A little more with regards to the Wagner quote below.
I renounce all fame, and more especially the insane specter of posthumous fame, because I love humankind far too dearly to condemn them, out of self-love, to the kind of poverty of ideas which alone sustains the fame of dead composers.
The concept of an “immortal” artist is a relatively recent mythology. One that ironically coalesced around the time Wagner wrote so melodramatically about Beethoven. Prior to the advent of a museum culture in the 19th century, concerts did not usually include music from the previous generation. Even Bach had slipped from popular consciousness by 1800 (50 years after his death).
Of course this isn’t to say that a museum culture doesn’t serve a valuable function (and that it has been made possible by fields like musicology, improved research methods, technology, etc.), but museums have to have holdings, and this establishes a canon of “classic” artworks–even if inadverdently. Inevitably, the larger the canon becomes, the more rigid it becomes. New works have a hard time competing with old ones simply because there’s a bias toward the canon (which is, or course, sufficiently inclusive!). There’s nothing inherently better about Wagner’s operas than Alban Berg’s or Ligeti’s. It’s just that Wagner is older.
The canon has become so large and powerful that for over 100 years we’ve built conservatories and universities to train musicians to play only the canon. We’ve built a classical music record industry and subscription-based orchestra system that can only accomodate Bach through Debussy. To escape from boredom we have to rely on new interpretations of old pieces. And then, when there is a new interpretation, old, dusty people argue about how authentic it is. Amazon.com lists 376 mp3s when you search “Beethoven 5th Symphony.” If the human eye can only discern 100 different shades of gray (at least that’s what my high school art teacher told me), how can the ear discern 376 shades of the same Beethoven’s 5th? And how could anyone profit by that kind of monotony?
In about 1477 Johannes Tinctoris summed up the attitude of his day by saying that “only the compositions of the last forty years are worth listening to.” That would be refreshing!
