Taking a Rest from Musical Criticism - Michael Moran

Julius Schmid (1854-1935), Schubertiade (1897) to celebrate the Schubert centenary

I have become a complete critical anachronism in 2026. I must now admit to having almost completely lost confidence in the usefulness and even appreciation of my rather long, perhaps all too personal, assessment of music recitals and concerts. There is little motivation to make these festivals truly international except of course for the kudos offered by pianists who come from many countries. I alone seem to be aware of the international utility and historical record of my reviews written in English, the lingua franca of the planet however you may feel about that form of imperialism.

Many concerts, competitions and recitals can be watched over the internet online, worldwide, today or listened to on national streamed radio. Listeners can easily come to their own conclusions concerning interpretation and performance.

After all, I feel it is the composer, the composition and its historical and cultural context that should predominate in one's considerations and conclusions. The performer is a temporary custodian of the music. This factual knowledge is now readily available on the internet, AI or CHAT. Automatic translation of comment posts is now ubiquitous no matter who makes them and however anonymous. In the modern world, beset as it presently is with the horrors of survival on every front, music reviewing is scarcely an intellectual activity of major or creative importance. However, I never forget the critical writings of Robert Schumann on music were actual works of literary art. I attempt in my modest way to approach the writing in that guise..

I have tried to offer constructive criticism in the kindest and most compassionate way possible. After all, I feel such writing is an important historical record of an ephemeral art. Having seriously studied the piano and harpsichord in London with the finest teachers, I know all too well how fiendishly difficult to master are these instruments and the music written for them.

Reviewing does seem rather increasingly pointless and certainly time consuming, even possibly rather a vain activity. Anyone can offer music criticism irrespective of general artistic and aesthetic culture and education. In many ways it has contributed to commoditization of the art of music and the increasing homogenisation of performance.

Of course a rare, great musician and interpreter can 'open the doors of perception' for us more limited beings but .... surely responding deeply to the music itself is the height one should aspire towards, an appreciation that illuminates any critical assessment. The filters of experience make this rather challenging for the creation of a so-called 'objective' judgments by both listener and performer.

Listening to music is a highly personal activity. We all have our own Chopin which we would defend to the death ....

In the highly entertaining and humanly inspiring Paderewski Memoirs (London 1939), the great pianist writes in the early 1880s that as well as teaching at the Conservatory in Warsaw he was fiendishly broadening his general education which he felt was inadequate (in Mathematics, Literature, History) with four teachers a day! 

A newspaper editor offered  him the opportunity to write music criticism. He wrote: 'But at that time I was not ready for making criticism for the simple reason that I had no bitterness in myself. I do not know if critics must have bitterness, but generally they have. I must confess I always feel that.' (p.91)

I am rarely bitter but still fondly hope to retain acute musical judgment. I am with the great English essayist William Hazlitt (1778-1830) when he writes in the magnificent essay On Criticism in Table Talk: Essays on Men and Manners (1822).

"I would rather be a man of disinterested taste and liberal feeling, to see and acknowledge truth and beauty wherever I found it, than a man of greater and more original genius, to hate, envy, and deny all excellence but my own [...] A genuine criticism should, as I take it, reflect the colours, the light and shade, the soul and body of a work."

I truly thank from my heart all those friends and acquaintances, unknown listeners and especially the brilliant young and mature pianists who perform at these festivals.  They have often read what I have written and obviously appreciate my rather intense approach. However on the larger international, English-speaking  landscape and present era in which we live, they are numerically too insignificant to justify my intense work and investment of time researching and writing 'reviews'.

If you have time, I suggest you read the perceptive article below by Dr. Alan Walker, Emeritus Professor of Music, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. He is the author of An Anatomy of Musical Criticism, also a remarkable four volume book on Franz Liszt and a recent outstanding book concerning the life and work of Fryderyk Chopin.  I respect his opinions a great deal.

The article was published in the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1998. It goes a long and thought-provoking way to furthering the debate on the fraught subject of music criticism.

Here is the serious Alan Walker text from Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Musical Criticism

Alan Walker

Musical criticism is branch of philosophical aesthetics concerned with making judgments about composition or performance or both.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to show that a value judgment can stand for anything that is even remotely true about music, as opposed to standing for something that is merely a personal whim on the part of the critic, since there is no such thing as an organized body of knowledge called “musical criticism.” The entire history of musical criticism can be summed up as a struggle to forge itself into a suitable tool for coming to grips with the art of music.

