The Top 52 Great Works of the 20th Century
©2000 Robert McBride

Robert McBride, Program Director
WMHT/WRHV-FM
P.O. Box 17, Schenectady, NY 12301
http://www.wmht.org

One reason we came up with the Top 52 idea was to celebrate the beginning of a new century and a new millennium in a way that would satisfy those who think the new era started on 1/1/00 and those who think it starts on 1/1/01. By doing something throughout 2000 we don't have to enter that debate at all! More importantly, we wanted to do something special to acknowledge the huge amount of great music written during the 20th century, especially since the phrase "20th-Century Music" is almost pejorative to many people who ought to know better. But the first impetus came from a listener. I got a phone call one day from a woman in Dorset, Vermont, who had been intrigued by a series of articles on 20th-century musical masterpieces, written by Terry Teachout for Commentary Magazine. She kindly copied the articles and sent them to me, and asked what I thought of Mr. Teachout's choices.

His list has 50 works, and I started to think about my own 50, just for fun. (The first piece that occured to me was Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra. The second was Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. In the end, both made the final cut.) Then I thought we should do this on the air, and The Top 52 developed from that. For the past couple of years we've set aside Saturdays at noon to play long, major works, so that was chosen as the time slot for The Top 52 all this year. (We're airing them in reverse chronological order, in part because they fall best within our fundraising schedule that way, and in part because I didn't want the most unfamilar and demanding works to be on the air during the December holiday season. As it happens, there are 53 Saturdays this year, so we could have done the Top 53, but I just couldn't bring myself to bump Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker from its recent place of honor on the Saturday before Christmas, so it will stay there, to the delight of countless last-minute shoppers, I expect.)

While Mr. Teachout's "Masterpieces of the Century: A Critical Guide" was the starting point for our Top 52, I also invited everyone on our radio staff to put in their recommendations, and I asked a few professional musicians and critics who I thought might enjoy the exercise to weigh in too. I had a few rules in compiling the list: Every decade of the century should be represented, we would include opera but not musical theater, and we would not include jazz. Also, it was a list of great works, not great composers, meaning that any given composer could be represented more than once, and several are. Finally, every work that made the list had to have received more than one "vote" - been suggested by more than one source.

As I personally enjoy a great deal of modern music that a lot of other people seem to enjoy about as much as modern masochism, I kind of hated to see our list be weighted as heavily as it is toward the first half of the century, but that's where most of the works people lobbied for came from. I think that's due to several factors, including familiarity, an established place in the repertoire, and the fear and loathing engendered by a lot of music written in the latter half of the century. That plus the fact that there was so much wonderful music written during the course of the last 100 years that it was really hard to choose only 52 works! Most of the emotional favorites were written before 1950.

If we compiled this list again in 50 years it would surely look different. In fact, if we did this list again tonight it would probably look different! It really did require a lot of hard decisions. But in the end I like what we've come up with. There is lots of diversity: in form, instrumentation, style, nationality, and even duration. (Great works don't have to be long.) There are works that are critical favorites but not very popular with audiences (Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, for example) and works that most critics would not regard as "significant" at all but that audiences can't live without (Orff's Carmina Burana, which has surely wormed its way into more movies and TV commercials than any other music on the list).

The complete list follows. I'm sure many of your choices would be different, and some would likely be the same. Maybe next year we'll do the Top 52 composers of the 20th century, and give each of them one work. That way some individuals who didn't make the cut this time could get the attention they deserve: Cage, Harrison, Reich, Glass, et al.

I never imagined I'd work in Top 52 radio. Casey Kasem, look out.

Robert McBride's Top 52 Great Works of the 20th Century

Mahler: Symphony No. 5
Puccini: Madama Butterfly
Debussy: La Mer
Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 2
Mahler: Symphony No. 9
Mahler: The Song of the Earth
Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier
Stravinsky: Petrouska
Ravel: Daphnis et Chloe
Schoenberg: Gurrelieder
Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire
Stravinsky: The Rite of Sping
Debussy: Preludes for Piano
Elgar: Symphony No. 2
Sibelius: Symphony No. 5
Holst: The Planets
Nielsen: Symphony No. 4
Ravel: Le Tombeau de Couperin
Stravinsky: The Soldier's Tale
Elgar: Cello Concerto
Ravel: L'Enfant et les Sortileges
Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue
Janacek: Sinfonietta
Stravinsky: Symphony of Psalms
Walton: Belshazzar's Feast
Hindemith: Mathis der Mahler Symphony
Rachmaninoff: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
Bartok: String Quartet No. 5
Gershwin: Porgy and Bess
Walton: Symphony No. 1
Berg: Violin Concerto
Orff: Carmina Burana
Bartok: Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
Prokofiev: Romeo and Juliet
Shostakovich: Symphony No. 5
Prokofiev: Alexander Nevsky
Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time
Prokofiev: Piano Sonata No. 7
Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 5
Bartok: Concerto for Orchestra
Copland: Appalachian Spring
Prokofiev: Symphony No. 5
Britten: Peter Grimes
Durufle: Requiem
Strauss: Four Last Songs
Poulenc: Gloria
Britten: War Requiem
Penderecki: St. Luke Passion
Gorecki: Symphony No. 3
Adams: Harmonlielehre
Corigliano: Symphony No. 1