On Stupidity in Music by Thomas Wolf
Less than a year after the premiere performance of Johannes Brahms’ third symphony on December 2, 1883 by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Boston concert goers were introduced to this composition. The reaction of the local audience was perhaps best captured by a review in the Boston Gazette on November 8, 1884 that read in part: “Like the great mass of the composer’s music, the Third Symphony of Brahms is painfully dry, deliberate and ungenial…The Finale we could not understand, and it ends in a quiet and unimpressive manner that makes it an anticlimax after the fuss and noisiness that precede it.” So much for what today is considered one of the great symphonies of the 19th century repertoire.
Boston Symphony Hall. Audiences were introduced to many great symphonic masterpieces here but the critics were often unkind.
Eight years later, Boston audiences were introduced to another important symphony—Tchaikovsky’s monumental fifth. A different reviewer, this time for the Boston Evening Transcript, wrote on October 24, 1892: “Of the Fifth Tchaikovsky Symphony one hardly knows what to say... In the Finale we have all the untamed fury of the Cossack, whetting itself for deeds of atrocity, against all the sterility of the Russian steppes. The furious peroration sounds like nothing so much as a horde of demons struggling in a torrent of brandy, the music growing drunker and drunker. Pandemonium, delirium tremens, raving, and above all, noise worse confounded!”
Finally, Boston critics were far from being done shunning the new and unfamiliar. In 1904, audiences had a chance to hear Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, arguably one of the greatest symphonic poems ever written. Here is what critic Louis Elson had to say in the Boston Daily Advertiser on February 25, 1904: “Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un faune was a strong example of modern ugliness. The faun must have had a terrible afternoon, for the poor beast brayed on muted horns and whinnied on flutes, and avoided all traces of soothing melody, until the audience began to share his sorrows.”
What does one make of this—these diatribes that seems nothing short of stupidity from people who presumably had been selected by their newspapers for their musical knowledge? Certainly, Boston’s Brahmin audiences had always had a reputation for conservative tastes and many of the local critics had been happy over the years to serve them up with words they enjoyed reading. But that explanation does not give musical criticism more widely its due. What was true of Boston has been true throughout the world and for centuries. The number of insipid and foolish remarks by music critics about works that were later deemed masterpieces could fill a book. Indeed, they did just that when Nicolas Slonimsky wrote his classic Lexicon of Musical Invective in 1953, an entire volume devoted to nothing more than outrageous reviews. New musical works especially had a particularly tough go at the beginning of their lives as the supposed tastemakers—the critics—took their pot shots.
Nicolas Slonimsky collected some of the most egregious reviews by critics of works that would later be deemed masterpieces. His 1953 book is now considered a classic.
Were all these critics stupid? Is that the nature of the breed? I used to think so, aided by members of my family—professional musicians who depended on good reviews to advance their careers but had nothing but disdain for reviewers. Yet, after reading a fascinating article called “Why Some of the Smartest People Can be so Very Stupid,” by Sacha Golob, a reader in philosophy at King’s College London and co-director of the Centre for Philosophy and Visual Arts (CPVA),[1] I am less sanguine about this rather simplistic notion Music critics are not any stupider than the rest of us. We all make stupid remarks and often it is so-called experts who make some of the stupidest.
Why is that the case? Golob’s argument is simple. “Stupidity,” he claims. “is a very specific cognitive failing. Crudely put, it occurs when you don’t have the right conceptual tools for the job. The result is an inability to make sense of what is happening and a resulting tendency to force phenomena into crude, distorting pigeonholes.”
Put another way, if throughout our lives we have always encountered grass that is green, we assume something is amiss if we encounter a grassy lawn that is blue. New musical works are often like blue grass—outside of our experience and comfort zones. We try to force the grass and the new music into categories with which we are familiar and they don’t fit. Hence they must be bad.
I would like to think that such failings are the province of others—that I and people who are near and dear to me are more sensible than that. Sadly, this is not the case. Often, on hearing a new piece of music, I react as though it is trash. It doesn’t fit what I am accustomed to and therefore it must be bad. At one time, I hated the music of György Ligeti (1923-2006), the avant-garde Hungarian-Austrian composer. I just didn’t get it. Then an event occurred that changed everything for me. I was at a concert of the Boston Symphony Orchestra that opened with a Wagner overture. The work ended quietly and beautifully on a single note when gradually and without pause that note took on a new shape and brilliance. The music shifted to something exotic and strange—something that extended the ideas of Wagner into a new realm. Brilliantly, the orchestra had chosen to transition from the Wagner to a Ligeti work without taking the usual break between pieces. It worked (at least for me) and my entire conceptual frame shifted. I can still remember the shivers that went down my spine as I first looked questioningly at the program thinking something was amiss and then allowing myself to be open to this whole new world of sound. From that day until this, I have loved and sought out the music of Ligeti. I get it.
