Harper's
March 1998
As concert halls became bigger, and audiences larger, music became gradually more difficult to understand at first hearing. This paradox is essential to an understanding of the history of modern culture. Mozart was already difficult for his contemporaries, who were distressed by what they thought were unintelligible modulations and overcomplicated textures. Yet his music was played anyway, simply because enough musicians liked it, and finally everyone else came around. Beethoven was much harder than Mozart, and polemic about the insanity of some of his late compositions continued until the end of the 19th century; his music was performed by those who loved it until finally, in our century, even his Great Fugue for string quartet is listened to with awe and pleasure. By contrast, Wagner made Beethoven's music sound childishly simple to many musicians, and he became popular only because his admirers insisted on performing his operas against the prevailing distaste. A devoted Wagnerian such as Ernest Newman found parts of Richard Strauss's Elektra unintel-ligible nonsense at its English premi?re. And Debussy was much less acceptable than Strauss. (Increasing complexity is not unique to music. The greatest French poet of the late 19th century is St?phane Mallarm?, whose poems are so difficult that it is said that only foreigners can understand them-because foreigners read slowly, word for word, instead of skimming. Paintings became harder to grasp at first sight, novels more difficult to read, music more impenetrable. This is a fact of modern life.)
What is missing from all the grim predictions that classical music will soon perish in this age of mass culture and mechanical reproduction is an awareness that taste and understanding are formed by acts of faith and will; we appreciate what we are willing to enjoy. Berlioz detested the music of Bach: he did not want to like it. Chopin hated the music of Schumann. Stravinsky despised Brahms but came around to him at the end of his life. Boulez still dislikes Brahms. Some composers are harder to like than others: Beethoven was harder than Mozart, Stravinsky was harder than Ravel. It is important to recognise, on the other hand, that some composers bring diminishing returns over the years to their enthusiasts. One can revive a taste for Hummel or Saint-Sa?ns, but their music is not nourishing for a long period. A little Satie for me goes a long way: I am never in a hurry to return to him. Even so, those who idolise a composer are the only ones whose opinions count: the musical canon is not decided by majority opinion but by enthusiasm and passion, and a work that ten people love passion-ately is more important than one that 10,000 do not mind hearing.
The music that survives is the music that musicians want to play. They perform it until it finds an audience. Sometimes it is only a small audience, as is the case so far for Arnold Sch?nberg (and I am not sure if it will ever be a large one), but he will be performed as long as there are musicians who insist on playing him. The most significant composers are those who gain the fanatical loyalty of performers; those who hated Beethoven listened again, persuaded by those who admired him. When I was a child, most of the students at Juilliard were children of Jewish immigrants from central and eastern Europe: Poland, Russia, Hungary and Germany. Now they are from Japan and Korea, and mostly female. Where the new generation that wants to assert itself will come from and what will motivate them I do not know. If music is made available to the young, either through records or in the schools, enough eccentrics will turn up. The music will live, as it always has, in the musicians, and they will somehow persevere until they find an audience for it.
