Avante Garde

"Schoernberg envied Berg his success while Berg envied Schoernberg his failures." So wrote a friend of Berg's. He said he had to console Berg over his success - possibly his quite popular violin concerto (which I have not yet fathomed and feel I probably never will).
A lot of composers of the early part of the 20th century seemed to have worried themselves sick over whether they were avant garde enough. "Am I modern enough?" Bartock cried.
Then there was poor Rachmaninoff, concerned that his music was not going along with the trend towards atonality with his success weighing him down: "I cannot cast out the old way of writing and I cannot acquire the new. I have made intense efforts to feel the musical manner of today but it will not come to me."
Thank God it didn't, I say. I have just heard, for the umpteenth time his 2nd symphony and although it gushes with sentimentality and with a style of orchestration that borders on confusion with its overlapping ornamentation, it still strikes me as an emotionally powerful work.
A couple of days ago I heard a song by Korngold. At first, not knowing who the composer was, I thought it might have been Franz Lehar (yes, it was that good). I was most impressed. Yet Korngold, after early triumphs in Germany and Austria, couldn't get his works played, probably his semitic origins had something to do with it. So he shot off to the USA where he became one of the most popular composer of backgound music to films. He was immensely successful with films like Robin Hood and Captain Blood. Yet he yearned for success of a different kind; he yearned to be taken seriously by his avante garde peers. He never was. Yet his violin concerto, written for Jascha Heifetz is rather good.
Well, we can't all be Franz Lehars I suppose, happy to go along doing what you do best and to hell with the rest of the modernisers. But some were like Ligeti: "One simply cannot go back to tonality, it's not the way. We must find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avante garde. I am in a prison: one wall is the avante garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape."
His scrap metal thrown into a tin bucket is, I suppose, some kind of escape!