(no subject)
If I were a dead Russian composer, I would be Dmitri Shostakovich.
I am a shy, nervous, unassuming, fidgety, and stuttery little person who began composing the same year I started music lessons of any sort. I wrote the first of my fifteen symphonies at age 18, and my second opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, when I was only 26. Unfortunately, Stalin hated the opera, and declared me "Enemy of the People" for life. I nevertheless kept composing the works I wanted to write in private; some of my vocal cycles and 15 string quartets mock the Soviet System in notes. And I somehow was NOT killed in the process! And Harry Potter stole my glasses and broke them!
If I were a dead German composer, I would be Arnold Schoenberg.
Arnold Schoenberg remains one of the most "infamous perpetrators" of modern dissonant music, despite the fact that he's hardly modern anymore based on years alone. Schoenberg was the major innovator of the 12-tone school of atonality, and this alone still makes people fear his work to some degree. He personally was even scarier than his music was -- Schoenberg was arrogant and intimidating, an individual who made no effort to be social or kind, and who thus was isolated so seriously that nobody even ever called him by his first name.