Originally Posted by Gardener

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Better trained? I think you depreciated the expertise of musicologists a couple of posts ago, saying that training alone doesn't qualify for anything. "Musicologists who cannot compose music as sophisticated as that of Brahms or Beethoven will not be able to understand Mozart and Bach as well as Brahms and Beethoven no matter how many facts and theories they have accumulated. It takes a genius to truly understand one."-> See, that's why I assumed you were talking about geniuses to judge other geniuses. Since according to you they're the only ones who can truly judge other geniuses. But SSC has already pointed out that composers of the last centuries inherently were less trained in certain musical aspects than we are today. Not only had they no clue about all the musical developments that happened after their time until today, they usually also had a very limited knowledge of music history and knew next to nothing about music in other cultures. Not even to mention the lack of knowledge about acoustics. Their knowledge might have been excellent in their particular musical field, but it was a specialised and narrow knowledge in comparison to what is expected from the average musicologist and musician today.

Far more accomplished? What does that mean? Famous? Able? If you mean the latter, we're already back in the realm of the undefineable.

You haven't named any real criterion why Brahms and Beethoven should be better suited at judging "geniuses" than less famous people. Or are you just going to give us a list of people who are in your opinion able to classify others as geniuses? And what if they disagree with each other?

Sorry, but I just find it a bit naive to think famous composers automatically have a perfect ability to judge themselves and others accurately. They are subjective individuals too, born into a certain culture, grown up with certain music and certain teachers, with individual characters and tastes (and not even just musically: just see how Mendelssohn's Judaism made Wagner depreciate his music). There's no "supreme council of composers" who all share the same musical ability and are able to judge who's a good composer and who isn't. It's a lot of individuals, all with individual weaknesses and individual ideas about what music should be. Vincent d'Indy might have classified different composers as geniuses than Pierre Boulez, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Jean Baptiste Lully or Leonin.