David Cozy replied to Jocelyn Wang:

>Name names please. Could we have some examples of critics "who think
>and act as though their hyperbole constitues evidence that they are more
>important than they actually are."

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.  They and their twentieth-century successors expressed
criticisms on grounds that varied, but which tended to include the ideas
that the music was unadventurous and that it was somehow not in good taste.

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.  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.

He expressed himself disdainfully on the music of many composers, including
some famous ones (eg Schubert, Brahms and Liszt).  But his real bete noir
was Mendelssohn.  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".

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.

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.  The critics' views
were then adopted by leading musical figures such as conductors.  Thus, for
reasons wholly unconnected with box-office success or failure, Paulus - a
work with a clearly successful track-record with audiences - disappeared
from concert schedules.  As a result, few in the present-day concert-going
public know that the work exists.

Incidentally, Paulus is not alone in this.  In the history of music there
have been many works that were popular whilst they were performed, but
which ceased to be performed so that now few know that they exist.

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.  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.

The critics' views were also sometimes strikingly at variance with those
uttered by composers.  For example, despite its treatment at the hands
of the critics, Mendelssohn's choral music has always had admirers among
composers.  Schumann credited Paulus with musical mastery, a nobility of
song, a marriage of words and music and a perfectly-formed style.  Berlioz
wrote of Elijah "How wonderfully great and beautiful it is" and "It is
magnificently great and of an indescribable harmonic richness".  Sibelius
said that Mendelssohn was, after Bach, the greatest master of counterpoint
in the history of music.  And Busoni regarded Mendelssohn as the finest of
all composers.

It is a measure of the undeservedly excessive degree of respect sometimes
given to the opinions of critics that the utterances of a quasi-musician
like Shaw could have had more influence on the frequency with which
Mendelssohn's oratorios have been performed than the opinions of these
composers.  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.

Alan Moss