Taking stock of the musical century is a game everyone can play. At the risk of being labeled a cultural Marxist, I have chosen 50 (a useful if arbitrary number) classical works written after 1900 that I believe are worthy of attention and likely to survive the sifting and sorting process of history.
All are pieces I believe to be masterpieces of both musical and historical importance — or works that have exerted far-reaching influence. But, in a more basic sense, they are pieces I simply cannot live without. There are several not-so-guilty pleasures that did not make the final cut — for example, 20th Century Romantics I adore, such as Hanson, Rachmaninoff and Vaughan Williams — but I will have to save those for another list.
One final caveat: I make no apology for my choices of works composed after 1965, where idiosyncratic personal opinion must rule in the absence of clear consensus. Feel free to supply your own candidates; remember, this is your music too.
Works listed in chronological order
(KEY:) X — Von Rhein’s top 10 picks
1900S
6 — Claude Debussy:”La Mer” (1903-05). Debussy’s most brilliant orchestral piece is a work of such imagination it transcends the Impressionist label usually attached to it. Ninety years later, it still sounds modern.
Puccini: “Madama Butterfly” (1904). Luminous in its scoring, gripping in its interaction of music and drama, this opera contains every element that makes Puccini the most beloved of the century’s operatic masters.
3 — Richard Strauss: “Elektra” (1906-08). For many, this bloodcurdling opera is the composer’s finest achievement, a horror show whose dramatic intensity remains hot from beginning to end.
Bela Bartok: String Quartets (6). Composed over most of Bartok’s creative life, from 1908 to 1939, these masterpieces are among the most important contributions to the chamber music literature since Beethoven’s, and basic to the modern quartet repertoire.
Charles Ives: “Three Places in New England” (1908-14). The key work in which American music was emancipated from European models and allowed to speak with its own regional voice.
2 — Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 9 (1909). The Austrian composer’s greatest and most paradoxical symphony, it stands with one foot in the late 19th Century, the other in the early 20th.
Richard Strauss: “Der Rosenkavalier” (1909-10). Not as musically revolutionary as “Salome” or “Elektra,” this is nevertheless the opera on which Strauss’ popularity chiefly rests. And well it should, for it’s one of the indisputably great operas.
1910S
Anton Webern: Five Pieces for Orchestra (1910-13). Webern remains the least known of the so-called Second Vienna School composers. But works such as this tell you why he so profoundly influenced the postwar generation of serial composers.
1 — Igor Stravinsky: “Petrushka” (1911). A wonderful ballet, brilliantly scored, that first signaled the emergence of Stravinsky’s iconoclastic genius.
Igor Stravinsky: “Le Sacre du Printemps” (“The Rite of Spring”) (1911-13). The seminal modernist masterpiece, it forever changed the course of 20th Century music and is still causing aftershocks.
5 — Arnold Schoenberg: “Pierrot Lunaire” (1912). Along with “The Rite of Spring,” this is one of the two great watershed works of the 20th Century, a piece that still sounds as strange and disturbing as it must have seemed when it was new.
4 — Alban Berg: “Wozzeck” (1914-22). This powerfully moving portrait of a soldier caught in a vortex of madness and murder is, along with Puccini’s “Turandot,” the last great opera to enter the standard repertoire.
Jan Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 (1915-19). Its stark beauty, economy and power make it the best and most typical of the Finnish master’s symphonies.
Carl Nielsen: Symphony No. 4, “Inextinguishable” (1916). The Danish composer’s response to the horrors of World War I is this gripping hymn to the unquenchable power of the life-force.
Manuel de Falla: “The Three-Cornered Hat” (1918-19). If ever there was a Spanish orchestral masterpiece, this riotously colorful and evocative ballet is it.
Edward Elgar: Cello Concerto (1919). The only cello concerto in the standard literature that can be compared to Dvorak’s, this eloquent masterpiece was the British composer’s final major orchestral score and, many feel, his greatest.
Leos Janacek: “Kat Kabanova” (1919-21). This is the underrated Czech composer’s most powerful opera, a story of a village wife’s illicit love in a society dominated by her malicious mother-in-law.
1920S
Arnold Schoenberg: Five Piano Pieces, Opus 23: Waltz (1921). Important as the first published piece written entirely in the composer’s 12-tone system, which took 300 years of Western tonal harmony and stood it on its ear.
Darius Milhaud: “La Creation du Monde” (1923). This jazz ballet remains the French composer’s most famous and characteristic work, refuting the notion that all modern music is grimly humorless.
George Gershwin: “Rhapsody in Blue” (1924). No single work says “American music” more readily than this jazz-based crossover classic.
7 — Edgard Varese: “Arcana” (1925-27). The maverick composer’s totally original means of organizing musical sounds is perhaps best reflected in this orchestral tour de force.
Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht: “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” (1927-29). Banned by the Nazis, this opera is anti-capitalist, anti-fascist satire at its most stinging.
1930S
Maurice Ravel: Concerto in G for Piano and Orchestra (1931). Every element that makes the French composer so French, and so popular, is contained in this jazzy, elegant showpiece.
Paul Hindemith: “Mathis der Maler” (1934). The symphony drawn from one of the most famous “unknown” operas of the century remains one of the most impressive modern orchestral scores.
