Whiere are the world class first or second rank British composers?

[Chaszz]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/m.../19/do1901.xml

[HaydnFan]

Say what you will about English music but the supposed critic made a stupid comment about English painting, as if German painting is so great.....there are very very few good German painters compared to those produced by England.

There is, of course, German Expressionism, but it is often quite messy.

[Chaszz]

Originally posted by HaydnFan:
Say what you will about English music but the supposed critic made a stupid comment about English painting, as if German painting is so great.....there are very very few good German painters compared to those produced by England.

There is, of course, German Expressionism, but it is often quite messy.

Oh, dear. Here we go. I was going to include a slap at English painting in my intro but decided not to. But now that the topic has been raised, who are the great English painters?

Constable, for sure, one of the greatest. Turner, I guess, not to my taste, but OK. I can't think of any others. Reynolds, Gainsborough?? Please. 20th C. English painters? Hardly. The Pre-Raphaelites? With apologies to the several Beethoven Forum posters who seem to like the Pre-Raphaelites, they rank in art history on the level that Salieri ranks in music history. OK, that's a little harsh, let's put them somewhere above Salieri and below Boccherini.

English architecture is a different story entirely and contains several great masters, like Wren and Jones. And Henry Moore is a first class sculptor.

But as for painting, Holbein and Durer by themselves make a German school of painting far superior to the English. And Grunewald and Cranach are almost as great as them.


[This message has been edited by Chaszz (edited 10-20-2006).]

[Peter]

Well firstly I rank Turner as one of the greatest artists, certainly British. He was so visionary, way ahead of his time, as was Blake for that matter.

As for the critic Oscar Adolf Hermann Schmitz, I've never heard of him, but clearly he'd never heard of William Byrd, John Dunstable and Purcell just to mention 3 names who ranked with best of their time anywhere in the world. Of course it is the 18th and 19th centuries where British composers fall behind, but there were outstanding talents from the 16th, 17th and 20th centuries.

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'Man know thyself'

[HaydnFan]

Ok, Holbein and Durer, yes...I wouldn't rank Grunewald so highly...

...I was going to say the English painters that you mentioned.

Another good German painter is Friedrich but apart from those, German painting is not on the same level as the French, Dutch, and Flemish which I know is not the argument here...

So, I see your point that English painting is not on the level of those other three countries I mentioned but it is certainly on the level of the Germans, if not better. And by the way, I like the Pre-Raphaelites...the ability to paint the way that they do should not be shrugged off, whatever their actual significance in the art historical vocabulary.

[Chaszz]

Originally posted by HaydnFan:
Ok, Holbein and Durer, yes...I wouldn't rank Grunewald so highly...

...I was going to say the English painters that you mentioned.

Another good German painter is Friedrich but apart from those, German painting is not on the same level as the French, Dutch, and Flemish which I know is not the argument here...

So, I see your point that English painting is not on the level of those other three countries I mentioned but it is certainly on the level of the Germans, if not better. And by the way, I like the Pre-Raphaelites...the ability to paint the way that they do should not be shrugged off, whatever their actual significance in the art historical vocabulary.

The Pre-Raphaelites make sentimentally pretty pictures but in terms of form and structure - that is, communicating emotion thru the architectural and visual basis of art rather than merely thru its subject matter - they cannot be considered in the same breath with real masters like Rembrandt, Titian, Breughel, Cezanne and Holbein, to name only a few from a fairly long list. The structures of their pictures are insipid and lack any visual strength. I predict that in 500 years (assuming that human civilization still exists) they will be forgotten or mere footnotes. Sorry for the bluntness of the response, and I like you, HaydnFan, but that is what I think. And leaving aside my personal opinions, there are very few or no art critics or art historians who would rate them very highly, when compared with the real masters of the 19th century or of earlier centuries.


[This message has been edited by Chaszz (edited 10-20-2006).]

[Chaszz]

Originally posted by Chaszz:

The Pre-Raphaelites make sentimentally pretty pictures but in terms of form and structure - that is, communicating emotion thru the architectural and visual basis of art rather than merely thru its subject matter - they cannot be considered in the same breath with real masters like Rembrandt, Titian, Breughel, Cezanne and Holbein, to name only a few from a fairly long list. The structures of their pictures are insipid and lack any visual strength. I predict that in 500 years (assuming that human civilization still exists) they will be forgotten or mere footnotes. Sorry for the bluntness of the response, and I like you, HaydnFan, but that is what I think. And leaving aside my personal opinions, there are very few or no art critics or art historians who would rate them very highly, when compared with the real masters of the 19th century or of earlier centuries.


[This message has been edited by Chaszz (edited 10-20-2006).]

Asking the inulgence of the moderators at a slightly off topic post, to clarify the above assertions, I’d like to post a painting by Giorgione (completed by his friend Titian after Giorgione's young and untimely death) which is one of the most important ones in Western art. The subject of the painting is vague and ambiguous: two clothed men, one a gentleman and one a rustic, play music in a meadow, with two nude young women near them. The reality of the women is doubted by some scholars: they may represent muses, or may represent the spirit of the music, rather than being physically present as participants. Are the two men exhibiting a closeness which hints at ancient Greek ideas of homosexuality, exclduing the women? Or is the rustic shepherd actually a discordant presence, interrupting the rhapsodic harmony between the gentlemen and the flute-playing woman? If the woman is muse, perhaps he interrupts the lute player's inspiration. Perhaps he is Eros, drawing the gentlemen musician unwillingly away from music and toward love. These deliberate ambiguities are used by Giorgione to suggest that the real subject of the painting is not in the event depicted, but elsewhere: in the color, forms and spaces.

