Any competent historian would tell you that the crunch has been a long time coming. Symphony orchestras, evolving in the 1830s to meet subsistence needs of urban musicians and a rising demand for entertainment from a growing middle class, started out by playing music that was fresh and new. Leipzig, Vienna, Paris, Boston and New York led the way; Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak wrote the pops. Berlin gained an independent orchestra in 1882, Amsterdam in 1888, London in 1904, but these were small spring shoots before the big flowering.

The First World War precipitated a public need for musical comfort which, before radio and records, could be experienced only between the walls of a concert hall. The second war redoubled that urgency, audiences rushing to the ink-wet symphonies of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams as to an oracle. By 1950, London had five full-time symphony orchestras, Vienna four, Berlin eight.

Attendance crossed all social barriers. In Angel Pavement, a 1930 novel by J. B. Priestley, a London clerk, Mr Smeeth, takes himself to Queen's Hall on a whim. They are playing Brahms, the first symphony. It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself . 

What is significant about this response is that a lower-middle-class man with a very basic education feels that he has the wherewithal to understand great music on his own terms. By the time the big tune comes around in the finale, swelling his heart until it nearly chokes him, Smeeth is lifted out of his woes and endowed with hope for a better future. This perception of symphonic music as an improving grace was widespread. Two out of five Mass Observation diarists collected by Simon Garfield in Our Hidden Lives (Ebury Press, 2004) were regular concert attenders in the late 1940s. It was both "the done thing" in English cities to go to symphony concerts and a refuge from the otherwise inescapable gloom of postwar austerity.