Alan Moss on G. B. Shaw:

>In the 19th century, Mendelssohn's choral music was extremely popular,
>especially in England.  But from the 1870s on music critics such as Shaw,
>in reaction against that popularity, began expressing adverse opinions
>about the music.

Perhaps he was an adverse opinion that had little to do with the music's
popularity.  I realize you like Mendelssohn.  So do I, as a matter of fact,
but my opinion is not Shaw's.  And, by the way, Shaw did admire much of
Mendelssohn.  I've read all three volumes of his criticism -- twice -- so
I could very substantiate this, if you like.

>Shaw was perhaps the prime mover in the development of this view of the
>music.  As he accurately said of himself, "He has no position or reputation
>which entitles him to the smallest consideration as a writer on music".
>But he found that writing articles on music enabled him to avoid the
>poverty to which his failed activities as a young writer would otherwise
>have condemned him.  Over the years he put forth a vast quantity of
>opinionated ramblings on musical subjects.

He also happened to know a great deal about the technical side of music
as a great deal of music, necessarily first-hand and often from score.
Finally, Shaw very seldom rambled.  His essays go right to the point.

>His style combined intellectual snobbery with an affable chattiness which
>implicitly invited the reader to share Shaw's amusement at the tastes and
>preferences of ordinary music-lovers.

Yeah, he was such a snob, he defended Verdi.

>His typical approach was to use generalised insult,
>rather than any specific grounds of criticism.  On one occasion he wrote
>"St Paul next Saturday.  I shall go expressly to abuse it"; on another,
>"For the musical critic in England, Mendelssohn is The Enemy".

And what did he write after that? You see, he also wrote "Mendelssohn ...
expressed himself in music with touching tenderness and refinement, and
sometimes with a nobility and pure fire." Of the Midsummer Night's Dream
music, he wrote, "how original, how exquisitely happy, how radiant with
pure light, absolutely without shadow!" Shaw happened not to like Romantic
oratorio, and he protested against the 19th-century deification of
Mendelssohn, as well as the 19th-century manner of oratorio performance.
His criticisms in this last regard show that not only did he know music, he
knew these scores from the inside out.

Shaw prided himself on writing a column on music even a deaf reader could
enjoy.  He also prided himself on seldom using musical type.  Because of
the nature of his work -- essentially, periodic journalism -- he never
collected his critical priniciples in a convenient place.  You do have
to read over several months of his work to glean what they are.

>At first there were powerful voices opposing this school of criticism,
>e.g.  Sir George Grove in the first edition of his Dictionary of Music and
>Musicians (1880).  But as the anti-Mendelssohnians gained the ascendancy,
>performances of the oratorios began to become less frequent, till Sir
>Donald Tovey, writing in the 1920s, could note "Today St Paul has almost
>sunk below the horizon".  Thus the work was relegated to occasional
>performances by local choral societies.

As to Paulus, despite interesting moments, compared to Elijah, I myself
find it pretty small beer, and, again, I *like* Mendelssohn.

>It is sometimes asserted that Paulus "fell out of favour", but this is
>misleading.  It was all but killed off by the utterances of critics who
>thought it was their role in life to correct the taste of the musical
>public, and make them despise pieces that they loved.

This is way too simplistic.  First, no one has to agree with any critic.
Second, I doubt very many people outside of England read Shaw's music
criticism, and yet Mendelssohn's reputation still fell, even in Germany
(the Nazis helped).  So you're left with the problem of explaining the
fall of the stock throughout Europe and the US.

>The critics' views were then adopted by leading musical figures such as
>conductors.

Conductors champion plenty of composers.  Mahler is a great case in
point.  Critics and public (such as it was) didn't care for him.  People
like Mengelberg, Walter, Mitropoulos, Scherchen, and Horenstein performed
him anyway.  Mendelssohn didn't have a champion, and it seems to me it
had little to do with critical reputation.  But then, as I keep saying,
composers go in and out of notice all the time.  Mendelssohn has had
little boomlets since at least the Sixties.  I suspect he will have more.

>Critics in the later 19th and earlier 20th centuries tried to establish a
>framework in which particular works and composers were assigned an absolute
>musical value, which would then be, as it were, settled.  The critics'
>views tend therefore to come across as statements, not of opinion, but of
>absolute truth uttered by One Who Knows.

This is a straw man.  Not even I believe this.

>Unfortunately for the credibility of this project, these self-appointed
>arbiters of taste sometimes disagreed amongst themselves.  For instance,
>Sir Ernest Newman launched a merciless assault on the usually-revered
>Verdi.

"Usually-revered?" Among whom? Certainly, with the notable exception
of Shaw, not many other critics of the time.  Verdi's rise in critical
fortunes happened within my lifetime.  And, guess what? He was still
performed!  A lot!  Didn't seem to bother Toscanini or de Sabata a bit that
critics didn't think much of Verdi.  I doubt your scenario more and more.

One of the problems with this kind of anti-critic attack is that people
think a good critic is the one who's right most of the time and whose
judgment has held up.  This is a fairly naive view.  To my mind, a critic
is someone who formulates principles and who argues their application to
specific works.  Matthew Arnold, considered a great critic, didn't care
for Keats, Shelley, or Coleridge.  Shaw didn't care for, mainly, Brahms,
although even here he excepted certain works and admitted that, at least
there, Brahms was a "giant." It's certainly true Shaw hated Ein deutsches
Requiem.  However, he also beat the drum for late Beethoven, Mozart, Elgar,
Strauss, Schoenberg, and Wagner, in at least two cases succeeding in
changing the prevailing view.  He also anticipated HIP in his reviews of
Bach's sacred choral music.  I don't have to agree with Shaw down the line
to consider him a great music critic, perhaps one of the three best who
ever wrote.

>Sibelius said that Mendelssohn was, after Bach, the greatest master of
>counterpoint in the history of music.

Which is, of course, different from saying that he was greatest composer
after Bach.

>And Busoni regarded Mendelssohn as the finest of all composers.

Seems a bit extravagant, don't you think? I just don't happen to agree with
him and wonder why he claimed that for Mendelssohn.  By me, Brahms is a far
greater contrapuntalist.

>It is a measure of the undeservedly excessive degree of respect sometimes
>given to the opinions of critics that the utterances of a semi-musician
>like Shaw

A semi-musician? No, Shaw was a musician.  He could read scores at sight at
the piano.

>could have had more influence on the frequency with which Mendelssohn's
>oratorios have been performed than the opinions of these composers.

At the time Shaw wrote, Mendelssohn's oratorios were hard to avoid.  He
was, even posthumously, one of the most frequently performed composers in
England.  Don't forget that Shaw wrote regular music criticism for, as I
recall, less than three years.

>That is not to state that the composers' views are right and the critics
>are wrong - merely that in these matters different schools of opinion
>inevitably exist, and critics should avoid dogmatic rejections that imply
>that no intelligent person ought to think better of a work than the critics
>do.

Well, you're talking more about matters of style.  Shaw's primary job was
to be interesting.  Nothing like infuriating readers to spark interest,
as John Simon well knows.  Unlike Simon, however, Shaw actually had the
critical chops as well as expertise in his subject.

Steve Schwartz