Pablo Massa at [log in to unmask] wrote:

>Stirling Newberry (about Mahler's 9th):
>
>> The third movement is neighbor to Strauss and Berlioz - the criticism of
>> the critics by making a joke of their sacred form - the fugue.
>
>When was the fugue the "sacred form" of XIX century critics?. It could be
>"sacred" to conservatoire professors, and only for pedagogic purposes
>(Bruckner is an example of this), but not indeed to musical critics.
>Criticism and academicism were not exactly the same thing. Hanslick's
>thoughts about musical coherence were far beyond the reverence of a single
>musical form.

Pablo Massa must forgive my indulgence in reading the forgotten, but
influential critics of their day.  It gives one a better sense of what the
establishment thought about what was going on, and to some extent what the
context of the times were.  Critics such as deFetis, Strong, Hanslick might
not get much recognition now, and most people might not be familiar with
the obsessional devotion to fugue stylism in academic training of the 19th
century, both in Russia and in France as well as Germany.

But it was so, and it was also so that most run of the mill critics, then
as now, became critics by being would be academics who could not get a job
in acdemia, or by being successful academics who could write accessibly.
Hence the chorous from newspapers did not consist of critics such as
Schumann - whose circulation for much of his run at editor was about the
size of this email list - or Hoffman, who was considered a strange bird -
or even Wolf.  But instead people such as deFetis. People who at worst
parroted the propoganda that they had been taught in school. Strike that,
people who, at worst, parroted what others taught in school - and at best
were those that taught it. One of the great lacunaue of Slomninsky's book
on musical invective is that he does not include names and biographies of
many of the critics. They are - and were intended in is hands - to be
nameless villians.  All the easier to identify them with his own enemies.
Doing some research one finds that they were generally products of whatever
schooling was to hand, and using those credentials gained a position
writing. It being an era where the vestiges of autocracy often censored
libretti and articles, a certain amount of adherence to political forms was
also necessary.

It is against this background of carping about counterpoint and fugues
that we must understand Berlioz Fugue in *Dream of a Witches Sabbath*,
Tchaikovski's fears that he could not write a symphony because he did not
care for his own fugues or fugue writing, Mahler's 9th, Wagner's comments
on composers who "girded themselves with JS Bach" and so on. We read the
winners of history, but the winners are responding to phantoms that must
also be given their due. And their due was that they were the deafening din
that had to be shoulded over.

At its most enlightened 19th century academicism was able to accomplish
what the late 18th century was not - the unification of baroque and
classical methods of composition - with the addition of unifying the
classical era's sonata style with its "brilliant style". We are talking
here of people such as Schumann, Brahms, Rimsky Korsekov, Sans Saens and
Faure. At its worst it had an obsessional devotion to the nit picking
details of the framework that was established to study these forms, and a
quasi monastic series of arguments over how to force fit various classical
symphonies into the mold - hence searches to find the "second theme" in
monothematic Haydn symphonies, arguments over how many new theme groups one
is "allowed" in the development and where the Fugue begins in the finale of
a Mozart symphony.

Stirling Newberry