Mitchell, Donald.  Cradles of the New: Writings on Music 1951-1991.
Selected by Christopher Palmer, Mervyn Cooke, ed.  London: Faber and
Faber.  1995.  506 pp.  ISBN: 0-571-17424-8.

The critic Donald Mitchell has fought the good fight for such composers as
Mahler, Reger, Schoenberg, and Britten, at a time when all those composers
needed champions.  Indeed, Reger and Schoenberg still need them.  In doing
so, he demonstrated a knowledge of the scores one rarely encounters in the
newspaper squibs that still pass for music criticism.  Most famously, I
suppose, he found a wrong note in the published score of Mahler's Das Lied
von der Erde and traced it back to a copying mistake in the composer's
autograph.  For those of you who believe that the marks in a composer's
score represent the final word on the composer's intent, I invite you to
read Mitchell's "Mahler's Abschied: A Wrong Note Righted," pp.  181-186.
Lord help the unwitting writer who went up against Mitchell, whose main
gambit was to bury the opposition in a truckload of details.  In short, the
opposition had to argue at a level that demonstrated command of the score,
or even of several scores.

To Mitchell we owe, among other things, our present appreciation of
Britten's operas - particularly Albert Herring, Billy Budd, Turn of the
Screw, Owen Wingrave, and the last masterpiece, Death in Venice.  Mitchell
also is the first, as far as I know, to point out the centrality to
Britten's late work of The Prince of the Pagodas, usually regarded - if
at all - as a divertissement.  Indeed, for their services to the composer,
Britten rewarded Mitchell and his companion-in-battle Hans Keller (who
helped organize the first major symposium in 1952 on Britten's work to
that date) by in effect creating Faber Music for them and transferring his
scores from Boosey & Hawkes to Faber.  Not a bad foundation for a business.

I don't think there's any question - leaving the justness of their
individual conclusions aside for the moment - that Mitchell and Keller
raised the standard of talk and writing about music in Britain.  They were
both of them fearless, knowledgeable, and (very important) entertaining
writers.  However, they had their limits.  Keller cheerfully admitted his
- a blind spot for Gallic culture generally and Debussy and Stravinsky (the
non-serial works) in particular.  However, he also for the most part
refrained from writing about them.  He didn't "get" them, and he knew it.
Revealing more than he probably knows, Mitchell took Keller to gentle task
over this: duty requires a critic to come to grips with the major figures
of the era, despite his feelings.  This notion led to an inept series of
essays by Mitchell on Vaughan Williams and to a serious misreading of
Elgar.  This doesn't mean that one can't say something penetrating about
a composer one has no sympathy for, but one must take special care not
to mistake taste for truth.

I want to make it clear I'm not thumping Mitchell for his dislike of
Vaughan Williams's music or even for his astonishing pronouncement of him
as a "minor" figure.  As Mitchell himself notoriously remarked of Ernest
Newman, he is entitled to his wrong opinion.  However, to use Mitchell's
own distinction, the reader mustn't forgive an unsound conclusion, and
Mitchell's "Vaughan Williams" (pp. 87-97) is filled with stuff that not
only just isn't so but, worse, unmusical.  Seamus Heaney, the Irish Nobel
laureate, once said of his view of Yeats, "We must all kill our fathers."
That, it seems to me, is what Mitchell acts out.

In short, Mitchell makes Vaughan Williams the scapegoat of what he views
as the parochialism of English musical climate between the wars.  In a
certain way, it makes sense to do this, because Vaughan Williams is the
major figure in British music between the wars, simply from the standpoint
of career alone.  However, I believe that Mitchell has conflated the
composer's music with those who wrote about the music at the time.
Reading Michael Kennedy's standard The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams
it repeatedly struck me - even or especially in the positive reviews -
how little real criticism there is in the contemporary writing.  I agree
that much of the criticism between the wars was indeed insular - like the
English complaining about the garlic in French food - but that insularity
is certainly not shared by Vaughan Williams.  In fact, he and Havergal
Brian probably knew as much about the European music scene as anyone.
The big strike against him is that he disliked the music of Mahler and
Schoenberg, but so what? Why should he like everything? And indeed one
had few opportunities to hear works by these men between the wars.  Yet
it is also clear that Vaughan Williams made it a point to attend as many
performances of these works as he could.  This doesn't seem parochial to
me.  Anyone who can't hear Stravinsky in the "London" symphony or Ravel in
Flos campi or Reger and Sibelius and Hindemith in the Symphony No. 4 or
Bartok in the piano concerto (incidentally, a work Bartok praised) isn't
really listening.

