What a sadly constricted view of the musical world my friend Simon Heffer reflects! In a column published in The Daily Telegraph on Saturday, he said he has no wish to hear any music written before 1800, so with a flick of his highly cultured hand he dismissed not only Bach and Mozart but also ignored all those who came before them, the composers who created the Western tradition that he values so highly. I don’t think Simon would dismiss the art and architecture of the past so lightly. 

It seems to me that Simon is stuck in a far-off past where progress was king. I read books that held this belief when I was a child, telling us that as music got louder, bigger, and faster our connection to the works of the past became more and more remote. Yet even then, singing the wonderful music of the 16th-century composer William Byrd in my church choir, I knew that was nonsense. This music spoke just as directly and powerfully to me as that of later centuries. And that instinct of deep connection with the past was a growing feeling. Simon’s god among 20th-century composers, Ralph Vaughan Williams, was eternally interested in old music, from folk songs to church music: he based his famous Fantasia on a theme by the English Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis. For him, great music grew from its past.  

There may well have been a time when those brought up on heavy, lugubrious performances of Bach might have found him tedious – Simon had one ally in the journalist Bernard Levin, who claimed that everything Bach wrote sounded as if it were written in the minor key. When Bach performances plodded dully, that was an understandable mistake. And, when Mozart was performed in a dainty and distant manner, and only programmed as a prelude to later, more weighty music, you could see why pianist Glenn Gould rejected the composer as superficial. 

But when you hear what Mozart made of the everyday form of the Divertimento, in his E flat Trio (peerlessly examined by Roger Parker in last week’s Building a Library on BBC Radio 3), or what Bach created from a common form of the day in his sublime Goldberg Variations, you realise that both these great composers transcend the often mundane circumstances for which their music was written. In this ability to speak across the centuries, Bach and Mozart are by any measure two of the greatest geniuses of the Western tradition.

Simon overlooks two critical things that have happened which have transformed the way we listen to music in recent years. The first is that a century of recording, broadcasting and now streaming services has made an infinite wealth of music immediately available to us, meaning we are no longer bound to feel that the music of today is more powerful than the music of many centuries ago. And there are wonderful discoveries to be made, if we allow ourselves to be surprised. I challenge Simon to remain unmoved by a great performance of, say, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas with its searing culmination in Dido’s lament.