Steve Schwartz wrote, in the same paragraph, on (among others) G B Shaw as
critic, and Mendelssohn:
>Shaw showed that people under the influence of High Romanticism had
>forgotten how to listen to an earlier idiom. Mendelssohn in effect
>performed an act of criticism when he revived Bach's St. Matthew Passion.
>I'd say that counts as significant ..... Criticism of any art normally
>doesn't appear in US newspapers. The difference is that most of the time
>nothing is argued, merely asserted. One doesn't find support for the
>proposition. On the other hand, try reading the criticism of Shaw or
>Newman or Schumann or Debussy.
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 (quite 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, eg 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 say "Today 'St Paul' has almost sunk below the horizon". Thus the work was relegated to occasional performances by local choral societies, till revived recently by the sterling work of Richard Hickox, who conducted a performance this summer at the London Proms with the combined forces of the Houston and London Symphony Choruses.
It is sometimes asserted that 'Paulus' "fell out of favour", but this is
misleading. It was (nearly) 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. 'Paulus' is, of course, not alone in
this.
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 absurdly-excessive degree of respect given to the
opinions of critics in general that the utterances of a semi-musician like
Shaw could have had more influence on the frequency with which works such
as 'Paulus' have been performed than those of these composers. But I don't
wish to say that the composers' views are, in an absolute sense, more
"right" than those of the critics - merely that in these matters different
schools of opinion inevitably exist, and critics (and others) should avoid
dogmatic rejections that imply that no intelligent person ought to think
better of a work than they do.
In an era when science has been so prominent, it might have occurred to the
critics that scientific proof of the rightness of an artistic preference is
impossible, so their own views can never be definitively established as
"right". And if a work to which many people enthusiastically respond
ceases to be performed, how does anyone gain from that?
Alan Moss
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