Page 28 - Weiss, Jernej, ur./ed. 2024. Glasbena kritika – nekoč in danes ▪︎ Music Criticism – Yesterday and Today. Koper/Ljubljana: Založba Univerze na Primorskem in Festival Ljubljana. Studia musicologica Labacensia, 7
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glasbena kritika – nekoč in danes | music criticism – yesterday and today
ing to the rendition at hand. A characteristic digression, from a column on
Donizetti’s “Dom Sébastien”:
Among the Scribe papers in Paris I discovered an affidavit to the ef-
fect that the composer had rewritten the baritone’s principal air, ‘Ô Lis-
bonne,’ between the dress rehearsal and the first night … The next day,
I found the original air – a beautiful piece – in the baritone’s partbook.8
Although some readers found these asides a little donnish, the dispensati-
on of particulars achieved a sensuous flow: you could go swimming in Por-
ter’s omniscience. And, when he got into the nitty-gritty of performance,
he wrote with a newspaperman’s bluntness: “René Kollo is probably the best
Siegfried around. The notes are all there, audible, agreeable in tone, if not
exactly heroic. He looked good, if rather too tidily coiffed.”9 In contempora-
ry music, Porter favored such modernist masters as Pierre Boulez, Elliott
Carter, and Harrison Birtwistle, but he also wrote sympathetically of John
Adams’s Nixon in China, Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, and the son-
gs of Ned Rorem.
The other potent influence on American music journalism in the late
twentieth century was the composer-critic Virgil Thomson, who wrote for
the New York Herald Tribune from 1940 to 1962 and remained a mentor to
younger writers until his death, in 1989. The co-creator, along with Ger-
trude Stein, of two of the greatest American operas – Four Saints in Three
Acts and The Mother of Us All – Thomson took music very seriously, but he
did not always speak about it in a serious tone, and he liked nothing bet-
ter than to puncture the solemn cult that long ago arose around the princi-
pal figures in classical music. Thomson tore into the conventional wisdom
of a middle-class public with unconcealed glee, killing one sacred cow after
another. His début review for the Herald Tribune dismissed Sibelius’s Sec-
ond Symphony as “vulgar, self-indulgent, and provincial beyond all descrip-
tion.”10 Toscanini was said to offer “a solid, expensive, luxury-product feel”;
Vladimir Horowitz was “a master of musical distortion.”11 Shostakovich’s
“Leningrad” Symphony “seems to have been written for the slow-witted,
the not very musical and the distracted.”12 A review of Jascha Heifetz ended
thus: “Four-starred super-luxury hotels are a legitimate commerce. The fact
8 Andrew Porter, “The Tide of Pomp,” The New Yorker, April 16, 1984.
9 Andrew Porter, “Wagner Goes West,” The New Yorker, July 8, 1985.
10 Virgil Thomson, Music Chronicles, 1940–1954 (New York: Library of America, 2014), 10.
11 Ibid., 61, 192.
12 Ibid., 108.
28
ing to the rendition at hand. A characteristic digression, from a column on
Donizetti’s “Dom Sébastien”:
Among the Scribe papers in Paris I discovered an affidavit to the ef-
fect that the composer had rewritten the baritone’s principal air, ‘Ô Lis-
bonne,’ between the dress rehearsal and the first night … The next day,
I found the original air – a beautiful piece – in the baritone’s partbook.8
Although some readers found these asides a little donnish, the dispensati-
on of particulars achieved a sensuous flow: you could go swimming in Por-
ter’s omniscience. And, when he got into the nitty-gritty of performance,
he wrote with a newspaperman’s bluntness: “René Kollo is probably the best
Siegfried around. The notes are all there, audible, agreeable in tone, if not
exactly heroic. He looked good, if rather too tidily coiffed.”9 In contempora-
ry music, Porter favored such modernist masters as Pierre Boulez, Elliott
Carter, and Harrison Birtwistle, but he also wrote sympathetically of John
Adams’s Nixon in China, Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, and the son-
gs of Ned Rorem.
The other potent influence on American music journalism in the late
twentieth century was the composer-critic Virgil Thomson, who wrote for
the New York Herald Tribune from 1940 to 1962 and remained a mentor to
younger writers until his death, in 1989. The co-creator, along with Ger-
trude Stein, of two of the greatest American operas – Four Saints in Three
Acts and The Mother of Us All – Thomson took music very seriously, but he
did not always speak about it in a serious tone, and he liked nothing bet-
ter than to puncture the solemn cult that long ago arose around the princi-
pal figures in classical music. Thomson tore into the conventional wisdom
of a middle-class public with unconcealed glee, killing one sacred cow after
another. His début review for the Herald Tribune dismissed Sibelius’s Sec-
ond Symphony as “vulgar, self-indulgent, and provincial beyond all descrip-
tion.”10 Toscanini was said to offer “a solid, expensive, luxury-product feel”;
Vladimir Horowitz was “a master of musical distortion.”11 Shostakovich’s
“Leningrad” Symphony “seems to have been written for the slow-witted,
the not very musical and the distracted.”12 A review of Jascha Heifetz ended
thus: “Four-starred super-luxury hotels are a legitimate commerce. The fact
8 Andrew Porter, “The Tide of Pomp,” The New Yorker, April 16, 1984.
9 Andrew Porter, “Wagner Goes West,” The New Yorker, July 8, 1985.
10 Virgil Thomson, Music Chronicles, 1940–1954 (New York: Library of America, 2014), 10.
11 Ibid., 61, 192.
12 Ibid., 108.
28
