The complete works of...

A few years ago I purchased the complete works of Bach and spent a year listening to all of them, beginning to end. It was a wonderful experience, and I found many hidden gems, surprising connections, and one truth that became apparent pretty quickly: from BWV 1 to BWV 1128, Bach displays an amazing unity of style and wit, and consistently produces high-quality, complex works. The works are not necessarily ordered by the time they were composed, which is fine: there are no early experiments, half-baked ideas, youthful duds. 155 CDs, and very few of them I found annoying (granted, it's hard to listen to 100 choir pieces, each 20 second long).

Mozart is a different story. Listening to his complete works is much more tedious. So many boring, early symphonies, divertimentos, exercises impressive for a 10 year-old but without Mozart's name they would never survive and be performed today. Yes, he wrote a lot: 170 CDs total. But if he'd deleted half of what he wrote, his legacy would have been much stronger. Still, here and there I'm finding some gems such as the trios for two clarinets and oboe. Charming, graceful pieces which I never even knew about.

In between the complete Bach and the complete Mozart editions, I spent a couple of months listening to the complete Brahms Edition. At 46 CDs, there are only mature, well-thought pieces. Brahms was well known for destroying any piece that he felt was not good enough. He wrote and deleted 20 (!) string quartets before publishing his first one (out of three). No wonder that there are no youthful exercises here: from Op. 1 (the first piano sonata) we are in genius territory.

What I mostly learned about Brahms is that he wrote a lot, and I mean A LOT of annoying vocal music: lieder, duets, trios, all kind of music that to my ears has no charm at all. At 20+ CDs of vocal music, this is almost half of his ouvre. If he only wrote another cello sonata! Or symphony! Or piano quintet! His chamber music is definitely the highlight of this set.

Next on my list: Messiaen, Ravel and Debussy editions. They're pretty short - 18 to 25 CDs each. It's amazing to see that Bach and Mozart wrote as much an order of magnitude more music than their 20th century successors.