Composer Howard Goodall started with a list of the fifty most important classical music pieces for the BBC Two's The Story of Music and for The Telegraph, he's whittled it down to an idiosyncratic ten.
His criteria was based on historical impact (“What I was looking for was music that changed the plot of classical music, and there’s an awful lot of classical music that didn’t change anything.”) You can pick your essentials and you can pick your friends but you cant pick your friend's essentials.
