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“I tell you before God, and as an honest man, your son is the greatest composer known to me by person and repute, he has taste and what is more the greatest skill in composition." (said to Leopold Mozart, Mozart's father) ― Joseph Haydn

Also: ". . . scarcely any man can brook comparison with the great Mozart. . . If I could only impress on the soul of every friend of music, and on high personages in particular, how inimitable are Mozart's works, how profound, how musically intelligent, how extraordinarily sensitive! (for this is how I understand them, how I feel them) - why then the nations would vie with each other to possess such a jewel within their frontiers." ― Joseph Haydn

Also, a letter from Mozart to Haydn: "A father, having resolved to send his sons into the great world, finds it advisable to entrust them to the protection and guidance of a highly celebrated man, the more so since this man, by a stroke of luck, is his best friend. - Here, then, celebrated man and my dearest friend, are my six sons. - Truly, they are the fruit of a long and laborious effort, but the hope, strengthened by several of my friends, that this effort would, at least in some small measure, be rewarded, encourages and comforts me that one day, these children may be a source of consolation to me. - You yourself, dearest friend, during your last sojourn in this capital, expressed to me your satisfaction with these works. - This, your approval, encourages me more than anything else, and thus I entrust them to your care, and hope that they are not wholly unworthy of your favor. - Do but receive them kindly, and be their father, guide, and friend! From this moment on I cede to you all my rights over them: I pray you to be indulgent to their mistakes, which a father's partial eye may have overlooked, and despite this, to cloak them in the mantle of your generosity which they value so highly. From the bottom of my heart I am, dearest friend, Your most sincere friend, W. A. Mozart

To what extent the composers you mentioned broke completely with Beethoven (and/or the past) is arguable. All of them wrote works in sonata form, all of them wrote fugues, all of them studied counterpoint carefully. Liszt idolized Beethoven, and many of the key works of all four are unthinkable without Beethoven's example. Not to diminish the originality of their respective contributions. But the Beethoven myth was already in place when they were growing up and the legacy can be traced in all of their works.

Received wisdom dictates that every century or so, composers break with the past and do something completely new. The reality is a lot messier.

Beethoven himself is a good example. He is held up as the paragon of artistic fearlessness, not catering to audience's whims, pursuing a vision of the future, etc. In fact he was very well versed in the music of the past, including JS Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, and others whose names have been forgotten. He also did everything he could to ingratiate himself with the aristocracy who commissioned his works: i.e. his market. He followed the Y-Combinator motto: "Make things people want" in the sense that he made things his customers wanted. He forged an idiosyncratic personal style but many of its constituent elements are stolen from older styles (counterpoint, abrupt changes of texture, the unification of movements over a larger form).

I like your analogy about Romanticism reaching an impasse and Busoni picking things up from there. The path I drew above leading from Beethoven directly to the 4 Romantic composers is meant to illustrate that the historical line, now that we are reestablishing Reicha's place in history, might be drawn from him straight to the 20th century (Bartok, Stravinsky, Martinu) in his treatment of meter and the way he is comfortable with abstraction.

As for "Episode 5 Paris", believe me, it's very much on my mind. The current idea is to do a whole second series of videos, only in Paris, or perhaps one in Prague (where he was born) and the other three in Paris. After all, Reich spent 30 years of his life in Paris (1799-1802, 1808-1836) and there is tons of material, including his teaching work (his students included Liszt, Franck, Berlioz, Gounod, and many other big names). I'm hoping we can film in the vaults of the French National Library (BnF) where the manuscripts are, to show people what it's like to dig up old forgotten scores.

For the moment, it's just a daydream, until we secure funding (unlikely).

The 2nd paragraph is really the crux of the matter. Whereas Beethoven's music draws attention to its unusual features, Reicha in his memoirs states unequivocally that Haydn and Mozart are the pinnacles of instrumental music, and that it is because of their grace and good taste. So we have opposite positions on what is beautiful, hard to reconcile with our view of music history which is seen through our "Beethoven filter".

Many of the things we take for granted as Beethovenian inventions (obsessive motivic development, sonata form in symphonies and quartets, abrupt harmonic disruption, fugues in final movmeents) were pioneered by Haydn. I remember being well-versed in Beethoven and being astonished when I played through Haydn's piano works for the first time, how many things Louis had ripped off.

The wind quintets are extraordinarily well-written for their instruments, something easy to take for granted today as so many composers followed Reicha's lead.

He was not the very first to write for that ensemble, but the instant popularity of the 24 (actually 25) wind quintets led a lot more people to write for that instrumentation (flute, oboe, clarinet, French or English horn, bassoon).

The blanket statement that Beethoven's octet is a higher standard than anything Reicha wrote for quintet is a little dicey. There's a reason all wind players play Reicha. The works are sophisticated, comfortable and formally pretty quirky, with plenty of memorable moments. That said, if you don't find Haydn memorable then there's not much I can do to argue in his favor, except urge you to listen more of it.

The important point here is that the wind quintets make up a tiny proportion of Reicha's music, and that dozens of hours of music have never been recorded. Much of the music is only available in (messy) original manuscripts in France's National Library in Paris (BnF). Implication: it is hard to make generalizations about Reicha's music because we just don't know it well enough yet. Keep in mind that he composed just as much experimental music as conventional music, drawing conclusions and extrapolating from one opus to the whole output isn't a good idea.

It is indeed intriguing to imagine music history if composers had followed Reicha's lead rather than Beethoven's. There would have been a lot more metrically interesting music earlier, that's for sure.

The experimentation Reicha loved so much became popular in post World War II Europe and America. Many would argue that this led composers into a modernist dead end. But I guess if Beethoven had never happened Schoenberg wouldn't have either. But then we forfeit Wagner too...

I've been pondering a related question which I've found difficult to answer: if Beethoven's music had been lost or misplaced, would we immediately recognize it as "genius" if someone made a first recording in 2018? I'm not so sure.