ABSTRACT
The process of listening to music differs considerably among musicians and non-musicians. People who don’t know anything about music enjoy listening to their favorite symphonies and operas. And it is the people, not the professional musicians, who determine the popularity of this or that classical work. This seems paradoxical. How can a person who does not know anything about music be a judge of which symphony is beautiful and which is not? But this paradox is peculiar not only to the art of music, but to literature and painting as well. Musical cemeteries are full of crosses over the graves of composers who were once professionally regarded as equal to the best of their period, but who are doomed by the voice of the people to remain in the dark shadows of musical death forever. Examples are many. Raff and Rheinberger were regarded as the equals of Brahms, but they died, and Brahms continued to live. Schubert had a contemporary named Norbert Burgmuller, who died at the age of twenty-six, and who left an unfinished symphony in the same key of B minor as Schubert’s famous work. Burgmuller’s unfinished symphony had numerous performances, while Schubert’s was not even discovered until some thirty years after his death. The judgment of the people decided in favor of Schubert.
