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