Overview
- Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 was voted number one in ABC Classic 100: Greatest of All Time on Sunday, marking the work’s fifth overall top placement and the third consecutive time a Beethoven piece has finished first.
- The 2026 countdown drew the second-highest total votes in the series, and for the first time a living composer reached the top ten when Karl Jenkins’s The Armed Man placed at number six.
- Eighteen works by living composers, representing 17 composers, appeared in the top 100 with John Williams accounting for five entries, showing growing popular appetite for contemporary music.
- ABC Classic presenters used the results to highlight long‑standing barriers that kept women and other marginalized composers out of symphonic programming and urged more commissioning, funding and bolder orchestra programming to change that.
- The list ranged from 12th‑century works by Hildegard von Bingen to pieces by composers born in 1985 and averaged a composition year of 1883, which critics say shows the countdown both reflects the traditional canon and signals shifting tastes that could boost performances of living and overlooked composers.