Composers who passed their sell-by date?

Two candidates:

William Bolcolm. His early work was very engaging like his concerto for piano and orchestra.

The stuff he churns our now just feels like yesterdays anachronistic recycled garbage. The thing that frustrates me about his recent work is that even though I find it aesthetically dull it's still done with a high degree of technical skill. Take as an example Graceful Ghost:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYNhoOLNds0&feature...

Cornelius Cardew.

When I think of early works like Treatise or Octet for Jasper Johns he really had something and was on the leading edge of the avant-garde.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NRoeyVYedA&feature...

Then Cardew came to a crisis regarding the accessibility of his music and wrongly decided that if a wide audience couldn't appreciate his music it was worthless and ended up being the definition of academic music in his late years. i.e. his Song for the British Working Class. Again like Bolcom done with extreme technical skill but towards an unnecessary aesthetic that doesn't belong in the repertoire of classical music. He basically turned into a folk music composer.

AS a PS I have to refer you to Glenn Goulds account of Mozart, who wrote an article arguing that Mozart died too late rather than too early. The article can be found in the Glenn Gould Reader.

It's a commonplace that if Mozart and Mendelssohn had both died at eighteen, Mendelssohn would be considered the greater composer. Mendelssohn, in my opinion, didn't live up to his early promise.

Edit:

del - As you note, Mendelssohn was twenty-five when he completed the "Italian" symphony. It's neither clearly an early work nor a late work, although I'll note that Beethoven had completed fewer than a dozen works by that age (works that were actually published, that is). Mendelssohn was older than I had thought when he completed the Violin Concerto, but, even if you count both that and the later Midsummer Night's Dream music (which I agree is great), and the "Italian" symphony as well, that's three great works in the last twenty years of his life compared with two by age eighteen. I admire Mendelssohn's music (in fact, I'm spending the morning listening to his string quartets, string quintet, and octet, while studying Visual Basic and answering questions here), but I think that productivity (of quality works) is one of the criteria by which composers are, and should be, judged. Perhaps I'm putting too much emphasis on the comparison with Mozart, who, in my opinion, published an average of one astonishingly great work per month once he turned twenty-five.

My candidate would be Paul Hindemith:

His youthful and early "bad boy" music, lively, fresh enough, though never, I think relegated to 'great,' was nonetheless very well written, lively, and a kind of 'fun.'

Kammermusik No. 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiEkO5NOBno&feature...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKBoFNADL7Q&feature...

His two very listenable orchestral suites, Mathis der Maler and Nobilissima Visione are very fine pieces. The Trauermusik is nice enough, as is the later Concert Music for Strings and Brass. That is very little from a very large body of works. His variations on a theme of Carl Maria von Weber, constantly hauled out as a sort of orchestral showpiece, I find horribly academic and uninteresting.

He began to be impressed with himself, and took on his formulated theoretic premise as 'THE way to write.' This, some argue, is best seen in his later revision of the song-cycle 'Das Marienleben.' It was revised to accomodate the consistencies of his theoretic premise, and it 'ironed out' any of the more intuitive or spontaneous writing in the original version.

His theory book, somehow valued, is also laced with the bitterness of a composer who thought he ought to be recognized as THE greatest composer of the moment, when the global audience, and critics, had decided otherwise. (The textbook confirms this: second rate at best when it was published, it had the enshrinement of many an American musical institution because it was written by 'our important immigrant composer.' It may have enlightened contemporary harmony at the time of its release, but it also is filled with 'dictates' of 'this is the only way to write, based on 'organic' acoustic principles' - a joke on what most now know to be an arbitrary construct to begin with., i.e. tonality, scales, leading tones, etc.)

His adherence to his own academic construct became a bound set of rules vs. a basis for free invention or expression of ideas. He fell prone to the typical freshman's misconception that theory is a bunch of rules, and if you just follow those rules, that will make a good piece of music.

The musical works he penned thereafter became insufferably dull and academic, no matter how well-crafted: they are indistinguishable, one from the other.

Best regards.

P.s. @ JoshuaCharles. Mine is your first TU, however, we all know Maestro Gould, when he opened his mouth, said reactionary things just to dramatize himself: however great, he was also greatly silly, as in young rebel cliche punk stuff.

Glazunov. He passed his sell by date after the 5th symphony. In fact, he probably passed it after his 1st. Whenever I listen to his music - which isn't very often - I picture a bored man, thinking to himself, 'what will I do with myself today? Oh, well, I suppose I could turn out another symphony... it won't take very long....." :-)