That’s debatable. Mozart was good too. But my real OG is Camille Saint-Saens. You want dark and moody? Light and fluffy? Dazzles and sparkles? He’s your man.
(Said as a huge fan of his work. I spent a year playing essentially nothing but one of his fugues.)
This didn't really get noticed in his own day, as they were busy dumbing things down into the classical period, but he was hugely influencial through rediscovery.
Except for Italian humanists rediscovering Greek and Roman writings, I'm having a hard time thinking of an earlier instance of a chiefly posthumous legacy.
Aquarium was my sons childhood theme song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmsNH8t25ck - This guy is like 95 and still shredding on youtube
Truth is, they were ALL Justin Bieber. It’s all pop music of the time.
https://youtu.be/_1xJoVzoIQg?list=RD_1xJoVzoIQg
Also they were not all justin beiber. Bach was a working church musician when mozart was out touring europe getting drunk and shitting on women. Only one of them was in it for the fame. In fact you could say that mozart and liszt were 2 of the first "pop stars" because that archetype didn't exist before them. There was basically no "beatlesmania" over bach. He had a steady job, but he didn't die wealthy or famous.
Because I was rather appalled by that language, but maybe lack background context.
https://www.thepiano.sg/piano/read/mozart-and-his-infamous-l...
Gute Nacht (good night)
Scheiss ins Bett dass es kracht (shit into the bed so that it bangs)
Reck den Arsch zum Mund (stretch your ass towards your mouth)
und sei recht kugelrund (and be spherically round))
And Mozart wrote a canon from it
"Buona Nox - bist a rechter Ox" (and the end of the text is what I wrote above)
Bach died 6 years before Mozart was born.
He was just decomposing instead of composing.
(Old sixth grade camp joke)
Mozart was the quintessential "Dark Forest" composer, hiding musical sentience in plain sight of light classical period textures.
Here he is with 2 measures of a simple major key "Justin Bieber" clarinet sequence interleaved with 2 measures from the strings that keep modulating to minor keys:
https://youtu.be/xdVo0MsJMOc?t=1074
Keep listening to the section marked "Tutti" in the score for a re-orchestration and reharmonization of that same clarinet sequence, but now in a surprisingly lush, chromatic style similar to Wagner or Brahms. It quickly disappears, too.
Similarly, Bach's own output is encoded inside Mozart's. E.g., the coda of the Rondo in A Minor doubles as a two-part invention, complete with invertible counterpoint between left- and right-hand.
He also built a nifty hash table that could be used to efficiently generate and stream music over the internet. (Unfortunately, he didn't live long enough to patent and sell it to Yahoo for 6 billion dollars.)
By a ridiculous stroke of luck I got to perform that piece as soloist once. Unforgettable.