# Composers or pieces you liked immediately vs those that took awhile



## adriesba (Dec 30, 2019)

What are some composers or pieces you liked immediately and some that took you awhile to appreciate? Why is this the case?


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## HenryPenfold (Apr 29, 2018)

Took me years to like Harrison Birtwistle. Been a firm favourite for a while.


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## level82rat (Jun 20, 2019)

I became obsessed with Bachs Passacaglia and Fugue in Cm almost immediately. On the other hand Buxtehude’s passacaglia sounded like a melody-less, harmony-less, random mush of notes on my first few listens. Then one day I listened to it again and it clicked—I could finally hear the music—and I liked it quite a bit.


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## Coach G (Apr 22, 2020)

*What I liked right away*:
Beethoven
Tchaikovsky
Debussy
Shostakovich

*What took a long, long time to enjoy*:
Mozart (except for the _Clarinet Concerto_)
Brahms
Stravinsky (except for _Rite of Spring_ and _Ebony Concerto_)
Schoenberg

I liked symphonies, concertos, and tone poems right away. 
It took me a long, long time to like chamber music and opera, and I'm still working on opera as of this writing.


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## Ethereality (Apr 6, 2019)

Nothing really, I just realized I didn't care for popular Classical instruments as much as I used to. Chamber music, piano and string this and that, not really that interesting. Maybe more ethnic drums, winds, bells, a broader textural range. This is coming from what I would rather write than listen to, ie. epic eclecticism.


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## MusicSybarite (Aug 17, 2017)

Some composers I connected with sort of instantly:

Beethoven
Tchaikovsky
Mahler
Bruckner
Nielsen
Sibelius
Vaughan Williams
Shostakovich
Saint-Saëns
Strauss
Arnold


Some composers I struggled with a bit at first:

Honegger
Prokofiev
Bax
Tippett
Lutoslawski
Schnittke
Schuman
Ginastera


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## ORigel (May 7, 2020)

Composers I liked immediately:

Vivaldi (I never listen to him nowadays)
Tchaikovsky
Schubert
Beethoven (my favorite composer)
Mendelssohn
Verdi
Monteverdi
Bruckner
Mozart (mixed; I am appreciating him more and more now)
Johann Strauss Jr. 
Dvorak

Composers that took me some time to like:
Mahler
Bach (Only once I listened to the B Minor Mass did I become hooked)
Bartok (now my favorite Modernist)
Sibelius
Brahms 
Schumann (appreciating him just in the last few weeks!)

Composers I don't really get yet:
Ligeti
Webern
Debussy
Palestrina


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## consuono (Mar 27, 2020)

It took me a while to love Bruckner's music, and it was his choral music that changed my attitude. I was kind of indifferent in the past but now Bruckner is one of my favorite composers.

I connected with the music of Bach and Beethoven right away from my childhood days learning the piano. Strange to say, Mozart took a little longer.

Bach's six-part fugue from the Musical Offering hit me right between the eyes the first time I heard it. Hindemith's Ludus Tonalis took a while, but now it's one of my favorite works.


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## gvn (Dec 14, 2019)

*LOVE AT FIRST HEARING*

*Handel*

*Mozart*

*Beethoven* (one of the first concerts I ever heard was the Ninth; I've never forgotten the experience)

*Berlioz* (I loved the _Fantastique_ from childhood, and can't begin to describe how I felt when, much later, I put the stylus down on the brand-new Colin Davis LPs of _Les Troyens_ and heard those first notes for the first time)

*Dvořák* (when I was young, he was generally considered a rather simplistic minor composer, and when I first went to hear his New World in concert, that's what I expected; nothing prepared me for its brilliance of orchestration, its breadth of emotional expression, its infallible feel for drama)

*Palestrina*

*Vivaldi* (like many of my generation, I knew him first from the 1952 Grishkat recording of the _Beatus Vir,_ musically more varied and emotionally more wide-ranging than any of his instrumental works; would I have responded with such instant enthusiasm if I'd known him first from his delightful but rather more repetitive concertos?)

*Gluck* (from the moment I first started to play the old 1952 Leibowitz set of _Alceste_)

*Boito* (both _Mefistofele_ & _Nerone_ were cases of unequivocal & unconditional love at first sight)

*Stravinsky* (in those days he was considered by far the greatest living composer-nobody now alive has anything like that reputation-so I expected to hear brilliance, and I did... but maybe that wasn't the _cause_ of my response, because I didn't always react to music as I was told: see Dvořák above!)

*ACQUIRED TASTES*

*Wagner* (even at first, I could hear impressive things in his music, but it seemed to me terribly longwinded; gradually, as I kept returning to it, each Act seemed to shrink shorter & shorter, and the impressive bits became more & more numerous; after about 10 years I thought his music just as good as Verdi's; a couple of years ago I realized, to my alarm, that I now admire it more than even the very best of Verdi's)

*Reger* (a very similar experience... but I took much longer to appreciate him, because I didn't play him so often, and therefore was much slower to "hear" his melodies as melodies; only after many years did I grasp that he wrote music for fun and meant it to be heard for fun!)

