I second Stirling's wonderful post.  However, I want to focus on just a
little piece of it:

>That 12 tone music was more difficult was considered by Schoenberg as a
>virtue of the music - he stated that composers were making more difficult
>music for the most demanding of music lovers.

I think this simplifies Schoenberg.  I believe he wanted it both ways.
He wanted the love of both connoisseurs and, eventually, the general
classical-music public.  In short, he wanted to be Bach, Mozart, Beethoven,
Wagner, and (now) Mahler.  Oscar Levant tells a story about Schoenberg's
Violin Concerto.  Schoenberg was unhappy over the premiere performance and
the initial critical reception.  Levant replied that the music was so
complicated, who could play it.  Schoenberg replied, "In a hundred years,
everybody."

Now comes the sermon (and this isn't a criticism of Stirling's post, but
an almost-literal tangent to it): Whether or not Schoenberg ever breaks
through - and there are lots of reasons why he wouldn't, not all of them
his own doing - I think is beside the point.  There is indeed music that
has its adherents - Reger, Alkan, Josquin, Ockeghem, Obrecht, Satie,
Koechlin, Thomson, Shapero, Piston, Fine, Holmboe, Schmidt - which seems
the property of a very small group.  Yet, it doesn't occur to anyone -
at least I haven't heard it here - to denigrate this work as Snobmusik.
General recognition is as much a matter of luck as anything else, and
people seem to understand this with respect to all music except what's
generally called "atonal." I have yet to figure out why aesthetically this
music constitutes a special case - why people should get so much hotter
over this than over other music whose appeal is equally limited.

Steve Schwartz