Young people, rites and the curious vice of telling Beethoven as if he needed to be saved.
by Marialuisa Veneziano
25 August 2026
For at least a century we announce the death of classical music with a punctuality that Beethoven would probably appreciate more than the metronome.
He dies because young people don't listen to her. He dies because Spotify exists. He dies for TikTok, for smartphones, for video games, for jeans at the theatre and perhaps also for the unfortunate that, taken from enthusiasm, applauds between the first and the second movement.
There is only one drawback.
As we prepare the funeral, the deceased continues stubbornly to breathe.
And he does not only breathe in the rooms frequented by the habitué. A report by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra has seen an increase in interest in orchestral experience and, above all, an audience less and less attributable to the single core of traditional melody: new listeners and "discoverers" are now a decisive part of the audience observed. In 2025, the Association of British Orchestras recorded almost triple events for children and young people compared to 2019. They are British data, therefore not automatically transferable to each country, but they tell a trend that deserves at least to make us pose the crown of flowers.
Maybe the question, then, is wrong.
Not: How can we save classical music?
But: what should we save her?
And above all, will it not be that, sometimes, should we save it from us?
BEFORE CONTINUING (click the arrow): Four notes. That's it? No. In Beethoven, those four notes become generative matter, conflict, return, formal destiny. Listen to the Fifth Attack without thinking about the monument. Think of an organism that begins to move.
The problem is not Beethoven. It's like we present Beethoven
Imagine a 14-year-old boy.
Let's tell him today he'll listen to Beethoven.
That's all right.
Then we start: "Ludwig van Beethoven, born in Bonn in 1770, exponent of passage between Classicism and Romanticism..."
At this point Beethoven has already died a second time.
And this is not about cirrhosis.
Because Beethoven is not interesting as "important composer born in Bonn". Beethoven is interesting because it takes a form that his time knew perfectly and begins to twist it from within. Because it transforms tiny cells into giant organisms. Because it creates expectations, denies them, exasperates them. Because his silence can have more violence than a very strong one.
The initial cell celeberrima of the Fifth should not be presented as four notes to be recognized at the television quiz.
It wasn't a monument. It was a problem.
IS a structural germ.
Four sounds that penetrate the movement, return, change, contaminate the speech. The reasoning principle becomes formal destiny.
This should be a boy.
Not the tag under the bust.
The same goes for Mozart. We turned it into a child with the wig that he composed while others played with trottolas, forgetting to tell us how dizzying the way in which, in his music, light and restless people often live the same line.
What about Bach? The terrible mistress of the escapes, what in school generally appears when the joy of the class begins to become suspect.
Yet one escape is one of the most exciting intellectual games that can be heard: one voice affirms an idea, another resumes it, another still contradicts it or flips it; everything changes and everything continues to remember the origin.
More than old music.
It's moving architecture.
Maybe young people don't reject classical music. They refuse the boredom with which, sometimes, we tell them.
And they'd even be right.
BOX IRONIC
Quick Manual to Kill Beethoven at School
Step 1.
Pronunciation with irreprensibly serious tone: "Ludwig van Beethoven, born in Bonn in 1770..."
Step 2.
Add now: "Composer of transition between Classicism and Romanticism. "
The boy, meanwhile, has already stopped breathing emotionally.
Step 3.
Reduce the Fifth Symphony to ta-ta-ta-taaa, as if one of the most shocking musical organisms in history was a jingle ante litteram.
Step 4.
Avoid saying that Beethoven burns the form from within, transforms four notes into destiny and succeeds in vibrating the conflict before even melody.
Final result.
Congratulations: you have not presented a revolutionary.
You've compiled his own cadastral card.
The museum we built around the sound
Then there is the rite.
Composite input. Lights down. Quiet.
Program on your knees.
Don't clap here.
Don't cough there.
Don't come in now.
Don't move.
Do not breathe too firmly during Mahler.
The new listener sometimes enters the room with the same serenity with which he faces a customs control: he knows he has done nothing, but he still fears that someone discovers something.
Yet our current concert galaxy does not descend unchanged from Olympus. The story of the performance recounts much more reactive audiences than today; in the Vienna of the early nineteenth century, for example, the listeners of chamber music could applaud among the movements and openly show their appreciation. Many behaviors we perceive today as "natural" are the result of a long historical process of formalization of listening.