Historical development

The criticism of music first gained serious hold in the 17th and 18th centuries. Among the first writer-musicians to make systematic contributions to criticism were Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France, Johann Mattheson in Germany, and Charles Avison and Charles Burney in England. Their work coincided with the emergence of periodicals and newspapers all over Europe. The first journal devoted entirely to music criticism was Critica Musica, founded by Johann Mattheson in 1722. Mattheson had a number of successors, notably the Leipzig composer Johann Adolph Scheibe, who brought out his weekly Der critische Musicus between the years 1737 and 1740 and whose chief claim to notoriety was his scurrilous attack on Bach. Generally speaking, the criticism of the time was characterized by an obsessive interest in the rules of music, and it tended to judge practice in the light of theory—a fatal philosophy. Mattheson, for instance, castigated Bach for ignoring certain rules of word setting in his cantatas.

At the turn of the century, the age of academicism dissolved into the age of description. Schumann, Liszt, and Berlioz, the leaders of the Romantic era, frequently saw in music the embodiment of some poetic or literary idea. They composed program symphonies, symphonic poems, and lesser pieces bearing such titles as “novellette,” “ballade,” and “romance.” Their literary outlook naturally influenced criticism, the more so as they themselves frequently wrote it. In his pamphlet On John Field’s Nocturnes (1859), Liszt wrote, in the purple prose of the time, of their “balmy freshness, seeming to exhale copious perfumes; soothing as the slow, measured rocking of a boat or the swinging of a hammock, amid whose smoothly placid oscillations we seem to hear the dying murmur of melting caresses.” Most of the Romantics were guilty of this type of descriptive criticism. Its weakness is that, unless the music is already known, the criticism is meaningless; and once the music is known, the criticism is redundant, since the music itself says it all far more effectively.

The most influential critic of the age was Schumann. In 1834 he founded the periodical Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (“New Journal for Music”) and remained its editor in chief for 10 years. Its pages are full of the most perceptive insights into music and music makers. The first major article Schumann wrote was a laudatory essay on the young Chopin, “Hats off, gentlemen, a genius” (1834), and the last, called “New Paths” (1853), introduced to the world the young Brahms.

During the second half of the 19th century, the critical scene was dominated by the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, who is rightly regarded as the father of modern musical criticism. He was a prolific writer, and his book Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854: The Beautiful in Music) is a milestone in the history of criticism. It took an anti-Romantic stand, stressing the autonomy of music and its basic independence of the other arts, and it encouraged a more analytical, less descriptive approach toward criticism. The book was continually reprinted until 1895, appearing in many languages.

Inspired by Hanslick’s example, critics in the 20th century rejected the age of description for the age of analysis. Scientific materialism created a climate of rationalism from which music did not remain immune. Critics spoke of “structure,” “thematicism,” “tonality”—a far cry from Liszt’s “dying murmur of melting caresses.” A group of musician–thinkers arose who questioned the very basis of musical aesthetics. They included Hugo Riemann, Heinrich Schenker, Sir Henry Hadow, Sir Donald Tovey, Ernest Newman, and, above all, Arnold Schoenberg, whose theoretical writings show him to be one of the most radical thinkers of the age. Criticism itself was criticized, its basic weakness clearly diagnosed. The search was on to discover the criteria for the evaluation of music. This quest—made ever more urgent by the rapidly changing language of music in the late 20th century—has dominated the work of serious critics ever since.

The practice of criticism

Criticism always seems to founder on the same small handful of basic problems. These problems are essentially philosophical. They appear to be insoluble. They are aggravated not only by the esoteric nature of music but also by the psychological mystery surrounding the very act of criticism. Are there any “standards” in criticism? If so, can they be defined? Are they objective or subjective? If the latter, can they possibly be true? These questions are fundamental. They disclose the full range of the philosophy of criticism.

Musical criticism has a primary aim: the evaluation of music. How does the critic set about this difficult task? The scientific school of criticism holds that he apply certain standards to the work in question. His evaluation is the result of testing music against his critical yardsticks and observing how far short it falls. According to this view, a value judgment is like a prize to be won by careful, objective, intelligent effort. This is an attractive notion, particularly among critics. It fosters the view that the critic is in a position of authority, and that he possesses the means to arbitrate over the creative artist. Unfortunately for criticism, there is nothing to suggest that this is anything but an illusion.