http://www.abcgallery.com/T/titian/titian81.html


Look at the way the entire right side of the painting swells from the ground upward to culminate in the distant tree trunk at right. See how the distant shepherd and the sheep under the tree participate in that swelling movement, sort of supporting the higher tree trunk like the jets in the tail of a rocket.
See how the woman’s back also is part of the same movement; indeed, she is engaged in the tree almost as part of it. Her flute also points to the the treetop, her legs continuing the shape downward. Indeed, the line of her legs and the flute makes a triangle with the line from the distant shepherd and sheep to the tree trunk. Another line goes from the red hat thru the rustic’s head to the tree also, so that many forms converge thru a sort of prismatic or faceted triangle, into the swelling shape of the leafy tree. The line of the hillside with the two distant buildings on it also is part of this faceted triangle.

This thrust upward at the right of the painting is balanced by a similar thrust upward on the left thru the body of the other nude and then thru the tree behind her. These two thrusts are like the large masses in a symphony or concerto, the themes in a development section, say, contending and then eventually merging emotionally in the climax before or during the recapitulation. These large visual masses provide almost physical feelings of large movement which is comparable to the almost physical power which we feel in our bodies at, for example, a heavy descending passage in music climaxing in a cadence.

There are other compositional ideas and levels here. which are too involved to go too far into. But briefly, when Renaissance painting first used perspective to pierce the flat picture surface and give an impression of real space and depth, it was not long before succeeding artists began a philosophical dialogue between deep space and the flat space of the actual painting surface, which dialogue became one of the main themes of later Western painting. The actual flat surface of the painting is like the twelve notes of the Western scale: it is the ground from which everything starts. How can deep space be aesthetically, philosophically related to this flatness? This may be compared to the dialogue between polyphony and homophony which has characterized music, or the dialogue between melody (horizontal) and harmony (vertical). Giorgione is key in this flat/deep dialogue development, and here he is playing deep space off against flat space in many ways, such as the merging of the rightmost nude’s head into the distant tree, so that they are paradoxically distant yet entwined. To describe the whole structure is beyond my intentions here, but perhaps let your eye wander over it and see how many forms you can find which are joined into larger movements. Also, notice that when you get used to looking at it in this way, EVERYTHING in the painting is in movement.

I’m going to contrast the Giorgione/Titian painting with two by Rosetti, the Pre-Raphaelite.

http://cgfa.sunsite.dk/rossetti/p-8girlhoo.htm

http://cgfa.sunsite.dk/rossetti/p-8domini.htm


The P-Rs were consciously trying to revive the flat space of pre-Renaissance painting, when deep space was not depicted at all. But their forms and designs lack the electric dynamism and visual impact of the compositions of the artists of the Middle Ages. In both these Rosetti paintings are compositions which are not only flat but basically of little interest; the eye is led around a little bit here and there, and there is pretty surface decoration in the patterns of the leaves in the Virgin’s Girlhood. But the kind of thrusts and emotions produced by larger architectonic movements of forms, comparable to the almost physical sensations derived from Beethoven’s massive thrusts of musical form and structure, are absent. There is little movement of the kind in the Giorgione. The literary poetic moods of the Rosettis are almost all that sustains them, as if the meaning of Fidelio could be found primarily in the touching story rather than in its combination with the multifaceted powerful musical means which undergirds it.

Now, number one, I could show some medieval paintings which have the visual power that I say the Rosettis lack. Number two, I do not say that no post-Renaissance painting uses a literary theme in a powerful combination with the formal means, as the Giogione purposely does not. I could post an example of this.... (But the formal means are always primary. Just as in opera, you can have a ridiculous story but a great opera, whereas you cannot have a great opera where the story is powerful but the music is ridiculous or weak.)

But in both these cases, I have written enough already and these two illustrations are outside my immediate point. Unless some hardy soul who has read this far asks for them. And of course I'd need a little further indulgence from the moderators.


[This message has been edited by Chaszz (edited 10-22-2006).]

[Peter]

Well Chaszz it is going way beyond the remit of this forum! It would be more relevant to deal with that article you posted a link to which relates to English composers. What is your view of his comments? I think he demonstrates at best an indifference to anything beyond the 18th and 19th centuries.

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'Man know thyself'

[This message has been edited by Peter (edited 10-22-2006).]

[Chaszz]

Originally posted by Peter:
Well Chaszz it is going way beyond the remit of this forum! It would be more relevant to deal with that article you posted a link to which relates to English composers. What is your view of his comments? I think he demonstrates at best an indifference to anything beyond the 18th and 19th centuries.

I think he is more interested in the 18th and 19th centuuies because, beginning with Bach and Handel and continuing on, that is when the Germans and Austrians lifted the art of music to heights beyond anything before or since. Just think, we might disagree on who are the 4 or 5 greatest composers, but in every case (save possibly Robert) all our candidates would almost certainly be German or Austrian. On this level we even all agree with Rod, no small feat. If your country claims a great composer, that is the general standard against which the claim must be compared. And to take one candidate, the Italians, though they built a lesser peak, can at least be meaningfully compared.




[This message has been edited by Chaszz (edited 10-22-2006).]

[HaydnFan]

Who are your top 5 composers, in order?

Mine:

1) Mozart
2) Beethoven
3) Bach
4) Haydn
5) Schubert

[Chaszz]

Originally posted by HaydnFan:
Who are your top 5 composers, in order?

Mine:

1) Mozart
2) Beethoven
3) Bach
4) Haydn
5) Schubert

Deserves a new thread. Voila...