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PARTISAN REVIEW
different from that of what preceded it. Perhaps it will. Perhaps the gap be–
tween what many composers want to write and what most music-lovers
want to hear can somehow be closed. Some examination ofthe origins of the
gap between composers and the musical public might help clarify the nature
ofour current problem.
Until the late eighteenth-century, the word "music," ifunqualilied, meant
"new music." The composer was typically employed by the church or the
court, and provided music for a social, economic, and cultural elite, many of
whose members performed (or even composed) themselves. This audience
had little knowledge of or interest in "old" music (which in 1770 would have
included what Bach and Handel had written barely twenty years before),
but was quite familiar with the sort of up-to-date music a composer was likely
to produce.
Late in the eighteenth century, this aristocratic patronage began to be
replaced by public concerts for an expanding middle-class audience. This de–
velopment coincided with a nascent interest in the revival of old music (a re–
vival spearheaded at first by aristocratic connoisseurs and by composers),
and with an astonishing explosion of new works of great power and
originality (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, etc.). But while the suc–
cessful composer gained new freedom and prestige (becoming almost a god in
the nineteenth century), the risks of failure correspondingly increased. Haydn
made the transition from respected employee to public success; Mozart failed
at both. Even Beethoven depended on noble largesse long before his music
went out of fashion as the rage for Rossini swept Vienna in the 1820s.
(Ironically, Rossini himself is thought to be the first composer
to
retire from
composition when
his
work went out offashion.) While composers as late as
Liszt and Wagner continued to benefit from court positions or royal patron–
age, many others, like Schubert, barely scraped by on publishers' fees and
temporary teaching positions.
The opposition of an increasingly passive and musically untrained
audience (whose tendency to nap in the slow movement was exploited as
early as Haydn's "Surprise" Symphony) to anything new became increas–
ingly marked, as did its veneration for the "classics." Yet often enough (as
with Wagner) it was the musically unwashed who championed the "music of
the future." Since subtlety and finesse were lost on a mass audience, the
composer's relation to his public often took on an element of sadism - as Ni–
etzsche says of Wagner, "he repeats a thing so often that we become des–
perate - and end up believing it." The adoration/mistrust of audience for
composer and the dependency/contempt of composer for audience are re–
flected in commonplaces such as "the great composer is always ahead of his
time." (Schoenberg: "beauty begins just when the non-creative person begins
