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Indeed. Due to their deep understanding of a wide range of subjects, some HN commenters amassed such an extraordinary amount of likes that puts Bach to shame.
Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time?
21–30 of 107 posts
Re: Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time?
#22A great achiever (much more than Bach IMHO) was Émile Littrè, the French author of several massive works but better known as the author of Dictionnaire de la langue française.
"much more than Bach" though??
Re: Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time?
#23> 9. Never experiencing true defeat or setback I don't think this is correct. Bach was seeking a position of court composer (like Handel) and even sent his 6 Brandenburg Concertos to Margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt in 1721. He didn't get the position. Brandenburg Concertos are some of his best works and I can't imagine how much top-quality secular music he could have written if he got the position.
Also, why on earth would this metric be important? Failure is a fact of life; one needs to experience it many, many times on the road to grandmastery. I’m pretty sure Bach had. It makes more sense to cherish than deplore it.
10 of his 20 children and his first wife died. That's enough setback for most of us. He was imprisoned over quitting his appointment, if you want to add some. It really is a weird criterium.
Re: Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time?
#24History is written by the victors. The greatest achiever of which work reached us, by the criteria that we pick, of the things we know today, and the "we" changes from culture to culture. Without dismissing Bach's work (or the others named in the discussion, I would had picked Leonardo with my shallow default knowledge on the topic) we should acknowledge how biased is what we know. Not just because how we select what…
> History is written by the victors
No it isn't, history is written by people looking at old documents. Losers write a lot of history as well since it isn't like the victors go and kill all the losers or burn down all their documents.
> The greatest achiever of which work reached us, by the criteria that we pick, of the things we know today, and the "we" changes from culture to culture.
Yes, the history taught to us depends on where we live, not who won back then. If you are in country A they will say their glorius wars conquered B, if you are in country B they will say the tyranny when ruled A was a horrible time. History wasn't written by A, both sides gets to write most of the time.
Re: Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time?
#25Victor Hugo could be on the short list.
Re: Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time?
#26It depends on your definition of greatness. Alexander the Great and Napoleon come to mind.
Re: Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time?
#27History is written by the victors. The greatest achiever of which work reached us, by the criteria that we pick, of the things we know today, and the "we" changes from culture to culture. Without dismissing Bach's work (or the others named in the discussion, I would had picked Leonardo with my shallow default knowledge on the topic) we should acknowledge how biased is what we know. Not just because how we select what…
Rather trite cultural relativism.
But Bach didn't even write the history, did he? Wasn't considered that great in his time. Rather, he was almost forgotten.
And let's forget about the rest of the analogy by ignorance.
Re: Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time?
#28The comment thread on that page gets into Newton and Neumann, but I think artistic/scientific achievements are apples/oranges. Doesn't make sense to compare the two, because the standard of quality is so different.
Even within artistic disciplines, how would you compare Bach, Shakespeare, and DaVinci? Shakespeare alone added 1,700 new words to the English language (that we still use today). DaVinci painted so meticulously that his works have hundreds of layers of paint that are thinner than a strand of hair.
Comparison is the thief of joy - better to just envision a "hall of fame", where once reached, it doesn't matter where you place.
Re: Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time?
#29Clearly not since neither the list of metrics nor theire relative importance nor even the assessment within a metric is anywhere close to being solid enough to allow measuring the known information (and then there is also a lot we don't know about the past).
Also, > 8. Ending up so great that he could learn only from himself.
how does greatness prevent you from learning from others? For example, don't greatest athletes continue to benefit from coaches?
Re: Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time?
#30Around the year 2000, amongst the other things that were going on, it was also the 250th anniversary of Bach's death. Someone at the record label Teldec got the bright idea to release the entirely of Bach's work, and so a 153-disc box set was produced: * https://www.gramophone.co.uk/features/article/the-complete-b... * https://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2013/Apr13/B... * https://www.amazon.com/Bach-2000-…
Deutsche Grammophon produced something similar recently, which I was lucky enough to get for Christmas last year: https://www.bach333.com/en/
It is stunning in every way; I highly recommend it for any Bach fans!