Composers

Rankings of composers according to "greatness" are always controversial and are often unappreciated, but a decent list of rankings can help us gain a rough perspective on who the important ones are, as long as we don't take the list too seriously. That said, this is not a list of "greatness" rankings - it just looks like one. The following ordered list was obtained by tallying up the number of CDs each composer has in the naxos.com online classical music catalogue.

If there were an objective way of evaluating composers, I imagine the evaluation would largely consider each composer's legacy, how strongly they are remembered, how relevant they remain over time. To a degree, the number of times a composer has been recorded on CD (a recent, mature medium of sound) is a measurement of that composer's legacy.

Instead of arbitrarily choosing 50 as the cut-off point, I chose to base the cut-off on some criteria. The first criterion is the following: To make it onto the list, a composer needed to be within one order of magnitude of the number one composer, meaning that a composer needed at least 72 CDs in the catalogue. The second criterion is as follows: Because there are thousands of composers in the catalogue and because it took some time to compile data for each composer, I narrowed the field from the start to the 162 selected by music critic Ted Libbey (of NPR and NEA fame) for inclusion in the small companion catalogue to NPR's Classical Music Encyclopedia (see naxos.com/workman). This left 51 composers.

1. Mozart 717
2. Bach 560
3. Beethoven 555
4. Tchaikovsky 405
5. Schubert 370
6. Brahms 334
7. Verdi 332
8. Mendelssohn 297
9. Handel 283
10. Haydn 259
11. Grieg 253
12. Chopin 252
13. Schumann 252
14. Debussy 220
15. Liszt 219
16. Dvorak 209
17. Sibelius 206
18. Puccini 201
19. Wagner 197
20. Vivaldi 195
21. Strauss II 193
22. Rossini 181
23. Rachmaninov 168
24. Bizet 162
25. Shostakovich 162
26. Ravel 153
27. Saint-Saens 153
28. Prokofiev 151
29. Rimsky-Korsakov 132
30. Elgar 126
31. Stravinsky 122
32. Donizetti 120
33. Gershwin 113
34. Strauss 113
35. Massenet 108
36. Faure 101
37. Britten 100
    
38. Mahler 99
39. Gounod 95
    
40. Nielsen 95
41. Weber 95
    
42. Telemann 91
    
43. Bartok 87
    
44. Berlioz 82
45. Glazunov 82
46. Mussorgsky 82
47. Villa-Lobos 80
48. Bruckner 79
    
49. Vaughan Williams 78
    
50. C.P.E. Bach 76
51. Offenbach 73

Edit: Because he is one of my sister's favorite composers, I will reveal that Purcell is #52.