Critical Thoughts

I occasionally enjoy Norman Lebrecht's columns, as posted and archived at the Naxos website. (Naxos, you really ought to know, is in my opinion the greatest thing to hit classical music since the trumpet.) Many times, I have no idea at all what Lebrecht is talking about; he frequently writes about specific goings-on in the British classical music scene, of which I have no knowledge at all. Other times, I disagree with him vehemently (he wrote a dismissive article about John Williams some months ago that had me fuming). But he's usually interesting. Right now, he's discussing what makes a great critic.

First of all, I'm not really sure there actually is such a thing as a "great critic"; not many critics seem to last in the general public estimation a while beyond their deaths, really. We can rattle off lists of great composers, great painters, great writers, et cetera; but the list of great critics seems painfully short: Pauline Kael (although I wouldn't name her, to be honest); and...well, are there any others? Does anyone still study the music criticism of Virgil Thomson, outside of music critics themselves? I rather suspect that "great critics" are actually "great writers", who made criticism their subject and stock-in-trade. The problem there, though, is that by the very nature of their subject matter, critics are pretty much doomed to being forgotten. There's not really a great deal that lasts in the critic's output, and it seems to me that critics' writings are more likely to become historical curiosities than anything else. A graduate student in film might dig into Pauline Kael's or John Simon's writings on 1970s American cinema, but I can't really imagine anyone else doing so.

Lebrecht's column also saddened me because it was here that I learned of Harold Schonberg's recent death. I never read Schonberg's music criticism, since when I came to music he was already five years into his retirement. But I did read a number of the general interest books Schonberg wrote about music: The Great Pianists is a fine volume, as is The Great Conductors (although when I reread that last one, a year or two ago, I was surprised at the occasional sexism that I had not noticed in my first reading as a teenager). He wrote a book about some of the greatest virtuosos in music history, and his most successful book, The Lives of the Great Composers (which I reviewed for GMR) is still in print. I enjoyed Schonberg's writings, and I'm saddened by his passing. (In a side note, Schonberg was also keenly interested in chess and wrote a book called Grandmasters of Chess, which I may have read in college although I don't recall if I actually did.)

(I would be remiss in citing Lebrecht's article if I didn't also cite one sentence from it, because I am sorry to say that this is the worst sentence I've read in months. Lebrecht notes that Leonard Bernstein overcame Schonberg's apprently-often negative comments about him to become a central figure in American music, and then Lebrecht writes this: "But the sparks struck by his flinty reviews fire the glow that endures as Bernstein's halo.". Gahhhh, make it stop!)