Image courtesy of Miguel Alcântara via Unsplash.

It is rare for the modern world to become interested in classical music. There are, of course, many enthusiasts of the genre, but it generally does not capture the attention of our fast-moving zeitgeist.

However, in the past two weeks, this has all, momentarily, changed. With the discovery of a previously lost composition by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, people have lined up for short concerts across the world and social media has been seemingly set aflame. (Many creators remarked that the world has seen “new” Mozart music before the release of a certain planned movie, game, or book.)

Many proponents of classical music are thrilled, not just because of the interesting nature of the discovery, but because of the media attention that it has garnered and the possibility that more people will join the community. But this new wave of excitement is not only a fleeting one; it points to a broader issue with the classical community and the way that it interacts with those it seeks to bring in.

There are several composers who are known by nearly everybody, and with good reason: Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, to name a few. They wrote some of the greatest masterpieces in all of music history. Yet their greatness, unfortunately overshadowing others who wrote wonderful music, exists at the expense of discovery.

Much attention has been given to the discovery of the new Mozart composition, a trio lasting no more than 15 minutes that he wrote when he was a young teenager. It cannot be denied that Mozart was a wunderkind, but his compositions at such an early age are not masterworks. The primary reason for the exceptional nature of these works is their existence in the first place; once that is established, nothing separates them from the wider oeuvre of the era.

When we devote time and attention toward the immature experiments of a figure who would become great, we rob those who are worthy of recognition. When there are countless recordings of the Mozart violin sonatas that he wrote at the age of seven, we sacrifice potential recordings of violin sonatas by wonderful composers from Biber to Reicha to Enescu (and if you don’t know the names of those composers, then you just proved my point). When recording companies insist on producing massive box sets of hundreds of Bach chorale settings, their funds and the choirs involved are diverted from recording wonderful polyphonic settings of Tallis, or Machaut, or Gesualdo. When every conductor of fame is expected to record a cycle of Beethoven symphonies, they are prevented from lending their expertise to the symphonies of Raff, or Krommer, or Nielsen and so on.

It is indisputable that the Beethoven symphonies are masterpieces, and they should garner more attention than the other composers listed above, but this attention cannot be skewed so heavily as to all but erase thousands of composers from existence.

There are, of course, composers who are not worthy of attention, but many are. Just to provide one example, Luigi Cherubini, a contemporary of Beethoven, was regarded by the latter as the greatest living composer of the time. This admiration was so great that Cherubini’s Requiem was played at Beethoven’s funeral. Yet there are fewer than 10 major recordings of this composition, and more than one hundred major recordings of the Mozart Requiem, which, it should be noted, he wrote less than half of before he died.

There is a certain hypocrisy inherent in the excitement over the newly discovered Mozart serenade when, at the same time, there is little passion for the hours upon hours of virtually unheard music which is, for the most part, more interesting and better-composed than the work of a 10-year-old, even if that boy happens to be Mozart.

If the classical community was truly serious about finding a wider audience, then instead of promoting an essentially mediocre piece as one of the greatest exponents of the genre, they would find unknown gems to entice those with different tastes. Instead of recording a few pieces many times each, they should record many pieces a few times each. Instead of digging deeper, they should dig wider.