Deryk Barker wrote:

>Chopin vs. Schumann.
>
>Schumann obviously, hands down the winner: Chopin only wrote great piano
>music after all, no chamber music worth speaking of, ditto concertos
>(sorry, I consider Chopin's 2 PCs to be extended solo works with orchestral
>interruptions), no choral music, precious few lieder....
>
>So why do I consider Chopin by far the greater composer?

Good question.:-)

I find this discussion really interesting because it helps remind me
just how various taste can be.  I always have thought of myself as a
Mendelssohn appreciator, and the "Italian" seems to me an excellent work,
but it never would have occurred to me in a million years to put his
symphonic achievement on the same level as Schumann's, let alone above it.
Very few symphonic movements by *anybody* make as big an impression on me
as the "Cologne Cathedral" movement in the "Rhenish" Symphony.  (Even in
the piano repertoire, to take up the other comparison, although I'd
hesitate to suggest that Schumann is the greater composer, I'm certain that
I'd much rather listen to Schumann's best piano works than to Chopin's.)
Schumann seems to me one of the great musical visionaries, and the visions
seem of rather magical vistas imperfectly glimpsed.  (Part of this has to
do, I think, with the way that in the piano works the melodies seem to
me to be partially--and, for me, enchantingly--obscured by surrounding
tendrils of notes.) I don't get this visionary quality from Mendelssohn or
Chopin, but it's useful to me to realize that others do, or that they don't
get it from Schumann, or that they get something else from these other
composers that seems to them even more valuable.

I understand how someone might prefer Chopin to Schumann, and I think
I understand how someone might regard the former as "by far the greater
composer" (despite my snotty response to Deryk above).  I also think I
understand how someone might prefer Mendelssohn to Schumann (though my
understanding starts to get stretched here), but to think of Mendelssohn
as the greater composer . . .  well, people are just very different,
aren't they?

Nick
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