If one reflects on the way in which one listens to music, a basic fact is apparent. Music’s value is inherent; it resides in the work of art itself. A value judgment is something that comes across as part of musical communication. Paradoxically, a value judgment appears to be necessary before the critical process can start. The consequences of this observation are far-reaching. Rather than critics with standards, there appear to be only works with standards, which critics observe. It is not necessary to prove that Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony is a masterpiece in order to be certain that it is a masterpiece. Its mastery is self-evident. Critics did not bestow value on Mozart; they perceived it in him.

Music as an autonomous communication

Music is autonomous. It refers to nothing outside itself. This sets it apart from the other arts, which rely upon the outside world for their images. A hat, a man, or an apple tree may all turn up in a painting, a sculpture, or a play. Indeed, they may be part of the very language of visual art and therefore essential to its understanding. Music has no such aids toward comprehension. It is completely lacking in conceptual crutches. It develops according to its own laws. It is a purely musical truth that is comprehended on a purely musical level. The purity of musical communication is what the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was admiring when he said that all of art aspires toward the condition of music.

The totally musical nature of musical experience raises a difficulty for the critic. Such experience is virtually impossible for him to describe. Consequently, the critic can hardly be called “the man in the middle,” a role frequently assigned to him. Music is not like a foreign language that requires an expert to translate it for a lay audience. It is a universal tongue. It either speaks to each listener directly, or it does not speak to him at all. If it speaks, the critic’s words are already redundant. If it does not speak, a problem exists that his words cannot solve.

Two important consequences flow from these views. They are among the axioms of criticism. First: since music is autonomous, all knowledge about it must spring from experience of it; practice, in short, precedes theory. Second: because of the purely private and personal nature of musical communication, a work’s mastery can only be demonstrated to those listeners who already know about it, who have already experienced it—and they hardly require the demonstration. To those listeners who have not experienced it, a work’s mastery is not demonstrable. If it were demonstrable, it goes without saying that critical differences would cease to exist: there would be nothing to prevent those who had experienced it from converting those who had not. Yet critical differences remain.

Objectivity versus subjectivity

A difficulty confronting all critics concerns the subjectivity of their observations. Since music is perceived subjectively, so the argument runs, does this not reduce criticism to mere personal opinion? And if this is so, what makes one critic’s opinions any truer than another’s? This objection can be disposed of, first, on the broadest philosophical level. Since all things perceivable are perceived subjectively, the charge of subjectivity must either be leveled against every other human endeavor, or it must be withdrawn from criticism. Second, and more to the point, what would be said of a performer who proclaimed to all the world his objectivity, his non-involvement with music? As for the composer, he would be thought strange indeed if he managed to avoid subjective entanglement with his creations. Why is it considered virtuous for performers and composers to enjoy an inner participation with music and not critics? Quite clearly, there is a contradiction here.

The crucial question facing every critic is how to demonstrate the truth of his reaction. Yet all critics cannot be right; many are diametrically opposed to one another. It is no wonder that musical criticism has been described as stuck at the litmus paper stage: critics take a dip into music, and one sees what colour they turn. Plainly, criticism remains indistinguishable from mere speculation until the critic develops the means of confirming the truth of his views. If he wishes to develop such means, it is to the theory of criticism that he must turn

Meanwhile, a definition of musical criticism emerges: Criticism is the rationalization of intuitive musical understanding.

Issues in the theory of criticism

If the practice of criticism, as has been noted, can be reduced to one thing—expressing value judgments—the theory of criticism is essentially one thing, too—explaining them. It is not enough for critics to assert that one work is a masterpiece, another a mediocrity. An attempt must be made to explain why, and this may lead to a central discovery. A masterpiece is not a matter of chance, nor is a mediocrity. Both are symptomatic of deep, far-reaching principles.

