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Some baroque works have somehow become cliché wedding music—works by Pachelbel, Vivaldi, or Handel, for example. And every now and again you will run into some guy who will roll his eyes at Pachelbel’s Canon or, like Luigi Dellapiccolo, make cracks that Vivaldi “didn't write hundreds of concerti but only one concerto hundreds of times.” (To my knowledge, no one sneers at Handel). And I would think to myself: Wait, I kind of like their music. That’s so rude!
I do consider myself too stupid for Bach, though. It isn’t that I do not get real pleasure from listening to his music. On the contrary, I enjoy the Orchestral Suites very much. His many preludes & fugues, too, but not on the organ. I could listen to the two-violin concerto over and over and over again, and never ever ever tire of it. And yes, the same eye-rolling snobs may tell me that all of my Bach favorites are everybody’s favorites. That is, they are entirely too obvious. I will admit that some Bach is beyond me—any of the cantatas, the Mass in B minor, or St. Matthew Passion, for example. And I don’t know for sure why I like the Goldberg Variations. It sounds good to the ear and the theme-and-variation structure is easy to understand. Sometimes I think it’s rather like me watching a Godard film without the subtitles, not certain that I’d get it even if I were fluent in the language. In any event, I do feel like I’m missing something.
Have I convinced myself that I like these works somehow, because I’m a phony? On an irrelevant question?:
I’m fully aware that Bach is not included above among the difficult-to-understand, but I do find Rosen’s word comforting in the idea that serious music is not intended for popular appeal. Instead, it invites you to rise up to its level, to make it intelligible. And that if something is beyond me at the first or even second pass, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I am hopelessly stupid.
The life of music is based no so much on those who want to listen, but on those who want to play and sing… The audience wants something new and detests innovation…As concert halls became bigger and audiences became larger, music became gradually more and more difficult to understand at first hearing. That paradox is essential to the history of modern culture. Mozart was already difficult for his contemporaries, who were distressed by unintelligible modulations and over-complicated textures. Beethoven was much harder than Mozart, and polemic about the insanity of some of his late conceptions continued literally until the end of the nineteenth century. Wagner made Beethoven’s music sound simple by contrast for most amateurs. A devoted Wagnerian like Ernest Newman found parts of Strauss’s Electra unintelligible nonsense at its English premiere. Debussy was much less acceptable than Strauss… 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 Schoenberg, and I am not sure if he will ever capture a large one, but he will be performed as long as there are musicians who insist on playing him. (Charles Rosen, “The Irrelevance of Serious Music” )
