There are two very fundamental objections I would make to the central
claims of David Wright's interesting and provocative essay.  First,
by attempting to define greatness in terms of ten necessary conditions,
he excludes, from the category of greatness, composers of, let us say,
towering genius, whose strengths develop in different directions from those
stipulated by the definition.  The definition is too a priori, and it "hems
in" greatness, or judgments of greatness, which is preposterous.  Second,
and this is an instance of greatness excluded, any definition which does
not work for a very paradigm of greatness, such as Bach (and I would say
Schubert too), simply doesn't work as a definition, so there has to be
something wrong with that definition.  To say that Walton is great but
Bach isn't, is less than convincing, to say the least.

Jim Tobin