R.J. Stove, who just completed a one-volume survey of the history of classical music, offers some intriguing observations of how government destroyed serious music:
Orwellian bureaucrats, answerable to no one, determined the nature of such new music as would gain official sanction. This was no mere charity for occasional deserving cases, such as the Danish and Finnish governments’ pensions for, respectively, [Carl] Nielsen and Sibelius. This was the establishment of veritable states within states. For the first time in Western history outside Axis dictatorships, music would be not something that a private potentate or a church wanted, nor something for which customers had exhibited the faintest enthusiasm, but rather, something that dragooned audiences would get given, good and hard.
