Question

During the late eighteenth century, the demographic landscape of European musical consumption underwent a profound transformation. As the industrial revolution catalyzed the expansion of a mercantile middle class, a burgeoning market for domestic sheet music emerged. Prior to this shift, composers were primarily sustained by aristocratic patronage, which fostered highly complex, contrapuntal forms tailored for professional court ensembles. However, the new demographic of amateur bourgeois musicians lacked the technical proficiency required for such intricate polyphony. Consequently, music publishers began demanding compositions that were accessible to the domestic market. To ensure their commercial viability, composers intentionally curtailed the use of dense counterpoint in their published sonatas, opting instead for clearer melody-and-accompaniment textures that amateur pianists could readily perform. Interestingly, while this commercial imperative precipitated a broad simplification of harmonic structure in published works, composers simultaneously began appending exceptionally demanding cadenzas to their public concertos—a separate domain where they could continually reassert their virtuosic superiority without alienating the sheet music consumer.

Based on the passage, which of the following is identified as a direct consequence of the limited technical proficiency of the emerging bourgeois amateur musicians?