But in our time, anyone who cares to, amateur or professional, can hear them all. You can download some of them from iTunes. All of which can be glorious fun--or else an absorbing study--for anyone who really cares, but the problem is that the scholarly understanding of all 26 Verdi operas taken as a whole (with variant versions existing of at least five some them) has now become the norm. There's scholarship in pop music, too, but you can avoid it if you want to; you can listen to the Beatles on CD or on the radio, and never know that people have catalogued every one of their recording sessions. Delve into classical music, though, and information like that hits you in the face. As I mentioned in an earlier episode, when the Metropolitan Opera last produced Rossini's wildly crazy comedy, L'Italiana in Algerì, the program book included a scholarly essay on variant editions of Rossini's score. Reviews will talk about such things. CD liner notes consider them.

And what gets lost is the direct appeal of the music. To talk about that, or at least to talk about it without reference to classical music scholarship, is somehow low-rent. Besides, as I've said earlier, what's most important about the music is now supposed to be its structure (a notion supported by the exponential growth, since World War II, of quantifiable musical analysis, in which the structural bare bones of music--the skeleton on which music's blood and flesh is draped--becomes deceptively tangible, and sometimes even mathematical, as if now, at last, we'd penetrated to the heart of music's mystery.

The history of music becomes important, too, and starts to take on an artificial life of its own. We're asked, for instance, to contemplate the popular appeal of Verdi's operas, at the time when they were written, when gigantic barrel organs trundled through Italian streets, playing Verdi tunes. But what does that mean? Does it mean these operas should still be vital now, because they were so popular when they were new? Does it mean that popular music now might turn out to be as great--and long-lasting--as Verdi's operas? It's hard to know, since neither possibility is ever mentioned. The popularity of Verdi, in his day, becomes what we might call an abstract fact, one that's savored by scholars--and thrust upon us in books and program notes--as if it meant something, though what it means is never quite explained. Like all the standard classical composers, Verdi now exists inside a classical-music bubble, where he never has to come in contact with real, contemporary life.

[And here, I think, I've circled back to the introduction, finding yet another way to get at classical music's problems. Some of that is helpful in a book, where--to stay grounded, to keep important ideas in play--you might want to restate things in different ways. But I think I'm also pawing at my subject, trying to find the way I most will want to make my case. There's one criticism, by the way, that I'll happily acknowledge, and that's that I need to quote examples of the classical music orthodoxy I get so busy criticizing. I could do this here with Verdi scholarship, or, alternatively--on another road I thought of taking here--with historical comments on composers' development, exegeses of how crucial (for instance) the Eroica Symphony was for Beethoven's emergence as a musical revolutionary. These analyses, so common in symphonic program notes, sit very oddly next to the untroubled, even comforting familiarity of the music. Which do we believe, the analysis or our experience? The answer, of course, is that we believe both. The historical analysis flatters us, while we listen to the Eroica, by telling us why the piece is so important, without ever asking us to disturb our unruffled enjoyment.]

This scholarly, detached, analytical view of classical music then gets translated into the formality of performances, the immobility and silence of the musicians and the audience, and the lack of communication, the lack of any explanation of what's really going on (which I've criticized so relentlessly in earlier episodes). All this turns many people off, especially since it runs directly against almost every trend in contemporary culture. How can people who (for example) listen to pop music that offers strong views about contemporary life, and about which listeners have really strong opinions--loving this band, hating that one--accept a classical music world in which they're told, repeatedly, in measured, unexcited tones, how great the great composers are?

Nor has the classical music world known (until very recently) how to reach out to anybody. So why should it be a surprise--as a consequence of everything I'm discussing here--that ticket sales have fallen off? Or that it's harder to raise money, or to generate other kinds of community support? And yes, new things are being done--classical music is being made more accessible, and classical music institutions are also doing business better, finally adopting the kind of marketing, financial analysis, and strategic planning that private industry knows how to use. But none of this is happening fast enough; the classical music world is only just beginning to address its problems.

And so we have a crisis--a serious one, if we look at the aging, shrinking audience. Classical music could become financially unsustainable. Which brings me to the first part of the book proper, after the introduction. In that first part, I'll look in detail at the dimensions of the crisis, giving as much data as possible on how bad it really is.

But before I do that, it's worthwhile--very valuable, in fact--to see where these problems came from. I've outlined one source, which was the growth (and spreading importance) of classical music scholarship in the decades after World War II. But where did that come from? In fact it's part of a longer history, which is worth expounding here, because it's not well known, and because it sheds a lot of light on our current situation, and even offers a new kind of hope. Besides, I've found that people are curious, once they start thinking about these things, to know how classical music got to be the way it is.

So now it's time to roll the clock back to an earlier time, when Bach and Handel, and then Haydn and Mozart, and of course many other fine composers, were all writing music, even though classical music didn't exist. Which of course sounds like a paradox. How can this be? As we see them now--to state the obvious--Bach, Handel, Haydn, and Mozart are central to classical music.

