At the end of the eighteenth century, nearly all of the music on orchestra concerts was fairly new music by living composers. Except at such oddities as London's Concert of Ancient Music, a composer's music did not stay in the repertoire very long after his death. Largely because of the turmoil caused by the French Revolution and other shocks, the three major European capitals (Paris, London, and Vienna) all suffered the nearly complete cessation of formal concert life for a couple of years. When it resumed, the world had become a different place. Classical music and popular music had become distinctly different categories and appealed to distinctly different audiences.

For the classical music audience, music should reward repeated performances by revealing new beauties to knowledgeable listeners each time. This audience sought timeless works of genius. For the popular music audience, music should please the senses on first hearing. This audience appreciated novelty, so long as the new piece did not stray too far from what they already enjoyed. Before the concert hiatus, Haydn and Mozart had delighted both kinds of audience.

Beethoven, the third member of the classical triumvirate, did not achieve quite the same broad popularity. People whose taste ran to easy listening found Beethoven's music confusing, although knowing his reputation as a great master and liking his earlier and less daring pieces, they usually blamed the "crudities" of his music on his deafness. A writer in the English musical journal Harmonicon (in 1825) represents this kind of listener:

The merits of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony we have before discussed, and we repeat, that . . . it is a composition in which the author has indulged a great deal of disagreeable eccentricity. Often as we how have heard it performed, we cannot yet discover any design in it, neither can we trace any conniption in its parts. Altogether, it seems to have been intended as a kind of enigma--we had almost said hoax.

Haydn and Mozart had always carefully observed and called attention to the beginning of a new section of a movement the distinction between one part of a movement and another, for example the second theme group or the start of the recapitulation. Beethoven, on the other hand, preferred to obscure the joints. Someone who expected that a symphony should exhibit a fairly obvious structure would inevitably have trouble following Beethoven's music. The new reality of classical music was that either a composer could attempt simply to imitate the older masters (like the now forgotten Adalbert Gyrowetz) or try to follow in Beethoven't footsteps. New classical music had now become in a certain way less listener friendly than the older classical music. Those who preferred popular music (that is, what Schumann dismissed as music of the Philistines) had little patience for it.

It is in this context that we turn to the diaries of George Templeton Strong, a New York attorney and music lover. He first heard Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in February 1841, as a young man of 21. That was the year before the founding of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, so there was not yet a permanent concert orchestra. He wrote, "The music was good, very well selected and excellently well performed, so far as I could judge. The crack piece, though, was the last, Beethoven's Sinfonia in C minor. It was generally unintelligible to me, except the Andante."

In my concert-going experience, if an orchestra has attempted a work by a living composer, or even one who has been dead only twenty or thirty years, it has usually come right before intermission, between two familiar works. That way the audience is stuck. If they come after intermission, they miss the first piece. If they leave before the modern work, they miss the last piece. In that way, orchestras have reinforced the idea that new music may be good for you, but you won't like it. This pickup orchestra in 1841 chose to put the relatively new and difficult piece last on the program. I don't know how many chances New York audiences had had to hear Beethoven's Fifth Symphony before, but Strong was probably not the only person in the audience to find it puzzling on first hearing.

The following year, Strong subscribed to the brand new New York Philharmonic, and it played Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on its inaugural concert (December 1842). Did Strong go with a sense of dread, having to sit through that unintelligible piece again? Hardly. He wrote, "The instrumental part of it was glorious . . . Beethoven's Symphony in C minor was splendidly played, and the Overture to Oberon still better, if possible."

If the piece confused him in 1841, how could he say with such confidence that the orchestra had played it so well almost two years later? In those days, all music lovers played piano--if not well enough to play in public, then at least well enough to study any music that interested them. Strong had evidently bought a piano reduction of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and played through it often enough to understand its structure and get an idea of how it was supposed to sound. After all, that is how lovers of symphonic music typically learned the repertoire in those days. Music stores sold arrangements for piano, piano four-hands, and two pianos of virtually anything a local was likely to perform. The Harmonicon's correspondent could have easily discovered the design of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony that way if he had been at all interested.

Strong had no further opportunity to hear an orchestra play Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until May 1844. By that time, he had probably played it and/or heard it played on the piano enough come to love it. His lengthy diary entry begins:

Feel today particularly happy--or particularly unhappy--I can't certainly determine which--for did I not hear the Symphony in C minor by one Ludwig van Beethoven, opus 67, played ad unguem [played to exactness] by the Philharmonic? Haven't I been fairly tingling all day with the remembrance of that most glorious piece of instrumental music extant, the second movement? (Twice played, by the by--the first encored symphony on record.) Haven't I been alternately exulting the accurate possession of this relic and lamenting the fruitlessness of my efforts to get hold of that all day long?

I expected to enjoy that Symphony, but I did not suppose it possible that it could be the transcendent affair it is. I've heard it twice before, and how I could have passed by unnoticed so many magnificent points--appreciated the spirit of the composition so feebly and unworthily--I can't conceive.

It's no mystery to me how Strong could have heard so much more of the Symphony at the third hearing than at the first. Classical music (or perhaps today the term "art music" might be better) by definition reveals its secrets little by little. He undoubtedly learned the basics of the symphony at the piano, but a live performance by full orchestra has so much more color and detail. The better a grasp of the basic structure a listener has, the more the details will stand out.

Today, not every music lover knows how to play piano well enough to study new music as Strong and his contemporaries did. Publishers do not issue piano reductions of much if any new orchestral music, but if they did, most of it would be much more difficult to play. We have recordings and full scores, which theoretically ought to enable the audience to learn new pieces even better, but actually Strong had the advantage. How many people have the chance to hear the same piece of new music in live performance three times in as many years? For that matter, when an orchestra announces the performance of a new piece, how often does a recording even exist? And the piece has been recorded, how many people get the recording and the score to study it before hand?

Over the past century and a half, the percentage of pieces by living composers on orchestra programs has dropped of precipitously. Composers, audiences, and orchestras all share responsibility for that fact. Beethoven's symphonies, which seemed so revolutionary strange to so many people at first hearing, became the warhorses of the symphonic repertoire within thirty years of his death--not only because of their intrinsic merit, but also because people had ample opportunity to study them.

Comparably, in the twentieth century, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring made the transition from a riot-provoking shocker (1912) to something commonplace enough that Walt Disney saw fit to use in in a film intended for a mass audience (Fantasia, 1940). I doubt if very many people could manage to play a piano reduction, but by that time, score study plus a recording would familiarize it just as well. How many orchestral pieces of the last thirty years or so (not counting movie music) and their composers are poised to make the transition from daring to familiar? Composers are composing. Are orchestras playing any of the pieces as often as Strong could hear Beethoven's Fifth Symphony? And are music lovers preparing themselves to listen with discernment?

Sources: Nicolas Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective (Coleman-Ross, 1965). Judith Tick (ed.), Music in the USA: A Documentary Companion (Oxford University Press, 2008).