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 Musician, Critic, and Public

[Note: This is taken from Henry Edward Krehbiel's How to Listen to Music.]

I have been told that there are many people who read the newspapers on the day after they have attended a concert or operatic representation for the purpose of finding out whether or not the performance gave them proper or sufficient enjoyment. It would not be becoming in me to inquire too curiously into the truth of such a statement, and in view of a denunciation spoken in the introductory chapter of this book, I am not sure that it is not a piece of arrogance, or impudence, on my part to undertake in any way to justify any critical writing on the subject of music. Certain it is that some men who write about music for the newspapers believe, or affect to believe, that criticism is worthless, and I shall not escape the charge of inconsistency, if, after I have condemned the blunders of literary men, who are laymen in music, and separated the majority of professional writers on the art into pedants and rhapsodists, I nevertheless venture to discuss the nature and value of musical criticism. Yet, surely, there must be a right and wrong in this as in every other thing, and just as surely the present structure of society, which rests on the newspaper, invites attention to the existing relationship between musician, critic, and public as an important element in the question How to Listen to Music.

As a condition precedent to the discussion of this new element in the case, I lay down the proposition that the relationship between the three factors enumerated is so intimate and so strict that the world over they rise and fall together; which means that where the people dwell who have reached the highest plane of excellence, there also are to be found the highest types of the musician and critic; and that in the degree in which the three factors, which united make up the sum of musical activity, labor harmoniously, conscientiously, and unselfishly, each striving to fulfil its mission, they advance music and further themselves, each bearing off an equal share of the good derived from the common effort. I have set the factors down in the order which they ordinarily occupy in popular discussion and which symbolizes their proper attitude toward each other and the highest potency of their collaboration. In this collaboration, as in so many others, it is conflict that brings life. Only by a surrender of their functions, one to the other, could the three apparently dissonant yet essentially harmonious factors be brought into a state of complacency; but such complacency would mean stagnation. If the published judgment on compositions and performances could always be that of the exploiting musicians, that class, at least, would read the newspapers with fewer heart-burnings; if the critics had a common mind and it were followed in concert-room and opera-house, they, as well as the musicians, would have need of fewer words of displacency and more of approbation; if, finally, it were to be brought to pass that for the public nothing but amiable diversion should flow simultaneously from platform, stage, and press, then for the public would the millennium be come. A religious philosopher can transmute Adam's fall into a blessing, and we can recognize the wisdom of that dispensation which put enmity between the seed of Jubal, who was the "father of all such as handle the harp and pipe," and the seed of Saul, who, I take it, is the first critic of record (and a vigorous one, too, for he accentuated his unfavorable opinion of a harper's harping with a javelin thrust).

We are bound to recognize that between the three factors there is, ever was, and ever shall be in sæcula sæculorum an irrepressible conflict, and that in the nature of things the middle factor is the Ishmaelite whose hand is raised against everybody and against whom everybody's hand is raised. The complacency of the musician and the indifference, not to say ignorance, of the public ordinarily combine to make them allies, and the critic is, therefore, placed between two millstones, where he is vigorously rasped on both sides, and whence, being angular and hard of outer shell, he frequently requites the treatment received with complete and energetic reciprocity. Is he therefore to be pitied? Not a bit; for in this position he is performing one of the most significant and useful of his functions, and disclosing one of his most precious virtues. While musician and public must perforce remain in the positions in which they have been placed with relation to each other it must be apparent at half a glance that it would be the simplest matter in the world for the critic to extricate himself from his predicament. He would only need to take his cue from the public, measuring his commendation by the intensity of their applause, his dispraise by their signs of displeasure, and all would be well with him. We all know this to be true, that people like to read that which flatters them by echoing their own thoughts. The more delightfully it is put by the writer the more the reader is pleased, for has he not had the same idea? Are they not his? Is not their appearance in a public print proof of the shrewdness and soundness of his judgment? Ruskin knows this foible in human nature and condemns it. You may read in "Sesame and Lilies:"

As a rule, however, the critic is not guilty of the wrong of speaking out the thought of others, but publishes what there is of his own mind, and this I laud in him as a virtue, which is praiseworthy in the degree that it springs from loftiness of aim, depth of knowledge, and sincerity and unselfishness of purpose.