This does not mean transforming Ninth in a country party with calls during the Adagio.
Silence is precious. Concentration is even more.
But we must distinguish respect from sorrow.
If a person entering the room for the first time applauds at the end of a movement because it has been overwhelmed, perhaps the most urgent problem is not to inform her that she has violated the Geneva Protocol of the philharmonic.
Maybe we could be happy that she was overwhelmed.
Then he'll learn.
Culture should teach its codes without using them as a barbed wire.
TikTok did not kill Mozart
There is another heresy that we have to give.
A young man can meet Chopin on TikTok.
He can meet Rachmaninov in the soundtrack of a video.
He can get to Mahler through a film, in Strauss through a television series, to a symphonic orchestra through the music of a video game.
So?
Do we have to seize his phone and immediately deliver him a 12 CD box with a critical booklet?
The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra noted that streaming and new media were radically changing the ways through which the audience meets orchestral music; at the same time, interest in traditional repertoire continued to live with soundtracks, crossovers and other formats.
Here's the point.
The entrance door must not necessarily resemble the room we enter.
If thirty seconds of Rachmaninov push someone to look for the whole concert, those thirty seconds did not desecrate Rachmaninov.
They opened a door.
The problem begins if we decide that there is nothing behind that door.
Candles, effects, location: poor Mozart, in the dark
And we get to immersive concerts.
A thousand candles. Churches, palaces, suggestive spaces. Atmosfera accurately photographable.
We could ask ourselves, with a certain perfidy:
did we really have to turn off the light to see that Mozart was still alive?
Maybe.
And it wouldn't necessarily be a tragedy.
If a different atmosphere leads to the room someone who would never come in, well come.
If a candle leads to a quartet, let it light.
As long as, at some point, one realizes that among all those candles there was also a quartet.
Because disclosure works when it leads to the work, not when it replaces it.
Accessibility does not mean impoverishment.
We don't have to make Beethoven easier.
We must make its complexity desirable.
This is a huge difference.
Classical music does not need well-educated young people
He needs curious young people.
Which is very different.
Maybe we should stop asking the new generations to become culturally old before we can enter a hall.
They must not immediately love the ritual.
They must be able to meet the music.
A boy may not know what a recapitulation is and feel physically the return of a theme.
Can ignore the meaning of support and feel the tension.
Can not know the word Agreed and realize that an interpreter held time right there, at that point, suddenly becoming a different phrase.
Knowledge will come.
In fact: it will come more easily if before the desire to know will be born.
We musicians sometimes make the mistake of reverse the order.
First we provide instructions.
Then, if time remains, the wonder.
We should do exactly the opposite.
Let him be hit
Let's still imagine that boy.
He first entered a theater.
Maybe he doesn't know when to applaud.
Maybe until ten minutes before he was watching the phone.
Perhaps Beethoven only knows him because someone made him listen to the beginning of the Fifth.
Then the orchestra accords.
The buzz slowly disappears.
The warden raises his arms.
And something very ancient happens.
Fifty, seventy, one hundred human beings breathe together and produce a sound that a moment earlier did not exist.
No algorithm can fully anticipate what will happen in that room: the weight of that first agreement, the tension of a silence, the tiny error, the risk, the vibration of the air.
And maybe that guy, for a few seconds, even forgets to check his phone.
Don't ask him right away if he knows the dish-shaped.
Let's not ask him if he understood thematic development.
Let us not correct it if at the end of the first movement he escapes an applause.
Let's at least give him time to get hit.
If he comes back, he'll learn everything.
Classical music is not a dead butterfly to be found in the teca of Western culture. He does not need our piety, nor to be embalmed, simplified or defended as an endangered species.
He went through revolutions, wars, social changes, gramophones, radio, cinema, television, rock, streaming and now algorithms.
He'll probably survive TikTok.
The question is whether we will be smart enough to allow the new generations to meet her without constantly putting ourselves in the middle.
Perhaps, out there, there is no generation unable to listen.
There is a generation waiting to understand why it should.
And when the answer comes from an orchestra, from a voice, from Beethoven's four jokes or from a very piano that will suddenly silence everything else, there will be no need to convince her.
He's already got it.
Classical music is not dying.
Please.
Let's remove only the black dress.
Classical music is not inherited: it meets. Tell us about your first meeting!
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