Discussion Groups / English Usage / September 2009

No, I don't think so.  The first phrase means "if B-5 had never been
played by an orchestra".  The conditional "were" makes it sound like it
might have been played by some other group.

Depends on what he means, and I'm not sure. Is it, "If Beethoven's Fifth
were never to be played again by an orchestra, and all copies were
destroyed by fire, we could still say the the work exists"?

Did he forgot to discuss recordings, or did that come next?

Is he trying to make a point like, say,  no one remembers nor can
reconstruct the triumphal march of some ancient Egyptian pharaoh? Memory
and written symbols (and sound-making technology) ultimately fail. Or is
he arguing the opposite? It "exists" in some nebulous way, even with the
lack of all evidence?

But anyway, your question about "were" -- no, so far I don't think this
is one of those simple cases where "was" could be "were."

Burgess's grammar is questionable here. The "was" is a poor choice of
tense.  If he had intended to use a hypothetical here, he should have
written "had never been played", which is more explicitly subjunctive.

Remark: older references say that the "conditional mood" is the right
thing to use in "if" clauses. Nowadays that mood doesn't exist, and we
are confined to a choice of two moods: indicative or subjunctive. In
practice it doesn't matter, because every verb - including even the
higher irregular "to be" - has the same form in the conditional and
subjunctive moods. Nevertheless I would prefer to restore the old
multiple-mood model. Maybe it doesn't make a difference in terms of
conjugation, but we who utter those sentences know what mood we're in
when we say something.