Let us look a little into the views which our factors do and those which they ought to entertain of each other. The utterances of musicians have long ago made it plain that as between the critic and the public the greater measure of their respect and deference is given to the public. The critic is bound to recognize this as entirely natural; his right of protest does not accrue until he can show that the deference is ignoble and injurious to good art. It is to the public that the musician appeals for the substantial signs of what is called success. This appeal to the jury instead of the judge is as characteristic of the conscientious composer who is sincerely convinced that he was sent into the world to widen the boundaries of art, as it is of the mere time-server who aims only at tickling the popular ear. The reason is obvious to a little close thinking: Ignorance is at once a safeguard against and a promoter of conservatism. This sounds like a paradox, but the rapid growth of Wagner's music in the admiration of the people of the United States might correctly be cited as a proof that the statement is true. Music like the concert fragments from Wagner's lyric dramas is accepted with promptitude and delight, because its elements are those which appeal most directly and forcibly to our sense-perception and those primitive tastes which are the most readily gratified by strong outlines and vivid colors. Their vigorous rhythms, wealth of color, and sonority would make these fragments far more impressive to a savage than the suave beauty of a symphony by Haydn; yet do we not all know that while whole-hearted, intelligent enjoyment of a Haydn symphony is conditioned upon a considerable degree of culture, an equally whole-hearted, intelligent appreciation of Wagner's music presupposes a much wider range of sympathy, a much more extended view of the capabilities of musical expression, a much keener discernment, and a much profounder susceptibility to the effects of harmonic progressions? And is the conclusion not inevitable, therefore, that on the whole the ready acceptance of Wagner's music by a people is evidence that they are not sufficiently cultured to feel the force of that conservatism which made the triumph of Wagner consequent on many years of agitation in musical Germany?

In one case the appeal is elemental; in the other spiritual. He who wishes to be in advance of his time does wisely in going to the people instead of the critics, just as the old fogy does whose music belongs to the time when sensuous charm summed up its essence. There is a good deal of ambiguity about the stereotyped phrase "ahead of one's time." Rightly apprehended, great geniuses do live for the future rather than the present, but where the public have the vastness of appetite and scantness of taste peculiar to the ostrich, there it is impossible for a composer to be ahead of his time. It is only where the public are advanced to the stage of intelligent discrimination that a Ninth Symphony and a Nibelung Tetralogy are accepted slowly.

Why the charlatan should profess to despise the critic and to pay homage only to the public scarcely needs an explanation. It is the critic who stands between him and the public he would victimize. Much of the disaffection between the concert-giver and the concert-reviewer arises from the unwillingness of the latter to enlist in a conspiracy to deceive and defraud the public. There is no need of mincing phrases here. The critics of the newspaper press are besieged daily with requests for notices of a complimentary character touching persons who have no honest standing in art. They are fawned on, truckled to, cajoled, subjected to the most seductive influences, sometimes bribed with woman's smiles or manager's money—and why? To win their influence in favor of good art, think you? No; to feed vanity and greed. When a critic is found of sufficient self-respect and character to resist all appeals and to be proof against all temptations, who is quicker than the musician to cite against his opinion the applause of the public over whose gullibility and ignorance, perchance, he made merry with the critic while trying to purchase his independence and honor?

