Best music ever written: Seven string quartets
Do you think, as I do, that Mozart's seven great string quartets - the six Haydn Quartets plus the D major Quartet, K. 499 - represent the finest music ever composed?
Of course, Western music still had a long way to develop. But considering the harmonic, melodic, rhythmic, and structural language available at the time, as well as the expressive possibilities of the string quartet itself, these works seem to me to represent the pinnacle of human compositional achievement.
They have everything: bliss, darkness, peace, sorrow, nobility, fear; intellectual curiosity and profound emotional expression; sonatas, fugues, variations and more; gorgeous counterpoints and beautiful melodies.
They expand the expressive range of Classical music itself to an extraordinary degree. At the time, nothing else - not symphonies, cantatas, operas, or any other form of chamber music - seems to me to have reached the same level.