Fading Away....

[ihatepop]

Can anyone name any pieces that popularitity is fading away? In the past, it was like, wow, so cool, so amazing. But now, no one pays as much attention to it than before.

Can anyone name any?

[ihatepop]

By the way, is Fur Elise considered fading away??

[arbisley]

I think things that have been overdone, example, Mendelssohn's wedding march, although the rest of the incidental music for a midsummer night's dream is beautiful, just need to listen to the whole thing through, and it can come back as really beautiful.

I think fur elise can be faded if performad badly, like the "pathetique" sonata or moonlight, particularly the latter first movement, because it's easy to play.
Otherwise I think that any great music need not fade away, if not butchered to death!

[shun]

It always seemed to me that pieces don't nessesarily "fade away" but just kind of move on to a different crowd. The bigger the crowd the more popular it seems. This is why pieces that are easy to listen to seem popular when the "Great Works", which invariably are quite difficult to listen to, are popular among the experts.

I know there have been times when I've been in love with a particular piece, then lost interest, and later on met people who are just discovering it and falling in love with it themselves.

[arbisley]

I know there have been times when I've been in love with a particular piece, then lost interest, and later on met people who are just discovering it and falling in love with it themselves.

...which then makes you turn back to them, listen to them, and rediscover that you like them just as much as before. although of course your opinion can change, but it's true that pieces never really "vanish" from the "repertoire", besides, in certain countries certain composers are often listened to, when they aren't really in others.

[ramseytheii]

I recently read two diaries of Liszt students, an American named Lachmund and a German, I think, named Gollerich.  They both detail the pieces students brought to Liszt's masterclasses in the 1880's.  I can confidently say that over half, probably 75% of these pieces people hardly ever play today.  There are beethoven sonatas, of course, though it seems to be the same ones over and over; and works of Chopin; from time to time works of Bach; then the strangest selection of Liszt pieces that today are considered decidedly obscure, works of composers that hardly get any stage time like Thalberg and Tausig, or even von Bulow, works of other "fashionable" contemporary composers who I have never heard of before or since, and so on.  Conceptions of repertoire have definitely changed since those times!  And in addition, many of the advanced students were bringing thei rown compositions, like d'Albert, Friedheim, etc.  Nobody plays this stuff anymore, maybe for a good reason.  But it goes to show that no repertoire is carved in stone, and will change with the tastes of the generations.

Walter Ramsey