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RAVINIA MAGAZINE | JULY 9 – JULY 15, 2018
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By John Schauer
In this age of online
“thumbs up” or “thumbs
down” reviews of every-
thing from freezers and
denim jeans to movies and
music, it’s hard for some
to recall the time when
music reviews were more
than popularity polls and
critics were taken serious-
ly—sometimes too much
so, including by themselves.
O en you nd yourself
surprised at how nasty
some of them can get, but
if we’re going to be honest
with ourselves, let’s admit
it: everyone enjoys reading an artfully
bitchy review. It isn’t the positive, glowing
reviews that we read to each other the
next day. And no composer has ever been
completely spared the slings and arrows
of outrageous critics.
Even Tchaikovsky, whose music is
some of the most beloved by today’s
audiences, had his fair share. His First
Piano Concerto (performed by Inon
Barnatan on July ) today is regarded as
the most popular piano concerto of them
all, but you would not guess it from the
comments of some critics back when the
piece received its
world premiere (in
Boston, no less!). e critic of the Boston
publication
Dwight’s Journal of Music
called it an “extremely di cult, strange,
wild, ultra-modern Russian concerto” and
asked, “Could we ever learn to love such
music?” A Russian correspondent for a
Saint Petersburg rag was more succinct:
“Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, like
the rst pancake, is a op.” Nor were these
the last bad reviews he would receive.
His nal composition, the “Pathétique”
Symphony (conducted by Marin Alsop
on July ), according to the critic of the
Boston Evening Transcript
, “threads all the
foul ditches and sewers of human despair;
it is as unclean as music well can be.” I
suppose it’s possible the critic meant that
in the good sense, but I’m not sure that
there is one.
Without a sense of the irony,
Tchaikovsky himself, like many other
composers, occasionally indulged in the
poison pen when evaluating the music
of his colleagues. If you like Wagner’s
operas as much as I do, you will love what
Tchaikovsky wrote to his brother a er
attending the world premiere of Wagner’s
Ring of the Nibelungs
at Bayreuth: “Even-
tually it all came to an end, and with the
nal chords of
e Twilight of the Gods
I
felt as if I had been liberated from captiv-
ity. Perhaps the
Nibelungen
is a very great
work, but what I do know for sure is that
never before has there been anything as
boring and tedious as this spun-out yarn.”
(If you haven’t guessed, I’m not a big fan
of Wagner.)
On the other hand,
Tchaikovsky just as freely
expressed his admiration for
music he liked. He was ap-
palled by his patroness Na-
dezhda von Meck’s dislike of
Mozart; to Tchaikovsky he
was “the musical Christ”—
and “the musical Jehovah”
was Beethoven. Tchaikovsky
o en relaxed by playing
piano arrangements of Bee-
thoven’s string quartets, and
in
he personally con-
ducted Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony (conducted by
Marin Alsop on July ).
But that iconic work had
fought its own uphill battle
over the years since its premiere. Its cho-
ral nale—the rst ever to be featured in
a symphony—really bothered some folks.
And I mean
really
: “An incomprehensible
union of strange harmonies (
Boston Daily
Atlas
,
); “… it appeared to be made up
of the strange, the ludicrous, the abrupt,
the ferocious, and the screechy … what all
the noise was about, it was hard to form
any idea” (Providence, RI,
); “for the
most part dull and ugly” (
Boston Musical
Record
,
). Even as recently as the
mid- th century, Winthrop Sargeant (to
his later embarrassment) described it as “a
lot of banging and shouting.”
What can we learn from all of this?
First, that critics can be spectacularly
wrong; second, that you should trust your
own ears; and third, Tchaikovsky knew
better than the critics. Especially about
Wagner.
John Schauer is a freelance writer, amateur
harpsichordist, and devoted doggie daddy,
though not in that order.
Come At Me, “Pro”!