Unity

When Rudolph Reti, the Viennese critic, was a young man studying music at the Vienna Conservatory, he once stood up in the middle of a composition class and put the following question to his professor: “Why can’t we take the themes of one work and substitute the themes of another?” Reti did not receive a very convincing reply and was therefore stimulated to think about the problem for himself. Forty years later, he worked out an answer in his book The Thematic Process in Music (1951). Briefly, it was that masterpieces diversify a unity. They grow from an all-embracing idea. Their contrasting themes hang together because each of them represents a different aspect of a single basic thought. This observation was not new. Schoenberg had made it years earlier. So, too, had Heinrich Schenker, who used it as the basis for a major theory of aesthetics in his monumental Das Meisterwerk in der Musik, 3 vol. (1926–29; “The Masterpiece in Music”). Reti sharpened the concept. He made the critics think again about what, precisely, they mean when they talk about the integrity of a musical structure.

Reti’s thesis can be vividly demonstrated by taking an existing masterpiece and substituting random themes from another. Even if such themes preserve a semblance of continuity (matching the key, metre, and mood of the themes they displace), they lose the deep sense of unity communicated by the original.

Not all musicians accept this theory. They argue that many composers, notably Bach, have put together works by borrowing materials from other sources. They fail to realize, however, that the act of borrowing is so highly selective that it, too, must be regarded as part of the creative process. The question then becomes: Why was that particular theme or movement borrowed?

Medium

Another question is why a composition expresses itself through its particular medium? Why that medium rather than another?

If a masterpiece is transferred from the instrumental medium for which it was conceived to some other, alien medium, it undergoes a curious distortion. Such distortion offers the clearest proof that a musical law is operating in the original: an identity of the idea with its medium. A master’s inner inspiration adapts to his outer terms of reference. Individual instruments lay down individual limitations. If a composer ignores this fact, he can never be certain that his creative aims will ever coincide with the musical results.

Occasionally, a great composer deliberately engineers a collision between the idea and the medium for a special musical purpose. The fugue in Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata, for example, is one of the most physically awkward works to play in the entire piano repertoire. It has been composed against, rather than for, the instrument. Some bars are strictly unplayable, and Beethoven knew it; they contribute to the sense of struggle that is an essential part of musical communication, which is present even in the greatest performance. The orchestration of this fugue by the Austrian composer and conductor Felix Weingartner does a major service to musical aesthetics by providing an alternative musical experience of the same work; but by rendering the difficult easy, his orchestral version robs the music of its basic characteristics. It is a splendid illustration of the way in which, in Beethoven’s original, a creative aim has been identified with a physical limitation.

Thematic chronology

A further question is why the chronology of the themes of a masterpiece cannot be changed. Why does one thematic chronology sound good, another bad? If the movements of a great sonata or a symphony are switched around, the result will be musically inferior. If the themes of one movement are mixed with those from the same work’s companion movements, the result may even be an artistic disaster.

An illuminating exercise in criticism is to “reconstruct” a masterpiece so that its thematic running order is altered; that is, to transfer the first movement’s second subject to the position occupied by the finale’s second subject, and vice versa. Any musician can carry out this simple experiment for himself. Nothing is better calculated to reveal to him the presence of a creative principle of contrast distribution in the original. Given the thousands of different directions in which the material of a work could be unfolded, a master chooses the “right” one, the one that maintains structural tension—and, hence, musical interest. The themes of a masterpiece cannot assume one another’s functions. They are born to fulfill specific roles. They develop out of each other because they create a musical need for each other.

Economy

Composers through the ages have hinted at a law of economy toward which all great music strives. Brahms, in a characteristic piece of understatement, once said of composing that “the essential thing is that every note should be in its place.” Beethoven expressed the same truth another way. Once, after he had heard the “Funeral March” from the opera Achille by the Italian composer Ferdinand Paer, he observed: “I must compose that!” To “fix” the idea, to define it, to pin it down—both composers felt that this was of the essence. Notes are redundant that do not stand for precisely those musical thoughts they are supposed to express. To have more notes, or less, than are actually required to communicate musical meaning must render such meaning correspondingly obscure. This law may be divided into three subsidiary principles.

