Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven were two of the greatest composers in classical Western music. They were both Germans. Beethoven, a contemporary of Mozart, was born 20 years after the death of Bach. They’re two of the “three Bs” of classical music – Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.
Bach vs. Beethoven
Bach born in 1685 and lived in the Baroque period while Beethoven born in 1770 and lived in the transition from the Classical to the Romantic era.
Beethoven was an admirer of Bach. He often played the preludes and fugues of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Beethoven called Bach the “Urvater der Harmonie” (“Original father of harmony”) and, in a pun on the literal meaning of Bach’s name, “nicht Bach, sondern Meer” (“not a brook, but a sea”).
Both composers struggled with disability; Bach became increasingly blind towards the end of his life while Beethoven began to lose his hearing when we was 26 and became completely deaf in the ensuing decade.
Beethoven music is so sad and chaotic because he lost his hearing, unable to appreciate sounds. He even has no wife and children.
Bach vs Mozart vs Beethoven
Bach = The Rules
Mozart = The Rules In-practice
Beethoven = The Rule Breaker
“Beethoven tells you what it’s like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it’s like to be human. Bach tells you what it’s like to be the universe.” (Douglas Adams)
At what point did we start to consider Bach, Mozart and Beethoven to be the three greatest composers?
Late 19th century. The field of musicology started around then, and was specifically a phenomenon in a newly unified Germany. This led to a swell of nationalistic pride, and German musicologists traced music history in a way that intentionally put the German-speaking world at the forefront. German instrumental music was presented as a monolithic achievement in opposition to morally depraved Italian opera, or French neo-classicism. Let’s not even talk about England, the “das Land ohne Musik.” Writers like Eduard Hanslick and ETA Hoffman who heralded the Germanic tradition of absolute music were doing so to prop it up against newer styles of programmatic music by Liszt and his circle. Bach became retroactively claimed in a teleology of Germanic greatness, leading from him to Mozart and then Beethoven, who has become the figurehead for this Romantic cult of genius that plagues our thinking to this day. The Germanic musical supremacies maintained a large role in the development of musicology as a discipline in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Bach-Mozart-Beethoven triumvirate at the pinnacle of composers is based on a system that somewhat devalues opera (which Bach didn’t write any of, and Beethoven only wrote one work of).
Opera was a very big deal in much of Europe in the 19th c. It was certainly more prominent then than it is now.