*Britten* (while he was alive I thought he was a talented but clever-clever ambitious young man who couldn't see the wood for the trees-couldn't, e.g., see the words "hoppity" and "skippity" without destroying the overall line of his music to illustrate them ["ho-oppity, ski-i-ipity"]; only when I listened to a radio retrospective immediately after his death did I discover, to my abject embarrassment, that the guy had actually been a great genius who had created masterpiece after masterpiece, and I hadn't recognized it)

*Shostakovich* (while he was alive he seemed to me a competent "safe" minor composer, whose emotional range was too narrow for greatness-no relaxation, no joy, no grandeur, etc., etc.-and who lacked the creativity & originality that I found in more adventurous modern works, e.g., Boulez's _Marteau sans maître,_ Stockhausen's _Stimmung,_ Berio's _Sinfonia,_ etc.; only after his death did I discover that his music wouldn't stay buried; I kept returning to play it, and I always enjoyed what I heard)

With Wagner, Reger, and Shostakovich, it was a slow process: increasing familiarity with the music very gradually won my affection. With Britten, it was more a case of the sun suddenly rising: the radio retrospective invited me to stand back for the first time and take stock of the whole range of the man's accomplishments.


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## larold (Jul 20, 2017)

To get an appreciation or love of their music these composers were:

*Easy:* Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, Dvorak, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Offenbach, Vivaldi, Schubert, Schumann, Vaughan Williams, Bruckner, Weber, Rossini, Respighi, Khachaturian, Debussy, Hanson, Handel, Frank Martin, Gluck, Barber, Bloch, Berlioz, Gershwin, Hummel, Grieg, all the Strausses, Saint Saens, Bernard Herrmann, William Walton, Ethyl Smyth, Suk, Smetana, Roy Harris, Ravel, Mussorgsky, Gounod, Delibes, Rimsky Korsakov, Lully, Purcell, Chopin, Bizet, Franck

*Sometimes easy, sometimes not:* J.S. Bach, Sibelius, Mahler, Shostakovich, Wagner, Schoenberg, Liszt, Bartok, Verdi, Rameau, Hanns Eisler, Dag Wiren, Ligeti, William Alwyn, Ibert, Poulenc, Milhaud, Borodin, Ives, Miroslav Kabelac, Puccini

*Never or rarely easy:* Elgar, Stravinsky, Berg, Webern, Rautavaara, William Schuman

*Never registered though I tried mightily:* Britten, Palestrina, Hindemith, Hans Werne Henze, Bax, Prokofiev, Malcolm Arnold, Rachmaninoff, Reynaldo Hahn, Balakirev, Reger, Boulez, Carter, Scriabin


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## Jacck (Dec 24, 2017)

Easy: Bruckner, RVW, Dvořák, Brahms, Ravel, Debussy, Prokofiev, Janáček, Schubert, Schumann

Middle: Beethoven, Bach, Scriabin, Schoenberg, Elgar, Shostakovich, Bartok

Hard: Mozart, Mahler


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Easy: J.S. Bach, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arvo Pärt, Giuseppe Verdi, George Frideric Handel, Bohuslav Martinů, Olivier Messiaen, Dmitri Shostakovich

Took Ages: Benjamin Britten, Richard Wagner, Felix Mendelssohn, Olivier Messiaen, Robert Schumann

Not Quite Yet There: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven

Messiaen was tricky: I adored Turangalîla first time I heard it. All his other work was a struggle.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Immediate appeal to me: Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Haydn, Vaughan Williams, Debussy, Dvorak, Puccini, Schubert (basically anyone tuneful)

Appeal over time: Bach, Schoenberg, Britten, Babbitt, Boulez, Prokofiev, Scriabin, Mahler

Longest: Ferneyhough, Carter


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## Wilhelm Theophilus (Aug 8, 2020)

The only piece I didn't have to listen to a number of times an almost loved immediately is Beethoven's VC.

Brahms took me a while.

Still don't love Mahler, Chopin, Bach, but I haven't dismissed them or given up.

Some composers music is more accessible and easier to listen to than others, like Tchaikovsky, but you might not really love the music.


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## consuono (Mar 27, 2020)

One work that I still don't really get is Beethoven's Diabelli Variations. I don't think the set comes close to his last piano sonatas, and I don't quite get the "greatest work for the piano" praise that's been heaped on them.


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

Instant greatness verified with: Handel, Bach and his sons, Mozart, Haydn, Scarlatti, Telemann, Vivaldi, Beethoven and many more.

Those taking a little more effort (just a little more): Wagner, Verdi, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Richard Strauss

Those who will never make it because they write bad music: all of the atonal composers, noise-music composers etc.


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## Caryatid (Mar 28, 2020)

To be honest, most of the music I listen to frequently these days was not love at first sight.


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