Until recently, I’d never heard of Joseph Martin Kraus. He was a music composer of the classical period – born in Germany and moved to Sweden in his early twenties. He lived a relatively short life of 36 years. I came across one of his symphonies accidentally, one in particular being inserted into an album I bought of someone I had heard of, Josef Haydn. I quickly fell for Kraus’ work – he’s one of my favourite composers now.
When I tell people like me, who don’t know much about classical music, about Kraus, I get blank stares – eyes that reply, “Who? Never heard of him”. When people think ‘classical music’ they think Mozart, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Strauss, Schumann, Schubert etc; people they’ve heard of because their work has been absorbed in the culture through visual media like movies and advertising. And, if they don’t know the names, all I have to do is say, “buh-buh-buh-buuuh” and people say, “Oh, that one? Yeah, I know that one.”
I find the idea that someone, 200 years from now, might connect with another human because of the art they made – whether that’s music, visual art, or something else – utterly romantic; a message to the future. When I listen to Kraus, I hear him saying to me, “See, you and I, separated by 200 years, are the same, you feel what I feel, don’t you?”
Maybe I don’t know enough about what’s ‘good’ in classical music, or what it is about Kraus’ work that keeps it relatively ‘hidden’ in our culture; is it because it’s not good? Is it because of the dominance of the others? Is it because we just repeat things in our culture that have worked before (like Monopoly, which is a terrible game)? Or is it for a myriad of other political, social, economic or technological reasons?
Not every work of every artist is a ‘keeper’, but the idea that there have been billions of artists before me, all with various messages to share, and to know that most of them have been destroyed by the passage of time makes me grieve. At the same time, it also fills me with wonder, that any art could survive at all so that future inhabitants may benefit.
It’s not likely that, in 200 years, someone somewhere will be reading my writing or looking at something I drew but I can see how, for some, it would feel like a chance at immortality.
Me? I’m assuming it all ends in about 50 years at best, so I’ll make the most of it now and let the future tell whatever story it wants to; about Kraus, Mozart, or otherwise.