Charles Dalmas wrote concerning Louis Spohr:

>>Speaking as a clarinet player, I can say that his four concertos
>>are specious and superficial.
>>
>>The rest of his work (that which I have heard) is equally dull and
>>uninteresting.

Don Satz:

>I have a relatively high opinion of Spohr's music.  But, I don't consider
>his clarinet concertos to be among his better compositions.  It's Spohr's
>chamber works which result in my overall assessment.

Interesting to find Spohr under the rubric above, as I've never thought
of him as a "highly rated" much less overrated composer, more as an
interesting minor figure

His Autobiography is a curious "worm's eye" view of an important period
of stylistic transition, as reflected on by a man of relatively limited
imagination--on the other hand, he did conduct (quite well, we are told)
one of the early productions of Wagner's "Flying Dutchman" although he
was not in sympathy with the music.  His rather jaundiced opinions of
late Beethoven, and his observations on the sociology of music from the
perspective of a touring virtuoso are worth having as exemplars of the
view from the main stream.

I would agree with Don Satz's opinion about the chamber music-I did some
serious looking into it in graduate school and found particularly the later
works for larger ensembles to be quite attractive.

One problem with Spohr seemed to be that although the pre-compositional
layout and medium of a piece (double quartet, piano septet with winds
and strings, songs accompanied by piano four-hands, symphony for
double orchestra etc) was often quite clever and/or novel, the actual
compositional follow-through was indiscernable from his business as usual.

The two exceptions to this I would propose are the once-popular Violin
Concerto No.  8, famous for its structure as a vocal scene, and the late
Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra, which I've conducted with the
Shanghai Quartet and St.  Lawrence Quartet -works in which either the task
he set himself inspired him and/or the framework evolved naturally from the
musical ideas.

The rest is, particularly in comparison with the visionary work of his
major contemporaries or younger colleagues-Weber, Schumann, Mendelssohn,
remarkably thin and "formal"-although the technique is impeccable, the
structural motivation, harmonic imagination and affective content are
minimal.

Joel Lazar
Conductor, Bethesda MD
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