Classical Music’s Conundrum

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Hermann von Kaulbach, Mozart’s Last Days (1873). Image via Wikimedia Commons.

In Compact, R. Taggart Murphy argues that classical music finds itself in a bit of a conundrum. On the one hand, some characterize the the giants of the art—Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Bach—as mere beneficiaries of racial preferences and, therefore, unworthy of the attention they receive. Less talented composers are forced upon listeners, who either congratulate themselves for their enlightened longsuffering or stop going to concerts. On the other hand, many orchestras only perform work by the dead giants, and the “endless repetition of the same old standards,” Murphy writes, “can be as deadly as forcing onto audiences music they can’t be made to love.”