Alban Berg: Violin Concerto (1935). Finished shortly before the composer’s death, this poignant masterpiece is the last great violin concerto to enter the active repertoire.
George Gershwin: “Porgy and Bess” (1935). The first great American opera, full of inspired American music with an American subject and setting.
Serge Prokofiev: “Romeo and Juliet” (1935-36). Orchestras and audiences have embraced the Russian composer’s Fifth Symphony, but this full-length ballet remains his major achievement.
8 — Bela Bartok: Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936). In many ways the Hungarian composer’s most concentrated, characteristic work.
Roy Harris: Symphony No. 3 (1937). A great American symphony that sums up the vigorous musical outlook of its era.
1940S
Olivier Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time (1940). Composed in a Nazi concentration camp, the haunting work contains many of the essential elements of Messiaen’s idiosyncratic style.
9 — Aaron Copland: “Appalachian Spring” (1940). The ballet this archetypal American composer wrote for Martha Graham is his defining masterpiece.o
William Schuman: Symphony No. 3 (1941). Along with the Roy Harris Third (see above), this remains my favorite among American “populist” symphonic works — exuberant, muscular, rhythmically charged, in every way a classic.
10 — Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony No. 8 (1943). The last of the Russian master’s “wartime” symphonies has taken its place as the greatest of his mature orchestral works.
Benjamin Britten: “Peter Grimes” (1945). The English composer’s first masterpiece and most enduring opera depicts the destruction of an outsider by a rigid and suspicious society.
Bela Bartok: Concerto for Orchestra (1945). The Hungarian composer’s last completed work is also his most popular, mainly because of its directness and accessibility.
Samuel Barber: “Knoxville, Summer of 1915” (1947). This beautiful setting of James Agee’s prose-poem is a perfect distillation of Barber’s neo-Romantic style.
1950S
John Cage: “4’33” (1952). Three movements of silence, for any instrument or combination thereof. Nothing more outlandishly simple has ever exploded the arty pretensions of so-called “art” music.
Elliott Carter: Variations for Orchestra (1954-55). Carter remains a tough nut for many to crack, but this powerful work represents America’s most widely respected living composer at his most vital and approachable.
Karlheinz Stockhausen: “Gruppen” (1957). A seminal work of postwar European modernism, this piece for three orchestras represents a new concept of instrumental music in space.
Leonard Bernstein: “West Side Story” (1957). The Jets and Sharks dance. Maria and Tony romance. Bernstein at his lyrical, finger-snapping best. A musical for all time.
1960S
Krzysztof Penderecki: “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” (1960). The Polish avant-gardist’s reputation was made by this creepy string-orchestra piece, which still packs an eerie sonic wallop.
Gyorgy Ligeti: “Atmospheres” (1961). One of the landmark works of postwar European modernism, its use in the film “2001: A Space Odyssey” first brought the composer to the attention of a mass audience.
Luciano Berio: Sinfonia (1968-69). Probably the best-known of the Italian composer’s large-scale works, this five-movement opus for eight amplified voices and orchestra is like a vast musical river whose currents carry you along with moving force.
1970S
Steve Reich: Music for 18 Musicians (1976). Exhilarating and inventive, this hour-long piece is one of minimalism’s masterpieces, along with Philip Glass’ “Einstein on the Beach.”
Arvo Part: “Tabula Rasa,” for violin soloists, piano and orchestra (1977). Vivaldian string figures filtered through a dreamlike haze of sonority. A landmark work by an important Baltic minimalist.
1980S
Pierre Boulez: “Repons” (1981-84). An intensely complex yet sonically alluring dialogue between live performers and the computerized transformations of their playing, “Repons” suggests where the new music of the next century may be headed. It invites us to peer unafraid into that future.
Witold Lutoslawski: Symphony No. 3 (1983). Lutoslawski is one of the few 20th Century composers who have created an individual style with a universal message. The Third Symphony represents his crowning achievement.
Morton Feldman: Piano and String Quartet (1985). Well over an hour in length, full of exquisitely quiet, otherworldly sounds, Feldman’s piece is a defining work of American minimalism.
John Tavener: “The Protecting Veil,” for cello and orchestra (1987). Along with Arvo Part and Henryk Gorecki, Tavener represents the mystical wing of living European composers, a deeply religious man who expresses here his devout belief in God in a powerfully expressive manner.
Alfred Schnittke: Symphony No. 5 (Concerto Grosso No. 4) (1988). It’s too early to tell whether the late Russian composer was the great successor to Shostakovich. In the meantime, this compelling work is perhaps the most striking example of his eclectic language, which he called “polystylism.”
Ranking the top 10.
1. Igor Stravinsky: “Le Sacre du Printemps.”
2. Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 9.
3. Richard Strauss: “Elektra.”
4. Alban Berg: “Wozzeck.”
5. Arnold Schoenberg: “Pierrot Lunaire.”
6. Claude Debussy: “La Mer.”
7. Edgard Varese: “Arcana.”
8. Bela Bartok: Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.
9. Aaron Copland: “Appalachian Spring.”
10. Dmitri Shostakovich: Symphony No. 8.
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