People were sniffy about him in his lifetime - he once said something along the lines of "Apparently being able to write tunes is considered old-fashioned these days" (this was when he was a very old man and in the era when lots of very young men - Stockhausen, Goehr, Birtwistle and all the rest of that sort of pretentious, unlistenable wankery - were writing music that almost nobody ever listened to and even fewer genuinely liked).
I'm dredging the memory here but that was the essence of it.
