- Bach: Mass in B minor, Brandenberg Concertos, Well-Tempered Clavier, Goldberg Variations, suites for solo cello and violin
- Beethoven: symphonies, concertos, string quartets and piano sonatas (yes, all of them)
- Mozart: symphonies, piano concertos, string quartets and operas
- Shostakovich: symphonies, string quartets, preludes and fugues for piano
- Haydn: symphonies, string quartets
- Chopin: piano music
- Selected music by Josquin des Prez, Guillaume DuFay, Guillaume de Machaut, Palestrina and John Dowland
- Some Gregorian chant and music by Leonin and Perotin
- Songs by Schubert and Schumann
- Symphonies by Berlioz, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mahler and Bruckner
- Selected works by Berg, Bartok, Stravinsky and Debussy
- The Beatles
That is, an idiosyncratic and incomplete list! But the omissions are important. You don't need, for example, to know anything about Beethoven's chamber music for winds (I made that mistake myself), or Haydn's operas, or Schumann's symphonies or Berlioz' music for guitar or French music between Berlioz and Debussy or those hundreds of lesser-known Baroque, Classical and Romantic composers that we are always "rediscovering". Everything they did Bach, Beethoven and Mahler did better. If you know Shakespeare, you really don't need to know all those lesser Elizabethan playwrights, do you? Well, maybe Christopher Marlowe...
2 comments:
A fine list to work with; thanks. Any changes you'd make, after four years?
Oh yes, I'm sure. I would add some Prokofiev, I think. A violin concerto, a piano concerto and a symphony or two. And I would add the symphonies of Sibelius and probably drop those of Brahms and either Mahler or Bruckner. Or maybe just one of each. I guess I should do an updated version!
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