Re: Does Andrew Lloyd Webber really steal from Puccini.

> It's true that I don't speak for everyone, but neither do you.

I claim to speak for minorities. You frequently speak for "us," for
"the ordinary music lover," etc.

The mass audiences for everything and what interests them are not in
need of any defense or protection. It's the minority audiences for
esoteric art (which you never fail to attack as snobs, elitists, or
poseurs) and the arts that interest them that require advocacy and
defense from people like you. There has always been great popular art
with a comparatively large audience (Aida) and great esoteric art that
never has had and never will have a wide audience (Emily Dickinson).

There's a big difference between the opinion of the performer of
Renaissance music who has spent his life preparing editions of
Renaissance music, reading Renaissance treatises on music, and
performing Renaissance music at an extraordinarily high professional
level and the opinion of the individual whose ignorance of this
repertory is nearly total, the listener who, when stumbling across a
motet by Josquin on National Public Radio, all too predictably finds it
"boring." This situation is nobody's fault. What chance is there that
the average person is going to grow up with a sufficient diet of
Renaissance polyphony really to get inside of the music? Nevertheless,
ignorance is no excuse for sneering at those musicians who have steeped
themselves in the masterworks of a bygone era and brought them to life
in performance.

As for virtuosic musicianship, there are no more virtuoso performers
than the master performers of contemporary music. In the case of this
repertory, again the opinion that weighs most is the opinion of the
musician unfazed by such things rather than the opinion of the casual
concert goer who hears one piece from this repertory per season against
his or her will because it's programmed on the same concert as another
piece he's bought a ticket to hear.

Appreciation of any art form of any complexity at all requires special
knowledge and adequate exposure: love only comes with understanding,
understanding only with familiarity, and today even Italian opera is an
art form appreciated by only a tiny minority. There is no chance that
the music of the Renaissance will ever again have a wide popular
audience. Nevertheless, in recent decades the audience for early
music has grown steadily thanks to the tireless advocacy of musicians
passionately devoted to it.

It can take a long time for difficult works of music to make their way
with audiences. The Emperor criticized Mozart for writing "too many
notes." Rossini complained that Bellini's music was "too
philosophical." It took the orchestra of the Paris Conservatoire one
year of rehearsals to master Beethoven's 9th for the first performance
in France under Habeneck. Before World War II, performances of the
late Beethoven piano sonatas were exceedingly rare: pianists simply
didn't learn them as a matter of course. Since then performances of
the late Beethoven sonatas have finally become as common as
performances of the Moonlight. The Grosse Fugue was widely considered
unplayable until after World War I, when the Kolisch Quartet (the
quartet founded by Schoenberg's brother in law) began programming it
regularly. When one of the Brahms symphonies had its first performance
in Philadelphia, a critic named Philip Hale complained that it was made
up of mathematical formulas and devoid of melody. Falstaff will always
be the one Verdi opera that many lovers of Italian opera prefer to get
along without. It wasn't until the 1970's that every Mahler symphony
had finally been performed by all of the major American orchestras: it
was many decades before Mahler emerged from obscurity and came to enjoy
the prominence he enjoys today. Similarly, Berg's Violin Concerto has
gradually become nearly as popular as the violin concertos of
Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, and Brahms. Berg may never be as
popular as Puccini, but as long as there are musicians passionately
devoted to performing his music, his music will survive. It's way too
early to predict whether his music will ever be as popular as the late
Beethoven sonatas became 125 years after Beethoven's death.

-david gable

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