It is only when musicians divide the question touching the rights and merits of public and critic that they seem able to put a correct estimate upon the value of popular approval. At the last the best of them are willing, with Ferdinand Hiller, to look upon the public as an elemental power like the weather, which must be taken as it chances to come. With modern society resting upon the newspaper they might be willing to view the critic in the same light; but this they will not do so long as they adhere to the notion that criticism belongs of right to the professional musician, and will eventually be handed over to him. As for the critic, he may recognize the naturalness and reasonableness of a final resort for judgment to the factor for whose sake art is (i.e., the public), but he is not bound to admit its unfailing righteousness. Upon him, so he be worthy of his office, weighs the duty of first determining whether the appeal is taken from a lofty purpose or a low one, and whether or not the favored tribunal is worthy to try the case. Those who show a willingness to accept low ideals cannot exact high ones. The influence of their applause is a thousand-fold more injurious to art than the strictures of the most acrid critic. A musician of Schumann's mental and moral stature could recognize this and make it the basis of some of his most forcible aphorisms:

The belief professed by many musicians—professed, not really held—that the public can do no wrong, unquestionably grows out of a depreciation of the critic rather than an appreciation of the critical acumen of the masses. This depreciation is due more to the concrete work of the critic (which is only too often deserving of condemnation) than to a denial of the good offices of criticism. This much should be said for the musician, who is more liable to be misunderstood and more powerless against misrepresentation than any other artist. A line should be drawn between mere expression of opinion and criticism. It has been recognized for ages—you may find it plainly set forth in Quintilian and Cicero—that in the long run the public are neither bad judges nor good critics. The distinction suggests a thought about the difference in value between a popular and a critical judgment. The former is, in the nature of things, ill considered and fleeting. It is the product of a momentary gratification or disappointment. In a much greater degree than a judgment based on principle and precedent, such as a critic's ought to be, it is a judgment swayed by that variable thing called fashion—"Qual piùm' al vento."

But if this be so we ought plainly to understand the duties and obligations of the critic; perhaps it is because there is much misapprehension on this point that critics' writings have fallen under their own condemnation. I conceive that the first, if not the sole, office of the critic should be to guide public judgment. It is not for him to instruct the musician in his art. If this were always borne in mind by writers for the press it might help to soften the asperity felt by the musician toward the critic; and possibly the musician might then be persuaded to perform his first office toward the critic, which is to hold up his hands while he labors to steady and dignify public opinion. No true artist would give up years of honorable esteem to be the object for a moment of feverish idolatry. The public are fickle. "The garlands they twine," says Schumann, "they always pull to pieces again to offer them in another form to the next comer who chances to know how to amuse them better." Are such garlands worth the sacrifice of artistic honor? If it were possible for the critic to withhold them and offer instead a modest sprig of enduring bay, would not the musician be his debtor?

Another thought. Conceding that the people are the elemental power that Hiller says they are, who shall save them from the changeableness and instability which they show with relation to music and her votaries? Who shall bid the restless waves be still? We, in America, are a new people, a vast hotch-potch of varied and contradictory elements. We are engaged in conquering a continent; employed in a mad scramble for material things; we give feverish hours to win the comfort for our bodies that we take only seconds to enjoy; the moments which we steal from our labors we give grudgingly to relaxation, and that this relaxation may come quickly we ask that the agents which produce it shall appeal violently to the faculties which are most easily reached. Under these circumstances whence are to come the intellectual poise, the refined taste, the quick and sure power of analysis which must precede a correct estimate of the value of a composition or its performance?

Grant that this antecedent criticism is the province of the critic and that he approaches even remotely a fulfilment of his mission in this regard, and who shall venture to question the value and the need of criticism to the promotion of public opinion? In this work the critic has a great advantage over the musician. The musician appeals to the public with volatile and elusive sounds. When he gets past the tympanum of the ear he works upon the emotions and the fancy. The public have no time to let him do more; for the rest they are willing to refer him to the critic, whose business it is continually to hear music for the purpose of forming opinions about it and expressing them. The critic has both the time and the obligation to analyze the reasons why and the extent to which the faculties are stirred into activity. Is it not plain, therefore, that the critic ought to be better able to distinguish the good from the bad, the true from the false, the sound from the meretricious, than the unindividualized multitude, who are already satisfied when they have felt the ticklings of pleasure?

