced by some form of genius.

But which one?

DanielePiano wrote:

I mean.... what did you think?

See, one expects the type of genius to be defined first ... before then thinking out loud 😉

It would be interesting to understand why Bach resonates with so many people from different backgrounds, as if he were a common denominator...

Perhaps because he merges the rational with the irrational, the conscious with the unconscious, as if replicating nature—or rather, man's immersion in nature, with all its contradictions. Let's say that he makes it live again in the listener, instead of just telling it.

I want to use a very bad but effective metaphor: his works are not the film, however beautiful, that we can watch on television; instead, they are the television itself! Or even more so: it is us who are watching, we feel Bach on our side.

Let's try, for example, to look at nature, even anthropized nature, flowing past the train windows, with Bach in our ears: it is all more evocative! Mozart also helps a bit, Beethoven almost not at all; you have to focus on him, otherwise he degrades into background music.

Perceive the effort I am making to express my feelings, because I am no genius! 🙂

Well, one could start by defining what is not genius...

And the greatest genius of medicine? Or science? Or literature? Or mathematics?? Of origami? Of architecture? Or of any other discipline......

Forgive me, but I find this discussion substantially useless.

Tall the great "geniuses" have only one thing in common: they were GREAT INNOVATORS! I would focus more on this and make my choice based exclusively on subjective taste.

Mr. Frank demonstrates a lot of balance, and if it were all based on their time in history, I would agree with him; however, I wouldn't if we perhaps also turned to other cultures belonging to other parts of the world.

The parameters for expressing an unequivocal judgment are truly too many; limiting these parameters makes the judgment partial and therefore unrealistic.

It is my opinion that if any one of those you mentioned could be brought back to life today, they would be so interested and distracted by the great musical innovations that have occurred since they died that they would be completely uninterested in answering why they created their works and thus totally uninterested in their "old" music.

I would conclude by going a bit off-topic......this continuous class struggle within music or art in general, I find to be the greatest problem we have in Italy. Taste cannot be the judgment!

Ciao

F

In reality, it is very easy to answer this question. Just turn it into:
> which single work would you take to a desert island to listen to for the rest of your life.

Since I make the rules, I can break them

The Goldbergs and all of Beethoven's sonatas

stuyvesaint wrote:

In reality, it is very easy to answer this question. You just have to turn it into
> which single work would you take to a desert island to listen to for the rest of your life.

Since I make the rules, I can break them.

The Goldberg [Variations] and all of Beethoven's sonatas.

It's a pity that the reasoning cannot be based on your listening background... which is, moreover, confined to keyboard repertoire.

Your "it is very easy" seems very limited to me.

Natan wrote:

It's a pity that the reasoning cannot be based on your listening background ... among other things confined to keyboard repertoire.

Your "and it's very easy" seems very limited to me.

I second this!

I detest certain hyperboles regarding the classics: "the greatest of all", "the absolute genius"... maybe we should add an epic comment, like in Gladiator....!

Among the classics, there is no need to make rankings, no need to express judgments; one simply needs to know them, each for their own contribution to the history of music, keeping in mind that we reason using the parameters of our own era.

In his time, Bach was not considered a genius at all (among other things, this "rhetoric of genius" only arises later, in the mid-1800s...); if that is the case, Telemann was more of a "genius" than him, given that he wrote much more, was considered much more modern, and was much more loved by his contemporaries.

And I do not believe it can be said that we are capable of understanding the music of the 1600s or 1700s better than those who actually lived that music in their own present...

I think, in essence, that we only know how to understand what we have inherited from the classics, but that this is not everything: there are musics and procedures forgotten or not passed down to posterity for purely historical reasons, not for objective musical issues; it is not written anywhere that sonata form, for example, is a more complete (or "elevated") form than that adopted by Boccherini (who did not use the sonata, but a sort of continuous thematic elaboration): it is just that history took one direction instead of another at a certain point, and that choice determined the parameters of our current taste. If Romanticism had not been born in Germany... If the French Revolution had not devolved into Bonapartism... etc., perhaps we would speak more of Clementi and Cherubini than of Beethoven.

stuyvesaint wrote:

In reality, it's very easy to answer this question. Just turn it into
> which single work would you take to a desert island to listen to for the rest of your life.

Since I make the rules, I can break them

The Goldberg [Variations] and all of Beethoven's sonatas

I disagree. Not with your choice, which I might or might not share (I mean regarding what to take to a desert island), but on the fact that one thing automatically means the other. For a thousand reasons, one can be attached to and "dependent" on one or more pieces without this automatically meaning that those pieces belong to the "greatest genius in the history of music of all time." You, for example, have chosen two authors (and that's already two: who is the greatest?) among the giants, but I could tell you that on a desert island I would probably take the complete works of Brahms (you were the first to break the rule...) while acknowledging that it's not certain that Brahms is the greatest, but he is certainly one of the greatest. And while we're at it, I'd also take The White Album by the Beatles... do we even want to talk about that?

That said, I agree with those who argue that the discussion is unproductive, not least because philosophy has always fought over what "genius" means; imagine if we can establish who it is if we don't even know what it means...

Carlos wrote:

And while we're at it, I'd also bring The White Album by the Beatles... shall we talk about it?

Maybe...!

Carlos wrote:

That being said, I agree with those who maintain that the discussion is not very productive, since philosophy has always fought to establish what «genius» means; let alone if we can establish who it is if we don't even know what it means...

In another discussion at this link http://www.pianoconcerto.it/forum/index.php?/topic/177-secondo-voi-chi-e-il-genio-della-musica-in-assoluto/page__p__819__hl__+poesia%20+mio%20+padre__fromsearch__1#entry819 , in the sixteenth post on the first page, I quote a poem by my father... It says more or less what you said.

w il white album