Living with the Music Masters

Living with the Music Masters

Building blocks for a classical CD collection, from Bach to Gershwin

Music is about emotions, said once Ted Libbey, commentator on the weekly National public radio show “Performance Today”, “It helps us grow”. And, Libbey says, classical music “has a particular richness because it goes back centuries”. Libbey is the author of the book The NPR Guide to Building a Classical CD Collection (Workman publishing Co, 1994). Following are the composers that Libbey would make the building blocks of any classical music collection and why he thinks so:

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750): Bach had a huge influence on music history, much greater than any of his contemporaries would have guessed. He was known mainly as an astounding keyboard virtuoso and a very prolific composer. What has emerged in more than two and a half centuries since his death, however, is the absolutely amazing spiritual power of his compositions. There is a beauty of construction and a kind of clarity of conception and detail that goes far beyond what any other composer of the baroque period achieved.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791): Mozart is one of the favorite, Libbey says, because of the sense of humanity that comes out in the music. People say he was a divine genius, and it's true. But he was also very human. With all the formality of the XVIIIth century he could evoke tragedy in music and make it burn with emotion. He was a virtuoso keyboardist, the greatest of his age. At the same time he played the violin well enough that he could have had a career as Europe's leading violinist. In his operas he conveys to the listener an understanding of an emotional or dramatic state probably more acutely than any other composer of all time.

Joseph Haydn (1732-1809): Haydn was the most powerful innovator of the later XVIIIth century. In the field of symphonies he was the leader. He grew the form from a lightweight suite to a very thoroughly worked-out and highly contrasted musical expression for a large orchestra. For Haydn, music was something of a game, and so there are wonderful jokes in his music. He didn't probe the tragic dimension as much as Mozart did, but he was a pioneer in creating the classical style.

An Orchestra. Photo by Elena

Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827): Beethoven was a classical composer who can also be called the first Romantic. He made things more subjective. His music not only conveyed emotions or imagery, but very precise emotions from his own soul as well. Working on the basis of what Mozart and Haydn had done, Beethoven reinvented the string quartet and symphony and expanded their meaning dramatically. His instrumentals set the standards for the entire XIXth century and Xxth century. Like an undertow in the ocean, they pull you in.

Franz Schubert (1797-1828): Schubert was the great song writer in music history; his melodies pin down a state of emotion so effectively. His music is more concerned with contemplation than drama. He puts a very high value on the beauty of sound. Indeed, what you hear in Schubert's music is the beginning of a Romantic concept of sound as color. His music inhabits regions. It's not in a hurry to go from one place to another in a straight line. It's like seeing a strange landscape.

Frederic Chopin (1810-1849): There has never been a closer connection between a composer and an instrument than with Chopin and the piano. There is an Italian quality to some of his works: he treated the piano as a human voice. There is an undertone of darkness in much of what he wrote, but also a surreal beauty and lightness to it all – an imaginative release from life.

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893): Tchaikovsky has been diminished by the musicologists as a little bit too hysterical and trite in his music. But when you listen to his music, it's not surprising that it's among the most popular. It's music of immediate emotional impact. His ballets – Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, the Nuttracker – are among the greatest ever written. His symphonic music has a richness and translucency to it, like a simple scale, but he clothed them so gloriously that they come out as very powerful expressions.

Claude Debussy ((1862-1918): Debussy was one of the most profound thinkers in the history of music. He did so much to create modernity. He had an ear for sonority that was completely original. He was influenced by the orchestra of cymbals and gongs from Indonesia that he heard at the World's Fair in Paris. He revolutionized his thinking about sound and resulted in some of the most extraordinary writing for the piano ever. The essential Debussy is in the quite floating pieces like “Prelude to the Afternoon of the Faun”. People tend to compare Debussy to the impressionist painters, but it's more accurate to compare him to the symbolist poets. Most of his work takes a literary point of departure.

George Gershwin (1898-1937): Gershwin was a lot like Schubert. He was a wonderful melodist. His tunes are all over our musical consciousness. He wrote “Rhapsody in Blue” when he was 25. As he got older, he got more of a sense of organization and structure without losing that freshness he always possessed. His opera “Porgy and Bess” is probably the great American opera. It's a tragedy his life ended so early. He still conveys something of the American spirit, especially of the “roaring “20th, that no one else has captured in quite the same way.