IRG CommandoJoe wrote:She said all of the great ones, not all of them. So whatever her definition of a great composer is may very well only include the atheist composers she listed.
Atheism as a measure of a person's skill and artistry in musical composition... Yeah, that's a really relevant prerequisite.
One would have a hard time honestly compiling a list of great composers while leaving out J.S. Bach at the very least. Haydn, Dvorak, Vivaldi, Rimsky-Korsakov, and several others also belong on the list in my opinion, though admittedly one who isn't well versed in the classical, romantic, and baroque periods might leave them out simply for lack of name recognition. However, I again doubt that the author is simply not as familiar with composers as one presuming to write such an article should be, because, well, when you start talking about Bizet, Debussy, Paganini, and to some extent Berlioz, you're treading well out of the realm of popularly known classical composers. I am again forced to the conclusion that the author was presenting the data deceptively for her own purposes; she's obviously not ignorant. Even if the criteria she was using for the status of "great" included being non-Christian (note that not all of the men on her list were atheists; Mozart was a Freemason, Brahms was agnostic, Debussy was a neo-pagan, Schumann was a pantheist, etc.) as you suggest, she has to know that it is a highly irregular requisite and one tailor-made to make the point of her article self-fulfilling and therefore worthless, and furthermore, in light of the irregularity of such a condition, it would be highly dishonest not to mention it. Yet saying so would remove all weight from the article, and she in fact said nothing of the sort. Either way, the article's got more holes than a seive.