Classical Music's New Golden Age

From City Journal:

"Thanks to period-music evangelists, breathtaking virtuosity, and millions of listeners, the art form remains vibrant."

Anyone inclined to lament the state of classical music today should read Hector Berlioz’s Memoires. As the maverick French composer tours mid-nineteenth-century Europe conducting his revolutionary works, he encounters orchestras unable to play in tune and conductors who can’t read scores. A Paris premiere of a Berlioz cantata fizzles when a missed cue sets off a chain reaction of paralyzed silence throughout the entire sorry band. Most infuriating to this champion of artistic integrity, publishers and conductors routinely bastardize the scores of Mozart, Beethoven, and other titans, conforming them to their own allegedly superior musical understanding or to the narrow taste of the public.

Berlioz’s exuberant tales of musical triumph and defeat constitute the most captivating chronicle of artistic passion ever written. They also lead to the conclusion that, in many respects, we live in a golden age of classical music. Such an observation defies received wisdom, which seizes on every symphony budget deficit to herald classical music’s imminent demise. But this declinist perspective ignores the more significant reality of our time: never before has so much great music been available to so many people, performed at levels of artistry that would have astounded Berlioz and his peers. Students flock to conservatories and graduate with skills once possessed only by a few virtuosi. More people listen to classical music today, and more money gets spent on producing and disseminating it, than ever before. Respect for a composer’s intentions, for which Berlioz fought so heroically, is now an article of faith among musicians and publishers alike.

Ms. McDonald had me at Berlioz. I haven't read his Memoires, but I have read his letters closely enough to know nineteenth century France was just about the worst place to be a great composer. (Hence, his reliance on the feuilletons and overseas conducting.) This is magisterial and, at first blush, incontrovertibly argued. I keep wanting to find fault, but I have no quibbles. I will be rereading this piece with the attention it deserves. I can't shake the feeling I first read this elsewhere, in The Guardian perhaps. Weird...