But when we place so great a mission as the education of public taste before the critic, we saddle him with a vast responsibility which is quite evenly divided between the musician and the public. The responsibility toward the musician is not that which we are accustomed to hear harped on by the aggrieved ones on the day after a concert. It is toward the musician only as a representative of art, and his just claims can have nothing of selfishness in them. The abnormal sensitiveness of the musician to criticism, though it may excite his commiseration and even honest pity, should never count with the critic in the performance of a plain duty. This sensitiveness is the product of a low state in music as well as criticism, and in the face of improvement in the two fields it will either disappear or fall under a killing condemnation. The power of the press will here work for good. The newspaper now fills the place in the musician's economy which a century ago was filled in Europe by the courts and nobility. Its support, indirect as well as direct, replaces the patronage which erstwhile came from these powerful ones. The evils which flow from the changed conditions are different in extent but not in kind from the old. Too frequently for the good of art that support is purchased by the same crookings of "the pregnant hinges of the knee" that were once the price of royal or noble condescension. If the tone of the press at times becomes arrogant, it is from the same causes that raised the voices and curled the lips of the petty dukes and princes, to flatter whose vanity great artists used to labor.

The musician knows as well as anyone how impossible it is to escape the press, and it is, therefore, his plain duty to seek to raise the standard of its utterances by conceding the rights of the critic and encouraging honesty, fearlessness, impartiality, intelligence, and sympathy wherever he finds them. To this end he must cast away many antiquated and foolish prejudices. He must learn to confess with Wagner, the arch-enemy of criticism, that "blame is much more useful to the artist than praise," and that "the musician who goes to destruction because he is faulted, deserves destruction." He must stop the contention that only a musician is entitled to criticise a musician, and without abating one jot of his requirements as to knowledge, sympathy, liberality, broad-mindedness, candor, and incorruptibility on the part of the critic, he must quit the foolish claim that to pronounce upon the excellence of a ragout one must be able to cook it; if he will not go farther he must, at least, go with the elder D'Israeli to the extent of saying that "the talent of judgment may exist separately from the power of execution." One need not be a composer, but one must be able to feel with a composer before he can discuss his productions as they ought to be discussed. Not all the writers for the press are able to do this; many depend upon effrontery and a copious use of technical phrases to carry them through. The musician, alas! encourages this method whenever he gets a chance; nine times out of ten, when an opportunity to review a composition falls to him, he approaches it on its technical side. Yet music is of all the arts in the world the last that a mere pedant should discuss.

But if not a mere pedant, then neither a mere sentimentalist.

So writes Dr. Stainer, and it is his emotionalist against whom I uttered a warning in the introductory chapter of this book, when I called him a rhapsodist and described his motive to be primarily a desire to present himself as a person of unusually exquisite sensibilities. Frequently the rhapsodic style is adopted to conceal a want of knowledge, and, I fancy, sometimes also because ill-equipped critics have persuaded themselves that criticism being worthless, what the public need to read is a fantastic account of how music affects them. Now, it is true that what is chiefly valuable in criticism is what a man qualified to think and feel tells us he did think and feel under the inspiration of a performance; but when carried too far, or restricted too much, this conception of a critic's province lifts personal equation into dangerous prominence in the critical activity, and depreciates the elements of criticism, which are not matters of opinion or taste at all, but questions of fact, as exactly demonstrable as a problem in mathematics. In musical performance these elements belong to the technics of the art. Granted that the critic has a correct ear, a thing which he must have if he aspire to be a critic at all, and the possession of which is as easily proved as that of a dollar-bill in his pocket, the questions of justness of intonation in a singer or instrumentalist, balance of tone in an orchestra, correctness of phrasing, and many other things, are mere determinations of fact; the faculties which recognize their existence or discover their absence might exist in a person who is not "moved by concord of sweet sounds" at all, and whose taste is of the lowest type. It was the acoustician Euler, I believe, who said that he could construct a sonata according to the laws of mathematics—figure one out, that is.

