Lend an ear PHILIP KENNICOTT The output of Franz Schmidt - and the composer's reputation -reveals much about 20th-century music and musical tastes

How I hate this game. A friend spins a mystery disc and fires off the dreaded question: who is the composer?

Schmidt, I answer. Franz Schmidt, the sadly still obscure composer of Austro-Hungarian lineage who clashed with Mahler, flirted (naively, foolishly) with the Nazis and died before establishing much of a reputation outside his native realms. But the last "t" of Schmidt has barely passed my teeth when I am not quite so certain of my answer.

Wrong! It's Björk. Drat. This is no minor mistake, like upgrading good Clementi to bad Beethoven, or misplacing an opus number here or there. This is a colossal mistake, the kind that destroys credibility. Serious music critics do not mistake Björk for Schmidt.

Had I listened another three seconds - to the soundtrack Björk wrote for Matthew Barney's agonisingly pretentious film Drawing Restraint 9—I would not have said Schmidt. And perhaps my error has something to do with a sudden and pleasing reanimation of my early love for Schmidt. Which has something to do with the arrival of a fine new recording, on Chandos, of Schmidt's best-known work, the oratorio Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln.

It has had no lack of heavyweight champions. Mitropoulos recorded it in the late 1950s and Austrians of different generations seem happy to carry the banner. It is an appealing work, even if the subject matter - a setting of passages from the Book of Revelations - isn't sprightly stuff. Schmidt, who toiled for years as a cellist under the baton of Mahler, is a masterful orchestrator and was unencumbered by any need to write fashionably up-to-date music. You hear asides and feints in the direction of wayward tonality but Schmidt is too much of a grand narrative poet in his music to risk losing his audience.

It is the sort of music of which we might have a great deal more if the 20th century had been a friendlier place. If the First World War hadn't shattered the old verities, if the Second World War hadn't made writing tone-poems after Auschwitz seem so distasteful to so many young composers. Schmidt was said to be terribly naive, politically, by contemporaries who knew him well. That doesn't excuse giving the Nazi salute at a performance, but it does explain, perhaps, the naiveté that makes his music so appealing. The vigour of Schmidt's writing may suggest, to some, the kind of bloodlust one hears in Orff with all its eerie political foreshadowings. But when it comes to the politics of music, circa 1937, Schmidt takes no strong positions.

He was, to his time, rather like some of our younger composers who mix and match, borrow and steal, recycle and refashion anything at hand, are to our own eclectic age. The organ, for which he wrote prolifically, crops up again and again in his music, so much so that I often imagine Schmidt's music as the adult transcriptions of what a boy stuck in 'It is the sort of music of which we might have more if the 20th century had been a friendlier place' church, by turns bored and rapt, might conjure in his musical fancy. It certainly looms large in the oratorio, giving the piece an old-fashioned grandeur, keeping its orchestral grotesquerie grounded in the basic religious spirit of the text.

I first discovered Schmidt 20 years ago when Capriccio released a recording of his best opera, Notre Dame. Neither Gwyneth Jones nor James King, the lead soloists, were making the most beautiful noises at the time, but the orchestra (the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra) sounded glorious, especially when Schmidt abandons dialogue for an old-fashioned orgy of love music. Despite the singing, I've held on to that recording for two decades. I play it rarely, but have been re-enchanted by it again lately.

Over the years, the Schmidt has poured in. Neeme Järvi recorded all four symphonies. The organ music, performed by Andreas Juffinger, has been covered, though a little bit goes a long way. Welser-Möst also gave us a reading of the Fourth Symphony. Of the available recordings of the oratorio, I like the current one, but I prefer the cast assembled by Welser-Möst.

It's odd that the canon of the 20th century has proven so impermeable. We rummage thoroughly through the 17th and 18th centuries, discovering new (to us) Kleinmeisters. Audiences eat it up. There's no shame in being an obscure composer of five-voice Masses or Baroque instrumental concertos. Bring it on. But not so with our nearer masters of middling talent And it is a curious process whereby we learn to love the composers who worked on the wrong side of history. It is, essentially, a process of forgiveness.

When I first discovered Schmidt, I liked his music in spite of myself. Today, I like it without any profound reservations. He has become, it seems, harmless. It is the first sign of history embracing an artist, of contentions and debates about what music should do yielding to a more charitable pleasure in what it sounds like.