Page 303 - 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
P. 303
summaries
cert should feature one of the original Slovenian full-length compositions,
so he approached the composer Matija Tomc – “an old friend of the choir
and a colleague of Marolt’s” – as early as October 1954, with a request for
a composition. Tomc thus wrote the cantata Stara pravda, whose premiere
was performed on 12 March 1956 in the Union Hall in Ljubljana. The per-
formance was met with harsh reactions from some of the more orthodox
Marxist ideologues, who resented the choir’s leadership for honouring the
compositional contribution of the Catholic intellectual Matija Tomc after
the concert. They put so much pressure on the choir that it lost its choir-
master and almost fell apart.
The words used to describe the incident soon shifted from political to aes-
thetic vocabulary. Sergej Vošnjak, editor-in-chief of Slovenski poročevalec,
then one of the main Slovenian daily newspapers, used the affair as an oc-
casion to attack critics who were supposed to evaluate art purely from an
artistic point of view, without taking into account socio-political perspec-
tives. In a long article entitled “A Critique of Criticism”, which appeared in
Slovenski poročevalec less than a month after the concert on 8 April 1956, he
wrote: “I think the basic weakness of our cultural criticism is that it does not
evaluate each individual work according to its totality, according to its gener-
al social role, but tries to separate an ‘aesthetic’, one might even say artisanal
part, which should be the subject of art criticism, from the general social sig-
nificance of this work, which should be dealt with (preferably as little as pos-
sible, of course!) by the ‘political’ critics.”
What came to be known as “the incident in the Union Hall” was thus not
only a reckoning with the clergy, but also an attempt to discipline critics by
setting out more “appropriate” socio-political guidelines for music-critical
writing. The latter was supposedly incapable of seeing the social utility of
purely “aesthetic” writing and, consequently, incapable of politically con-
demning “deviant” social phenomena.
Keywords: cantata, Old justice, Matija Tomc, Criticism, Post-World War II
303
cert should feature one of the original Slovenian full-length compositions,
so he approached the composer Matija Tomc – “an old friend of the choir
and a colleague of Marolt’s” – as early as October 1954, with a request for
a composition. Tomc thus wrote the cantata Stara pravda, whose premiere
was performed on 12 March 1956 in the Union Hall in Ljubljana. The per-
formance was met with harsh reactions from some of the more orthodox
Marxist ideologues, who resented the choir’s leadership for honouring the
compositional contribution of the Catholic intellectual Matija Tomc after
the concert. They put so much pressure on the choir that it lost its choir-
master and almost fell apart.
The words used to describe the incident soon shifted from political to aes-
thetic vocabulary. Sergej Vošnjak, editor-in-chief of Slovenski poročevalec,
then one of the main Slovenian daily newspapers, used the affair as an oc-
casion to attack critics who were supposed to evaluate art purely from an
artistic point of view, without taking into account socio-political perspec-
tives. In a long article entitled “A Critique of Criticism”, which appeared in
Slovenski poročevalec less than a month after the concert on 8 April 1956, he
wrote: “I think the basic weakness of our cultural criticism is that it does not
evaluate each individual work according to its totality, according to its gener-
al social role, but tries to separate an ‘aesthetic’, one might even say artisanal
part, which should be the subject of art criticism, from the general social sig-
nificance of this work, which should be dealt with (preferably as little as pos-
sible, of course!) by the ‘political’ critics.”
What came to be known as “the incident in the Union Hall” was thus not
only a reckoning with the clergy, but also an attempt to discipline critics by
setting out more “appropriate” socio-political guidelines for music-critical
writing. The latter was supposedly incapable of seeing the social utility of
purely “aesthetic” writing and, consequently, incapable of politically con-
demning “deviant” social phenomena.
Keywords: cantata, Old justice, Matija Tomc, Criticism, Post-World War II
303