Sadly, some of the people I have respected the most have the greatest blind spots. The more they know about a field, the more intransigent they can become to new ideas. I imagine my readers have had the same experience with people they know and respect. I cringe at an interview that the Chicago based broadcaster, Bruce McDuffie, conducted with my uncle Boris Goldovsky in 1985. By that time in his career, Uncle Boris, who was in his late sixties, was widely referred to as “Mr. Opera” because of his encyclopedic knowledge of the subject and his erudite and amusing commentaries during Metropolitan Opera intermission broadcasts. At the time of the interview, supertitles—translations projected above the stage during an opera performance—were just coming into use. McDuffie asked Uncle Boris what he thought of “the new gimmick of supertitles.” Here was Boris’ response:
My Uncle, Boris Goldovsky, delivering one of his intermission broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Despite his expertise and brilliance which led to the moniker “Mr. Opera,” he would on rare occasion make statements about the art form that today we might politely call “ill-advised.”
BG: (sighing) Yes, it is very sad. I personally find it demeaning, but I am very bad judge of that because I am a linguist. I have a brother-in-law who didn’t like opera, but the moment he saw opera with the supertitles he started loving it .There are people for whom this is important, so obviously it has an advantage. But it is a peculiar thing because it gives the impression that people don’t have to study the librettos or read things ahead of time or pay any attention. They just sit there and relax and act like morons. And many things are being sung that the supertitles don’t give the right impression. Don’t forget that to use them you have to have a certain kind of theater. The proscenium at the Metropolitan is much too tall.[2]
[NB. The Metropolitan Opera solved that problem of the height of the proscenium arch by putting the text-titles on the back of seats where patrons now have the option of turning them on and off and which have become extremely popular.]
But before dismissing Boris’ remarks as stupid (especially in light of the universal popularity of supertitles today), let’s examine what Golob would call my uncle’s “conceptual tools.” Boris believed that opera was more than a musical production—it was a form of theatre. How can one understand the theatrical elements of plot, the motivation of characters, and the subtlety of the action if one doesn’t understand the language? Translations solve that problem but not if you have to look at words rather than the actors on stage. Boris’ solution was to produce operas in the language of the audience and in the United States that meant, for most operas, translating them into English. Boris himself was a master linguist speaking eight languages and his opera translations were used by countless companies in the days before supertitles—even a production of Eugene Onegin at the Metropolitan Opera. Opera purist hated his idea, believing that an Italian opera, for example, sounds more beautiful when sung in Italian. But there were advocates on both sides of the issue by 1985. Boris’ own touring opera company, reaching people in over 500 communities throughout the United States and Canada, offered every production in English.
But that was not all. Boris grew up in Moscow where as a boy he attended performances by Konstantin Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theater, observing some of the greatest actors of the day. By comparison, the opera performances he attended in Moscow were often disappointing. Singers came to the front of the stage to belt out their arias and there was little sense of the dramatic action. Boris’ dream was to apply the theatrical elements of Stanislavski to opera production, teaching singers how to act according to the Stanislavski method, and he got his chance to do so when he was invited by Serge Koussevitzky to lead the opera department at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood.
But there was a problem. “How can singers truly understand the character they are to portray and render the emotions and actions if they don’t understand what they are singing?” he would ask. “Let them sing in their native language so they truly know who they are supposed to be and what they are supposed to feel.” Boris’ singers were consistently praised for their ability to be compelling actors, including by critics in the New York Times (one of the rare times Boris felt fondly toward critics), and his approach became so universally part of the opera world that today few remember the wooden productions that preceded them.
Thus, we might forgive Boris Goldovsky’s remarks about supertitles in 1985. The conceptual frame was such that he did not understand their potential and he saw them as a direct threat to his approach to opera in the local vernacular.
Okay, so now it is your turn. Have you ever been embarrassed by some of the stupid opinions you have uttered about music? At least now you have an excuse.