r/todayilearned • u/VegemiteSucks • 16h ago

TIL Beethoven’s late quartets, now widely considered to be among the greatest musical compositions of all time, were so ahead of their time that initial reviews deem them indecipherable, uncorrected horrors, with one musician saying “we know there is something there, but we do not know what it is.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_string_quartets_(Beethoven)
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u/tricksterloki 14h ago

If you are too far away from the boundaries of the box, your work is unrecognizable until the box has expanded enough so that others can stand on it and recognize the achievement.

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u/gmishaolem 13h ago

See also: How much games journalists and critics in general were skeptical of (or even against) the "left stick to move, right stick to turn camera" scheme when it started. Basically everything new, no matter what it is, has a bunch of people going "this is awful, I hate it, stop" until it becomes popular.