But as a music teacher of mine in college said, Mozart was primarily a composer of opera, and even his symphonies sound as if there should be words attached to the themes.
If I were on a desert island and had to choose the complete works of three composers to take along, it would be Bach, Beethoven and Chopin. If I could bring five, I would add Haydn (his choral music, IMO, is brilliant) and Schubert.
Who would be the 3 or 5 you would bring along?
Had Mozart lived a normal lifespan, Beethoven would have struggled harder to be heard. There would have been Mozart afficianados and Beethoven afficianados among the musical cognascenti in Vienna, endlessly debating their merits just as the afficianados of various opera singers of the era endlessly debated the merits of their favorites. The two composers had a fondness for the bottle, so they may have ended up as friends.
I say this because I never tire of his Requiem, a piece that I believe is one of the top compositions of all time.
The Kyrie is where Mozart located his fugue, and a monumental fugue it is. Mozart puts on his size 15 boots here. No other composer of requiems after Mozart ever set the Kyrie as a fugue again.
But Mozart does something at the end of the Kyrie that is astonishing. He uses an open D chord -- D-A-D -- to end it. He leaves out the F to make it a definite D minor chord. Sometimes a composer will do this to create tonal ambiguity, but there is absolutely no ambiguity here. Another use of the open fifth is to create the sense of spaciousness, usually the sense of spaciousness above. Here Mozart uses that open fifth D chord to create the sense of spaciousness below. For the length of that whole note with fermata, Mozart gives the listener a view of the abyss. I still can't figure out how he did it.
One would be Mozart. For a few reasons. The breadth of his catalog, the number of compositions, and the quality (in no particular order). The second movement of his 20th piano concerto is just about my favorite piece of classical music.
Beethoven would have to be included
The last spot in my trio would be awfully hard to fill. Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Bach. . . . yikes, so hard to choose. Mozart and Beethoven would be easy choices because there is so much to listen to that it would be a long time before you had to listen to a piece over again. I might choose Borodin for the third, but he just didn’t write enough.
So, Mozart for his beauty, Beethoven for his emotion, the third, I’d really have to think about it.
So you prefer Haydn to Mozart? The latter was primarily a vocal composer and his instrumental music shows it. His music is also wonderully moody and completely lacking in artifice. I don’t see how any future stuff would have ‘blown away’ his best works. They cannot be improved upon.