Salieri in Amadeus

[Rev. Rye]

Yeah, and, thanks to this sort of mentality being common in the Classical period, that's why, with the exception of a few names, like Mozart, Haydn, Rossini, maybe opera composers like Gluck and Bellini, a few scattered pieces by Boccherini, and Beethoven (who's usually grouped with the Romantics anyway), much of the music of the Classical Period has fallen out of favour.

Rossini is already a bit of a stretch ...

Which only further proves my point that the music of the Classical period has suffered largely because of an unusually high proportion of prominent composers who preferred to, as Anomalocaris put it, create china rather than paint the Sistine Chapel. Compared to all the other periods from the Baroque on, the Classical probably has the smallest number of composers whose work still lives on today, and many of those (Rossini, Beethoven, Bellini) probably fit in better with the Romantic idiom anyway. And even of the ones I mentioned, many of them are still fairly obscure (Gluck is slowly gaining ground), and I highly doubt that anyone would count Boccherini among their favourite composers, even in a top 25.