being a composer in the early twentieth century. For him, the last
unequivocally great composer was Schubert, though he had a little time
for Bruckner, Brahms and (temporarily) Mahler, and at least recognized
Wagner and Richard Strauss as “full-blooded musicians” even though he
disliked the music. His involvement with Schoenberg’s circle seems to
have been mostly one of putting his own conservatism to the test, and by
the end of the process he was confirmed in it and remained so till the
end of his life. In 1991 he characterized the twentieth century as one of
a “terrible decline in art” and explained this in terms of artists’ attitudes:
“It is because all artists hear what historicists predict about the future
and then, instead of trying to create good work, they concentrate on
becoming leaders for the future. They are too much interested in them-
selves.. .”^5
Such attitudes were, according to Popper, apparent in the Society for
Private Musical Performances which had, he says, some of the charac-
teristics of a clique, political pressure group, or church faction that are
typical of any avant-garde. He traced the idea of avant-gardism in music
to Wagner, and noted that Schoenberg and his contemporaries started as
Wagnerians for whom the crucial problem was what we might call the
Wagner problem. He relates how one of Schoenberg’s circle (he doesn’t
say who) described their main problem as “How can we supersede
Wagner?” This problem, says Popper, turned into: “How can we super-
sede the remnants of Wagner in ourselves?” and eventually “How can we
remain ahead of everybody else, and even constantly supersede our-
selves?”^6 Thus for Popper, a dislike of Wagner and skepticism about the
avant-garde sat very comfortably together.- Popper’s Three Theories about Music
Popper’s experience of the Viennese avant-garde seems to be intimately
bound up with three theories which he formulated about art in general
and music in particular in these early years. One of these is precisely a
criticism of progressivism or avant-gardism in art: that is, of the view
that the artist’s job is to make artistic progress, to innovate, and above all
to be ahead of his time. These aims are the hallmarks of modernism and
avant-gardism and they are, Popper says, badly misguided.
Popper has two arguments on this. First is the historical evidence
that, as a matter of fact, great composers have almost always been appre-
ciated in their own lifetimes. They may not always have been success-
ful—Schubert could be such a case—but in art as in life, luck is as or
more important to success than merit. Schubert was appreciated by
100 Jonathan Le Cocq