Are today’s composers up to the challenge of writing sublime music?

When we describe music as ‘sublime’, what do we mean? For the Romans, sublimis signified greatness beyond measure. In the 18th century, Englishmen looked to The Spectator for clarification. Joseph Addison, in his Essay No. 339 of 1712, suggests that the sublime often achieves greatness without stirring up ‘pathetick’ human passions. The example he gives is Milton’s description, in Paradise Lost, of the Messiah looking down on his new Creation, ‘when every Part of Nature seem’d to rejoice in its Existence; when the Morning-Stars sang together, and all the Sons of God shouted for joy’.

Whether a composition is sublime is essentially a matter of opinion. How odd, then, that — with 500 years of music for us to choose from — the adjective is commonly applied to relatively few pieces. Two immediately spring to mind: the unearthly Cavatina of Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 130; and the slow movement of Schubert’s String Quintet, under whose plaintive song the composer nudges the harmony so deftly that, however often I hear it, I catch my breath.