Well, the All-Powerful Hand of the Moderator has not descended yet, so I'd like to jump in. And, I did make one truly legitimate post on this thread today (#1216), after all, so maybe I've got one credit to spend.
Actually, without pulling out the rulebook to confirm, is it being all that naughty to make ancillary remarks, like the above that you all have made, to a clearly legitimate post (about the Naxos album choices)?
Anyway, the only reason that it matters to me about what country produced the most and best classical composers is that I am a nationalist at heart. I love America, and I want to be better than any other country in
everything. I think that citizens of most countries feel the same way about their countries.
If you put all of the theatrical music and motion picture scores under the rubric of "classical music," I think that someone could make the claim that America has had more great classical composers than any other country. But we are a nation of mongrels (present company
not excepted) and immigrants, however. Based upon my limited biographical knowledge about them, it seems to me that people who were first-generation immigrants to the U.S. (especially from places like Eastern Europe, Russia, and Germany) probably have produced more and better theatrical music and motion picture scores than the rest of composers of those types of music in the U.S. combined.