E-Mail This Article to a Friend Generations The remembrance of music past BY DAVID WEININGER

Because of its reputation as a museum filled with the greatest hits of the past, classical music exudes a public image not just of stability but of flat-out intransience. Once a piece is in, it can look forward to a long life of repetition. In reality, of course, classical music is as subject to changing flavors and fashions as any art form.

Just compare BSO director James Levine’s first 2004 concert with 2005’s season opener. Last year it was Mahler’s massive, world-embracing Eighth Symphony. This year, it’s a French concert whose centerpiece is Saint-Saëns’s Symphony No. 3, which will show off Symphony Hall’s recently renovated organ.

And think about the two composers’ fortunes over the past 40 years. Mahler, once neglected, is ubiquitous; his symphonies get played almost as often as Beethoven’s. Even people who don’t get classical music dig Mahler. And Saint-Saëns? His music is almost invisible — or, more precisely, inaudible. It was never as popular as Mahler’s is now, but I’m told that in the ’60s few seasons went by in New York without the "Organ" symphony’s showing up on some bill. Now its appearance seems almost a novelty. Other French composers of Saint-Saëns’s time — Franck and Chausson are two — have suffered the same fate.

One explanation is what you could call the Alan Freed factor: a lot of what sounds good to one age bracket sounds square to the next. To many in my parents’ generation, the Saint-Saëns remains a touchstone of the 19th century. To me, it’s mostly a lumbering mass of sound.

But I suspect that the deeper reason has to do with our historical consciousness. At least since Wagner, we’ve tended to valorize those works that look forward. Innovation beats conservatism, no matter how skilled the creator. The Saint-Saëns doesn’t speak to us not because it isn’t a good piece but because it didn’t lead anywhere.

For an equally revealing contrast, put the "Organ" Symphony next to Debussy’s Jeux, which is also on the BSO program. Premiered two weeks before Le sacre du printemps in 1913, this 17-minute ballet score is in its quiet way as revolutionary as its more famous Russian counterpart. Nothing better illustrates Debussy’s shape-shifting modernism than Jeux’s ambiguous harmony, rapidly changing surfaces, and mysterious voice. There’s a plausible argument that no French composer has been as influential.

But perhaps in 40 years our ears will have shifted again, Debussy will be forgotten, and Messiaen will seem old guard. And music once thought essential will be left behind en route to another new path.

James Levine + Boston Symphony Orchestra | Berlioz’s Overture du corsaire + Debussy’s Jeux + Milhaud’s Le bœuf sur le toit + Saint-Saëns’s Symphony No. 3 | Sept 30 @ 6:30 pm | gala opening $75-$2500 | Oct 1 @ 8 pm | subscription concert $29-108 | 888.266.1200