Furthermore, Mitchell brings only the case against.  He quotes Neville
Cardus's original negative review of the Symphony No. 4, but he neglects
to note that Cardus later changed his mind.  He brings up again and again
the "true fact" that Vaughan Williams's music is confined to the British
Isles, apparently because it's not played in Vienna.  Well, a lot of things
aren't played in Vienna, including much Britten.  I imagine that if you
looked at CD sales figures, you'd find both Vaughan Williams and Britten
healthy in several overseas markets.  No one has followed Vaughan Williams
in the same way that no one has followed van Gogh, but it doesn't make much
sense to dump on van Gogh because of this.  Vaughan Williams's music has
not generated successors in the way that Stravinsky's music has.  On the
other hand, to paraphrase Shaw, in art it doesn't matter who comes before
you, but who comes after you.  Nobody followed Mozart, either.  Something
else is going on in Mitchell's head.

As for Elgar, Mitchell makes the standard case for Gerontius as the
culmination of the earlier oratorios and cantatas but thinks the Enigma
Variations came out of the blue.  He fails to note two things: the
symphonic procedures throughout much of the earlier big choral works and
the orchestral character pieces that had made up Elgar's output to that
time.  The Enigma consists of these character pieces tied by the basic
symphonic technique of variation.  There's plenty left over that's new
for Elgar, challenges which he meets triumphantly (the peroration in
particular, which cost him a lot of sweat), but the work has precedents.
I also disagree with Mitchell's judgment of Elgar's Apostles.  I think it
the greatest of the oratorios - a step forward from Gerontius - but I'm in
no position to argue details.  I admit Mitchell certainly knows Gerontius
better than I, and probably The Apostles as well.  Again, for Mitchell the
culprit is British insularity at the time.  Elgar had to write oratorios,
because that was the English taste.  As a matter of fact, so did Britten,
Walton, Holst, Tippet, and Vaughan Williams.  All of them contributed
something new to the form.  As Kennedy notes in Portrait of Elgar, a work
about the apostles had been in Elgar's mind since boyhood.  Though we might
deplore British artistic insularity, we can't claim that it forced Elgar
into a project he didn't want to do.  In fact, I know of no instance in
which anyone forced Elgar into any of his major works, and Mitchell
provides no detailed example.

In refreshing contrast, however, there are brilliant essays on
Expressionism as well as on the links between French and Austro-German
music at the beginning of the twentieth century.  We tend to think, like
Ned Rorem, that there are two kinds of people: French and German.  If
you're not one, you're the other.  Mitchell discovers Wagner as the common
ancestor to both and in so doing argues for a cohesive European musical
culture (always leaving aside Britain and Russia).  Mitchell also makes the
case - again tracing his definition to Wagner, in this case Tristan - for
Expressionism as a part of almost all post-Romantic music, beyond its brief
burst mainly in the Teens and a bit of the Twenties.  He even brings in
painting, with the writings of Kandinsky juxtaposed to those of Schoenberg.
This is all first-class.

We might ask ourselves whether it's the critic's job to be right.  I've
never believed it.  Schumann may have praised Chopin, Brahms, Wagner,
Mendelssohn, and Berlioz, but he also went ga-ga over Niels Gade.  Shaw
hated Brahms's and Dvorak's music for most of his life (he relented about
Brahms thirty years after giving up regular reviewing) and made a fool of
himself over Richard Strauss's awful (there's no other word) kitschfest,
Josephslegende.  Tovey went nuts for the likes of Joachim and Roentgen.
In fact, I distrust a critic who doesn't make the occasional extravagant
mistake.  The twin roots of criticism for me have always been passion and
understanding.  You risk making a public fool of yourself every time you
write, but you do it because the work before you matters in some way.  If
you don't care for a work, you may not understand the most important thing
about it: namely, why others like it.  It's easy, but also dangerous, to
dismiss others as subhuman.  Remember that they also probably share many
of your artistic loves, and what does that say about *your* taste? Hans
Keller's advice seemed to me very wise in that regard.  On the other hand,
in any period, garbage outweighs gold.  Critics unwilling to put themselves
on the line against what they consider shoddy do nobody any good.
Criticism, above all, is argument.  It needs not just passion, but reason.
It's also argument, in the sense of back and forth between parties, which
leads eventually to the bright discovery.  Mitchell consistently provokes
this kind of response in his reader, and for that alone, we owe him a debt.

Steve Schwartz