Beethoven, Handel and Mozart always wrote with their audience in mind.
To be sure, Beethoven and Mozart were sometimes excessivley optomistic
about their public's imagination and advernturousness, but they always
built upon a musical language that was current and popular with the public.
They didn't have tenured positions.  If Beethoven, instead of opening up
the symphonic vocabulary with a bold but evolutionary step in the Eroica
symphony, had invented an alternate tonality or had taken a few basic
musical elements and repeated them ad nauseum, he would have ended up
selling pencils on the streets of Vienna (or whatever the indigent did in
those days.)

Richard, who invites you to visit his music, outdoors and other pages at
http://www.magi.com/~richard/