I'd like to thank Alan Moss for the thoughtful and well-written essay my
rather slight post elicited.  In actually naming a critic and discussing
specific work of that critic rather than chastising some vague entity
called THE CRITICS, he has himself provided a model of what good criticism
looks like.

A few comments:

>[Alan quotes Shaw] "For the musical critic in England, Mendelssohn
>is The Enemy".

It's interesting that rather than saying simply that Mendelssohn is the
enemy, he qualifies his statement by saying "for the musical critic in
England." This suggests that what motivates Shaw's criticism is less
Mendelssohn's music than some aspect of contemporary English musical life.
I don't know enough about the musical life of the period to know, however,
if that is indeed the case.  Is it?

>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.

This suggests that in Shaw's day critics had quite a bit more power than
they do now.

>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.

Is it the case that "box-office success" is necessarily a better criterion
than critical assessment?

>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.

Are we drifting here toward the "received canon" thread?

>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.

Of course any critic or non-critic's judgement about a piece of music
*is* an opinion even if they don't make that obvious by prefacing it
with "I believe" or "In my opinion" or some such locution.  Many critics
choose not to use phrases such as those simply because it makes for weaker
writing.  (I advise the students to whom I teach expository writing to
avoid that sort of hedging.) What's important, though, is less the opinion
than how well or poorly it is supported.

A critic's ultimate judgement about a work--thumbs up or thumbs down--is
(if the criticism's any good) most often the least interesting part of
the piece of writing in which it appears.  What--in my opinion--is usually
the most interesting part of good criticism is the facts with which a
critic supports her judgement, the careful analysis of the work, the
comparisons the critic makes with other works, the discussion of the
social/cultural/political background out of which the work being criticized
grew, the place the work occupies in the composer's oeuvre.

Thus it often matters not a whit in the end whether one agrees with a
critic's judgement; one can learn even when one does not concur.

>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 fact that critics can and do (violently and vehemently sometimes)
disagree strikes me as a strength of the critical endeavor and also
evidence against some unified group called THE CRITICS.

>The critics' views were also sometimes strikingly at variance with those
>uttered by composers.

I don't see any particular reason to privilege composers' opinions of
either their own or other composers' work.  It's probably worth noting,
though, that when they venture opinions, if they offer arguments in support
of those opinions, they have taken off their composer-hats and replaced it
with a critic-caps.

>It is a measure of the undeservedly excessive degree of respect sometimes
>given to the opinions of critics

Are their any music critics around now who get this degree of respect
(leaving to one side the question of whether that respect is deserved)?

>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.

of course I agree with you that no critic should base her judgements
on a dogma of any sort ("New music bad," "Period instruments bad,"
"Mendelssohn bad").  I don't, however, think it's necessarily wrong for
a critic to reject a work, even to reject it forcefully.  That critic
makes her judgement and then supports it as best she is able.  She
publishes her judgement and supporting arguments:  she gives it her best
shot.  Then other critics can come along and, should they disagree with
her conclusions, they try to demonstrate where she is mistaken, what she
has missed, etc..  But again, the thumbs-up or thumbs-down aspect is really
the least interesting part of criticism.  The fun's in the ongoing
conversation.

Perhaps the problem with Shaw (whose music criticism I have not read) is
simply that he wrote too well.  Perhaps his command of rhetoric was so
overwhelming that other critics had a hard time responding to him?

Anyway, thanks again, Alan, for your stimulating post.

David Cozy
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