First is the principle of identity between the idea and its utterance. There is a concrete musical difference between what a composer intends (the idea) and what he actually says (the utterance). Some musicians contend that the distinction is merely theoretical, that in practice it cannot be made. Fortunately, composers have left ample evidence to the contrary. Consider the act of revision. Revision is an acknowledgment by the composer himself that what he actually wrote was not, on reflection, what he actually meant. Revision is self-criticism. The very word implies that a composer has a re-vision of the work, that he returns to the utterance and modifies it in order to be truer to the idea. Revision can sometimes result in criticism on a grand, creative level. Composers occasionally revise the work of other composers with such effective results that the original composition may be eclipsed by the new version, the “criticism,” often succeeding where the original work failed. Bach’s arrangement (in A minor) for four harpsichords of Vivaldi’s Violin Concerto in B Minor, for example, is more than an adaptation from one medium to another. It is an act of musical criticism par excellence. Vivaldi created the idea. But it was left to Bach to give it complete utterance.

Second is the relation of form and content. Why does music unfold a particular structure? Why that kind of structure rather than another? The textbooks on form remain silent. Yet this is a profound question. It is surely of paramount interest to know why music unrolls in one direction rather than another. Inspired music appears to carry within itself its own blueprint, according to which it propels itself across precise distances and in precise directions. If it is prematurely halted, diverted, or too long continued—all hallmarks of creative immaturity—it loses the sense of punctuality, the feeling of arriving “on time,” the knowledge of being in the right place at the right moment, which characterizes each stage of an emerging structure masterfully handled.

Some musicians have observed that the distinction between form and content is a false one. They rightly argue that no one hears one without the other, that the one is an organic result of the other. Therefore, why not abolish the distinction? They are right in regard to good forms, forms that arise inevitably from the musical material, in which case there is indeed no distinction to abolish. But bad forms, those that are not true to their content, produce a symptomatic division between the inner direction the music was born to follow and the outer direction it was made to follow.

The third subsidiary principle is audibility. The objective of all compositions is to make a total aural impact. There have been some famous miscalculations, intrinsically inaudible passages, which even the most illustrious performance could not render audible. A striking case of inaudibility occurs toward the end of Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor, in which the “big tune” of the finale returns in full orchestral splendour and obliterates the part of the solo pianist. In the concert hall, it is an extraordinary sight to see the soloist racing up and down the keyboard, fortissimo, without producing any sound. The observation is beyond all question and may be checked every time the work is played in public.

In 1937 Schoenberg completed an orchestration of Brahms’s Piano Quartet in G Minor, Opus 25. As a young man, he had regularly participated in performances of the quartet. Time and again, he was bothered by its intermittent inaudibility: the piano tended to swamp the strings. Schoenberg’s orchestration, as he himself claimed, attempted to put matters right. It remains an exercise in musical audibility—one master helping another to communicate. It constitutes an act of criticism on the highest creative level.

Other principles could be formulated to show that a theory of criticism is also a theory of composition. A search for these principles is really a search for the ultimate justification of the feelings of value inspired by great music.

Criticism and performance

Since music does not exist until it is brought to life by the player, two basic requirements are demanded of the critic: a knowledge of the work and a knowledge of the instrument. Many critics talk loosely about “the work” and “the performance” as though they were separate aspects of musical experience. They are, in fact, different aspects of a total musical experience, and it can be misleading to split them. Much bad criticism results from trying to do so. The Polish-American pianist Leopold Godowsky used to survey his audience before commencing his recitals in an endeavour to discover how many “detectives” there were in the house. Being such a superb pianist, he attracted all those critics exclusively interested in keyboard gymnastics. On the other hand, those interested exclusively in the composition may be equally biased. In this age of authenticity, when the urtext is the thing, many a promising career has been blighted through what, in the profession, is called a “departure from the text.” It is not always appreciated that at least a part of the total musical experience is created by the performer, who has a twofold artistic duty: first, to the fundamental character of the work he interprets; and, second, to his own artistic conscience, which tells him how the work should unfold. The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

The criticism of performance is the most public, and publicized, aspect of a critic’s function. It is also the least important. Unfortunately, what particular critics think of particular artists accounts for most contemporary music criticism. This is due rather to arbitrary factors than to the critic’s sense of priority. Most newspapers insist that a musical event be reported the following day. The critic, consequently, is forced to telephone his review to his newspaper immediately after the concert, limiting himself to a strictly prescribed number of words. Under these conditions, it is not surprising that most criticism consists of predictable accounts of what was played, who played it, and how it was played. Nevertheless, performing artists are obliged to rely on these critical notices if they are to secure further work, even though neither critics nor artists like it. The box-office economics of performance are so delicate that bad publicity, or no publicity, can wreck artists and management alike.