| Well, I think there was a dichotomy in his life in that he was in demand as a conductor, especially of opera - which he called the "treadmill", while not so much as a composer - he wanted to be accepted for his music, but he seemed to know that it wouldn't be accepted or understood until long after his death.
He wasn't the sort of person to compromise his ideals for popular acceptance - his symphonies progressively got more complex, more difficult to perform and more dissonant/"difficult". His music was appreciated by contemporaries like Schonberg, but wasn't performed much until the 1960s - half a century after his death. Now his symphonies are in the repertoire of all the great world orchestras.
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“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.”
Charles Mingus | 
