Was Peanuts the MTV of the print generation?
- By : Nat
- Category : Questions answered
Friend-of-the-AAUGH-blog Jim has this question:
I recall once reading an article that suggested that Beethoven’s popularity and place in the classical pantheon was far less prominent, before Schulz introduced Schroeder and his penchant for the composer. Being vastly ignorant of classical music myself, I couldn’t at the time know how much weight to give this argument and I haven’t heard it made since. Do you have any idea where this may have come from and whether it’s a widely held view? Any opinion about it, yourself?
Hmm… an interesting question. It doesn’t sound impossible; Peanuts certainly helped popularize some things. On the other hand, Beethoven feels to me like someone who was not unimportant. Schulz was reading multiple biographies of the man, which means, well, there were multiple biographies of the man. There was at least one biopic back then, as well. Still, might Peanuts have kicked Beethoven up a notch or two compared to the classical competition?
Rather than go to an opinion, I go to information. Thanks to Google Ngram, I can look at how much literature of the period discussed Beethoven, in comparison to some of the other classical greats, Bach and Brahms.
So we can see that Beethoven was not obscure, and was the most talked about of the composers for decades (allowing, of course, for the fact that this count will also include mentions of other people named Beethoven, Brahms, or Bach), but that he had begun a steep slide into second before Peanuts launched in 1950. And then there are signs of a relative resurgence starting in the mid-1950s and through the late 1960s… but then it fades through the 1970s (despite such popular culture invocations as the film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange and John Belushi’s playing Beethoven on NBC’s Saturday Night Live) and holds down in second place ever since (and this is despite the name being used for a successful series of films about a St. Bernard.)
So this isn’t absolute proof, but my best guess is that Peanuts provided a temporary boost to the flagging relative popularity of Beethoven, but the impact has long since faded.