But what I'm saying is true. When Bach and Mozart were composing, the concept of classical music didn't exist. Almost all the music anyone performed was music of the present. Yes, music of the past was preserved in manuscript, and some people treasured it, but in the normal run of musical events, you'd never encounter it. There's a story about Mozart visiting Bach's church in Leipzig, and hearing the choir -- to honor him -- sing Bach's motet "Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied." Mozart, who often derided the music he heard when he traveled, loved the piece, and asked to see the handwritten manuscript, which arrived in separate piles of paper, one for each of the eight vocal parts the motet was written for. He spread these piles "all around him" (says an account quoted in Maynard Solomon's Mozart), "held in both of his hands, on his knees, and on the adjoining chairs." He studied the music, putting the eight parts together in his mind, learning the piece, which had been written by a man he'd barely even known about.

What was the music world like, without the burden of masterworks from the past? It was very lively. Music was written for an audience, and the audience reacted. Consider, for instance, the famous letter that Mozart wrote to his father after the premiere of his Paris symphony. He was just 22, and had left home without his father for the first time, living in Paris and starting his grownup musical career, with only his mother as chaperone. His father, worried that he wouldn't succeed, gave him advice: Find out what kind of music the Parisians like, and write it for them. But Mozart had bigger ideas; he thought he could write something more complex and more artistic, the kind of music he liked, but which still would be able to delight people who had simpler taste.

It's hard not to see a parallel with pop music here. Mozart, in a pop analogy, would be signed to a record label. The label would be like his father, wanting him to record songs that people will like. Many pop musicians hate that; they want to record their own kind of music. Mozart, though, would be a little different. He'd want to have it both ways. He'd think he could record his own kind of music, and still get his album on the charts. Which of course does happen, in the pop world. Or sometimes people have it both ways by recording a few tracks that the record company thinks might be hits, and then filling the rest of their album with music they're making for themselves.

So how did it work out for Mozart? Just wonderfully, he told his dad:

I was exceedingly anxious at rehearsal, for never in my life have I heard a worse performance. You can have no conception of how they bungled and scrambled through it the first time and the second. Really I was quite frightened and would have liked to rehearse it once more, but there was so much else to rehearse that there was no time left. Accordingly I went to bed, fear in my heart, discontent and anger in my mind. I had decided not to go to the concert at all next day; but it was a fine evening, and I finally resolved to go with the proviso that if things went as ill as at the rehearsal I would certainly make my way into the orchestra, snatch Herr Lahouse's instrument from his hand and conduct myself! [Lahouse was the principal violinist. In those days, nobody stood up in front of an orchestra to conduct. The principal violinist led the performance.]

I prayed God it might go well, dedicating all to His greater honor and glory, and ecce!--the symphony began! Raff [a singer who was Mozart's friend] stood near me, and in the midst of the first allegro [the first movement, at a quick tempo] came a passage I had known would please. The audience was quite carried away--there was a great outburst of applause. But, since I knew when I wrote it that it would make a sensation, I had brought it in again in the last--and then it came again, da capo! The andante [the second movement, at a slower tempo] also found favor, but particularly the last allegro [the last movement, which like the first was fast] because, having noticed that all last allegri here opened, like the first, with all instruments together and usually in unison, I began with two violins only, piano [softly] for eight bars only, then forte [loudly], so that at the piano (as I had expected) the audience said "Sh !" and when they heard the forte began at once to clap their hands. I was so happy that I went straight to the Palais Royale after the symphony, ate an ice, said the rosary I had vowed--and went home--for I always am and always will be happiest there, or else with some good honest German, who, if a bachelor, lives alone like a good Christian or, if married, loves his wife and brings up his children well!

I've always thought the last sentence really meant, "I didn't fool around with any women." But notice what happened--two things that don't fit common notions of classical music. First, Mozart wrote this piece to get a reaction from his audience. And, second, the audience reacted by applauding and crying "Sh!" right in the middle of the piece. Nowadays we think it's daring to applaud between movements, instead of waiting, as proper classical etiquette demands, for the end of the entire symphony. But Mozart's audience had no concept of musical etiquette at all. They clapped as soon as they heard something they liked.

The piece, as it happens, may not have been quite the success that Mozart describes. Notice that he says nothing about the second movement. After the performance, the man who asked him to write the symphony avoided him. When finally they talked, the impresario had a complaint. The second movement had been too complicated. And what did Mozart--in this pre-classical music era--do? Like an obedient servant (or like a pop musician in trouble because his album didn't sell so well), he wrote another second movement, with what success we don't know.

As we'll see in the next episode (which goes online May 29), this incident wasn't even remotely atypical. Audiences in the past applauded whenever they felt like it, interrupting the music on occasion even well into the 19th century. And it gets crazier. The audience, when it wasn't applauding, didn't listen to the music silently. People would talk, eat, and walk around. The musicians could be informal, too. They'd change the music the composers wrote. And on one stunning occasion, something happened that's just about inconceivable today. A key section of one of Mozart's greatest operas was actually improvised at its first performance.

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