Hey don’t forget Shlomo for Cello.
It is also important to remember that working musician was not an oxymoron at that time (or at the very least it was the rule not the exception). There were theatre and dance orchestras that played regularly, and most large cities had an orchestra and likely an opera as well.
Even into the era of silent movies the ritziest of them had an orchestra and a stage show along with the silent short subjects.
Sousa, after leaving the Marine Corps, made his living with his “Band” traveling the circut.
Electronic reproductions of music and performances have gradually winnowed the number of job opportunities down drastically for actors and musicians. There is very little live music or theatre avilable to the general public. They have Television and recorded music which fills the same role.
When I was a kid, back in the dark ages, you hired bands (albeit “rock” bands) to play your school dances. NOT DeeJays. and that’s just over a 30 year period (going from when I was in school to now). Think how much the technology has changed in the last 200 years and you will see that the number of working musicians has dropped dramatically. (Don’t get me started on fundamentalist Kareoke churches).
Smetana - maybe not quite a one-hit wonder, but nothing comes to mind beyond the Moldau. Ditto with Borodin and Prince Igor.
Then again, maybe I’m just clueless 
The only quibble I can think of for Smetana is the overture to The Bartered Bride. As for Borodin, In the Steppes of Central Asia is well known, as is whichever string quartet movement it was that provided the tune for “This Is My Beloved.” I was about to include the Polovtsian Dances until I remembered that those are from Prince Igor.
Being a half-assed Slavophile, I have to say…I have one Smetana recording (Ma Vlast) and I have no idea where it is.
Plus the rest of the opera 
His piano trio and quartets also get fairly regular airings.
Well, Holst’s Egdon Heath and his music for the ballet The Perfect Fool are reasonably well known (I have them both on CD, the former on a compilation entirely of Holst’s lesser-known orchestral works). Orff has – off the top of my head – Der Mond, Catulli Carmina and De Tempore Fine Comoedia.
I’d also dispute that Mars is the only part of The Planets that is well known. Most people familiar with so-called “classical music” would recognize parts of Jupiter, I’d say (also, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band did a piece called Joybringer that was based on it and received radio airplay).
My vote for classical one-hit wonder? Paul Dukas, whose Sorcerer’s Apprentice is known worldwide via Mickey Mouse and Walt Disney’s 1940 film Fantasia. Dukas wrote other pieces, but they’re rarely performed IMHO. Any Dopers have any Dukas in their collection other than SA?
I’m a casual fan of classical music, and here are a few other composers from whom I can only think of one work:
Barber (Adagio for strings) (which is a movement of a larger work)
Resphigi (The Pines of Rome)
And while I’ve heard of a few things by Bizet other than Carmen, I think he fit the “one hit wonder” mold pretty well, as that’s at the very top of the list of favorite classical works, and nothing else of his even comes close.
I also have a book about the 50 greatest classical composers which leaves out Rachmaninoff because (it claims) nothing of his aside from one excellent piano concerto is ever played.
(But Pachelbel is DEFINITELY the best answer.)
Oh for god’s sake. The Prelude in C-Sharp Minor? The Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini?
His violin concerto gets a fair few outings.
The second symphony? Oodles of chamber & piano stuff? The Bells?
Bizet is definately NOT a OHW - The L’Arlesienne suites, Symphony in C are played to death on classical radio. And don’t forget his “other” opera “Les Pêcheurs de Perles” (The Pearl Fishers). And there is that part of the “Jeux d’enfants” piano suite that is used in commercials and cartoons.
My take on it is that there are hundreds of thousands of classical composers. Luckily we have forgotten all but a hundred or so of the very best.
If you’re going to mention Respighi’s Pines of Rome as his one hit, you’re probably artificially limiting the scope, as Pines is part of the so-called “Roman Trilogy”, also including Fountains of Rome and Roman Festivals. I’d say Fountains is just as famous.
Barber’s “Adagio” is originally from his String Quartet #1, but it had to have been fleshed out a bit, since there are more than four parts in the string orchestra version. I’m not positive because I’ve never heard the string quartet.
My votes for classical one-hit wonders would have to be Dukas and Pachelbel. I know I’ve heard other pieces they wrote, but they were utterly forgettable.
Yeah, and if you go back far enough, you get to the period when a musician would be hired by a nobleman (e.g. Haydn) or a church (e.g. Bach) to crank out original compositions for all sorts of purposes and occasions, in addition to leading the performances thereof.
There are several periods in western music: Renaissance, Baroque, Classical (1750-1820), Romantic, and 20th Century. The most popular composers of the Classical period included Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert. Many of the composers mentioned in this thread are from a different musical time period than Classical.
Well, thank you!
I’d say that, as Bippy pointed out, Albinoni’s Adagio is right up there, too.
I note from the Wikipedia entry on Albinoni, that the Adagio is actually “a 1945 reconstruction by Remo Giazotto of a fragment from a slow movement of a trio sonata he discovered among the ruins of the Dresden State Library.” So Albinoni might be most famous for a piece he didn’t really write himself.
That’s a whole different level of one-hit-wonderness.
Labels, labels, labels…
It’s clear that everybody took the ‘classical’ classification in its wider sense, meaning ‘music from the western & European traditions’. There’s plenty of composers from the seven decades you mention who can’t be accurately described as classical in the narrow sense - including, errrm, Beethoven and Schubert.
There was no ‘renaissance’ in music, and the ‘baroque period’ covers a vast array of styles, idioms and agendas. And ‘20th century’ as a ‘period’ is meaningless beyond a high-school classroom.
Just the fanfare from La Peri. On the CD “Brass Greatest Hits”. But the only copy of SA I have is on my video of Fantasia.
I think Ponchielli, who wrote “Dance of the Hours,” also popularised by Disney’s Fantasia, as well as Spike Jones and the City Slickers and Alan Sherman, counts as a one-hit wonder, too.
Then there is Telemann, often described as a “no-hit wonder”.
In his time, he was the big cheese in Germany, ahead of Handel and well ahead of Bach. (Bach was considered a provincial musician with his organ playing as his primary claim to fame.) How things have changed!
Telemann is still well-loved in Baroque circles and does get recorded regularly, but can you think of one tune of his?
Compare that to Water Music, The Messiah, Harmonious Blacksmith, Largo from Xerxes, Arrival of the Queen of Sheba, Air on the G string, Goldberg Variations, Brandenburg Concertos, Toccatta and Fugue in D Minor, Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring, etc, etc, etc.