Didrik Schiele:

>Seemingly it is popular among a (rather large) fraction of people who take
>interest in contemporary music and want it to be "beautiful" a.k.a "sweet"

It was immensely popular for a time among a very large group of people,
most of whom had no interest in classical music but who did in fact find
this work beautiful, I assume.  (It isn't "sweet," but poignant.) One of
the most interesting things about this phenomenon is the enormous extension
of the usual time-frame/attention-span that audiences for popular works of
music normally exhibit.

Jim Tobin