Because music is in its nature such a mystery, because so little of its philosophy, so little of its science is popularly known, there has grown up the tribe of rhapsodical writers whose influence is most pernicious. I have a case in mind at which I have already hinted in this book—that of a certain English gentleman who has gained considerable eminence because of the loveliness of the subject on which he writes and his deftness in putting words together. On many points he is qualified to speak, and on these he generally speaks entertainingly. He frequently blunders in details, but it is only when he writes in the manner exemplified in the following excerpt from his book called "My Musical Memories," that he does mischief. The reverend gentleman, talking about violins, has reached one that once belonged to Ernst. This, he says, he sees occasionally, but he never hears it more except

Well, the reader, if he has a liking for such things, may himself go on for quantity. This is intended, I fancy, for poetical hyperbole, but as a matter of fact it is something else, and worse. Mr. Haweis does not hear Ernst's violin under any such improbable conditions; if he thinks he does he is a proper subject for medical inquiry. Neither does his effort at fine writing help us to appreciate the tone of the instrument. He did not intend that it should, but he probably did intend to make the reader marvel at the exquisite sensibility of his soul to music. This is mischievous, for it tends to make the injudicious think that they are lacking in musical appreciation, unless they, too, can see visions and hear voices and dream fantastic dreams when music is sounding. When such writing is popular it is difficult to make men and women believe that they may be just as susceptible to the influence of music as the child Mozart was to the sound of a trumpet, yet listen to it without once feeling the need of taking leave of their senses or wandering away from sanity. Moreover, when Mr. Haweis says that he sees but does not hear Ernst's violin more, he speaks most undeserved dispraise of one of the best violin players alive, for Ernst's violin now belongs to and is played by Lady Hallé—she that was Madame Norman-Neruda.

Is there, then, no place for rhapsodic writing in musical criticism? Yes, decidedly. It may, indeed, at times be the best, because the truest, writing. One would convey but a sorry idea of a composition were he to confine himself to a technical description of it—the number of its measures, its intervals, modulations, speed, and rhythm. Such a description would only be comprehensible to the trained musician, and to him would picture the body merely, not the soul. One might as well hope to tell of the beauty of a statue by reciting its dimensions. But knowledge as well as sympathy must speak out of the words, so that they may realize Schumann's lovely conception when he said that the best criticism is that which leaves after it an impression on the reader like that which the music made on the hearer. Read Dr. John Brown's account of one of Hallé's recitals, reprinted from "The Scotsman," in the collection of essays entitled "Spare Hours," if you would see how aptly a sweetly sane mind and a warm heart can rhapsodize without the help of technical knowledge:

That is Beethoven.

Once upon a time—it is an ancient fable—a critic picked out all the faults of a great poet and presented them to Apollo. The god received the gift graciously and set a bag of wheat before the critic with the command that he separate the chaff from the kernels. The critic did the work with alacrity, and turning to Apollo for his reward, received the chaff. Nothing could show us more appositely than this what criticism should not be. A critic's duty is to separate excellence from defect, as Dr. Crotch says; to admire as well as to find fault. In the proportion that defects are apparent he should increase his efforts to discover beauties. Much flows out of this conception of his duty. Holding it the critic will bring besides all needful knowledge a fulness of love into his work. "Where sympathy is lacking, correct judgment is also lacking," said Mendelssohn. The critic should be the mediator between the musician and the public. For all new works he should do what the symphonists of the Liszt school attempt to do by means of programmes; he should excite curiosity, arouse interest, and pave the way to popular comprehension. But for the old he should not fail to encourage reverence and admiration. To do both these things he must know his duty to the past, the present, and the future, and adjust each duty to the other. Such adjustment is only possible if he knows the music of the past and present, and is quick to perceive the bent and outcome of novel strivings. He should be catholic in taste, outspoken in judgment, unalterable in allegiance to his ideals, unswervable in integrity.

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