The House of Music: Art in an Era of Institutions

...An American leftist called Rzewski wrote variations on The People United Will Never Be Defeated, a radical song from Allende's Chile...

...He is certainly unafraid to snap at the most distinguished anklesColin Welch writes regularly for the London Spectator...

...Call the witness Nietzsche...

...Rzewski's politics or the message he was trying to convey...

...Well, he is kinder to some moderns than I would be, as most critics have been since Hanslick was floored by Wagner-the great man-bites-dog sensation of nineteenth-century Vienna...

...I bet not...

...He views the musical audience as necessarily limited, "largely self-selecting, a relatively small public marked by the willingness to make sacrifices of other pleasure for the sake of artistic experience...

...The house of music is a holy place to him...

...Comedy in art is not, I suspect, Mr...

...Rossini's Cinderella is for Mr...

...He snaps at Nicolai's Merry Wives of Windsor, "of no more than historical interest...

...Good heavens: I thought it was the sparkling melodies and ensembles, the high spirits and poetry of this enchanting work that I adored, though historical interest can hardly be denied to a piece which so felicitously combines elements of Weber and Mendelssohn...

...the pathology, hysteria and instability" which are "most readily accessible to the contemporary (i.e., modern) listener," but which are "not all, or even the best part, of what Hugo Wolfs art is about...

...He suggests (perhaps rightly) that the City Opera lacks the stars for the former and the "necessary concentration and investment" for the latter...

...Yet no one could doubt that it is a true music critic whose pieces (mostly from Commentary) are here collected...

...My music criticism is not only music criticism," Samuel Lipman might just say...

...Harold Schonberg of the New York Times magnanimously called it "an ingenious heartfelt piece...

...Lecturing at Aspen on Liszt's Mephisto Waltz, Mr...

...Well, of critics now out of fashion, there is often something lovable about what they loved, something hateful about what they vainly opposed...

...Like their contemporaries, music and students lack general culture...

...Lipman found no one there who knew the vague outlines of the Faust legend, not to mention Lenau's, Goethe's, or Mann's treatment of it...

...At the hoi polloi his hackles rise alarmingly...

...at Zubin Mehta playing music from Star Wars for 17,500 screaming pop fans in the Hollywood Bowl...

...He takes Shaw to bits both as critic and thinker: high ideals and high income, "hits and misses . . . excesses of praise and criticism, prejudices . . . cruel eugenic fantasies, an exponent of 'progressive' opinion ugly then and now...

...Touchel Not only music criticism: In order to keep inviolate the blest hall of song, our watchdog ranges far and wide over the neighboring terrain, over the society and culture which produces music, organizes it, pays for it, "loves" it (many), understands it (alas, few...

...Of it he is the faithful unsleeping watchdog, ferocious, formidably intelligent and well-schooled, ever on guard against low standards in composition, repertory, and performance, like a mastiff with brains and taste...

...Perhaps they would coincide more nearly if I shared his prodigious learning and understanding: He is often operating beyond the frontiers of my knowledge...

...he leaps up with rapture...

...Yet a few pages later we find him implicitly lamenting that the Met can find no time for Victor Herbert's Natoma, Deems Taylor's King's Henchman, and Howard Hanson's Merry Mount-"resonant presences in the history books...

...at a concert series billed "Mozart, I Love You Madly...

...Grrr, snap, crack, ouch, grrrrr...

...Music studies are no longer valued for themselves, but as "ego therapy for the socially disadvantaged or as a tool for democratizing elite values...

...Even Carmen...

...I cannot end, however, without expressing my respect and gratitude for a man like Mr...

...Phew...

...A real terror, then, this Lipman...

...In general, Mr...

...Whatever is said even in praise of Elliott Carter, for instance, has had the effect of frightening me off...

...He bares his fangs at boosters and do-gooders who chase with public funds after audiences "in inner cities and barren wastes, youth centers and homes for the aged, schools and prisons...

...Lipman's standards and my own are not always identical...

...Good stuff there may be in all these, but better than Nicolai and Rossini...

...Lipman shrewdly wonders "whether a similarly ingenious and heartfelt piece based on an Afrikaner marching song would be granted a similar exemption from consideration of its politics...

...What, all...

...Think of old Hanslick, not all wrong...

...Barking at the door of the New York City Opera, he flies at some dear old friends-Puccini's Tosca, Flotow's Martha, Bizet's Carmen, all "tentative and a bit vulgar in appeal...

...Lipman who, in a sliding and disintegrating culture, sets high standards and has the courage and skill to defend them resolutely contra mun-dum...

...On these few, on family, friends, and tasteful houseguests (no blaring brass for them...

...Lipman a "banality," unsuitable for a "prestigious" (sic) airing at the City...

...Fischer-Dieskau in Wolf, "verging on the hysterical," shouting, crooning, "overwrought, fussy," "fostering...

...He criticizes other critics, and not only for their music criticism either...

...Is he fearless...

...Not only music criticism, but criticism of society, and in particular of modern educational quackery which, applied to an already precarious academic discipline, allowed bright students to drift off into primitivism and irrationality, and produced between 1965 and 1975 an academic lost generation...

...Lipman's forte: Even Verdi's Falstaffhe damns with faint praise-"a certain picaresque grandeur...

...at a Public Broadcasting Service gala fund-raising concert which featured not only Freni, Ghiaurov, Milnes, Bergonzi, Domingo, and Bum-bry but also Miss Piggy (who addressed the conductor as "big mouth Levine"), Cleo Laine and John Dankworth...

...Lipman growls at bel canto operas, wags his tail for "solid works," "true heavyweights" like Don Giovanni, Die Meistersinger, Der Rosenkavalier, and Pelleas et Melisande...

...at televised concerts which distract attention from the music onto "emoting, gesticulating coiffured conductors...

...He has his softer side-a record of Grieg's Elegiac Melody reminds him "of what aching beauty can be produced by a great string section [the Boston Symphony] under a great conductor" (Koussevitsky...

...Schwarzkopf in Wolf, "coyness," "entirely inadequate," "nervousness and self-pity...

...He ridicules Shaw's eulogies of Goetz, as also Harold Schonberg for liking Spohr, Raff, Kalkbrenner, Hummel, and Reger better than Elliott Carter...

...Confronted by such massive ignorance, what can our watchdog do but roll over and sham dead...

...Perhaps it should therefore avoid both: But it is the latter deficiency, I think, he deplores most...

...It is of course not necessary to consider Mr...

...Those who strive to enlarge the audience by coercive or vulgar means he savages with a fearful relish...

...12.50 paper Colin Welch My music is not only music," declared Wagner, earning himself a cold rebuke from Nietzsche-"What true musician ever spoke like that...

...But such melting moments are rare...

...at musical "Workshops, Lecture/Demonstrations, Educational or Community Programs...

...As I have said, with less diffidence perhaps than would be proper, Mr...

...THE HOUSE OF MUSIC: ART IN AN ERA OF INSTITUTIONS Samuel Lipman/David R. Godine/$22.50...

...This is odd, since his own sense of the ridiculous is mordant and unerring...

...Like many good watchdogs, ours is an elitist, a snob unashamed...