Handling Bad Reviews
By Thomas Wolf
Can you identify the composers who were the subject of the following reviews:
“His second symphony is a crass monster, a hideously written wounded dragon, that refuses to expire and thoroughly bleeding in the Finale, furiously beats about with its tail erect.”
“The Finale [of his fifth symphony] is riotous beyond endurance. Instead of applying local color with a brush, [the composer] emptied the paint pot with a jerk.”
“His music which professes to dismiss all elements of melody, appears strangely futile, vacuous, and non-existent.”
The answers (the names of the composers) will come at the end of this blog; but let’s just say that the composers whose works are described are considered among the greatest in the history of western classical music and the compositions are audience favorites today.
Nicolas Slonimsky collected dozens of bad reviews from Beethoven’s time to the mid-twentieth century in his book, Lexicon of Musical Invective.
Respected writers, from the earliest days of formal musical criticism, have assaulted composers and performers with words that have stung. So much so that the writer, pianist, composer and conductor, Nicolas Slonimsky, collected a panoply of outrageously negative reviews, including the ones above, in his book, Lexicon of Musical Invective[1]—prose that over time has made the writers look silly at best and downright ignorant at worst. The composers and works they have described have become classics.
How to respond to a bad review?
Composer, Max Reger, responded to a negative review by suggesting it was headed for his toilet where it belonged.
Certainly, a clever riposte like this one written by composer Max Reger from his bathroom after a very negative review, has a satisfying feel to it: “I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it shall be behind me.”
Yet often, such a response only encourages a larger readership for the original offending piece and makes its subject appear petulant or worse.
My Uncle, Boris Goldovsky, used to make an announcement to his singers on the first day of his opera company’s tours. He never read reviews, he claimed, so if singers received some bad ones (as inevitably would happen), they should not worry that he, as company director, would ever see them or would be swayed by them. It was a reassuring claim. But he went further with this advice: “Don’t read reviews. You generally won’t remember the good ones but you will remember and believe many words of the bad ones.”
The Director of the Goldovsky Opera Theatre promised his singers on the first day of the tours that they need not worry—he would not read any of the reviews, a promise that others in positions of authority might emulate.
His advice was prescient for me. Though I have no recollection of most of the reviews I have received over decades of playing concerts, the handful of ones I remember are negative. I even remember one from a summer concert series in Martha’s Vineyard when the reviewer complained not only about my flute playing, but also about my verbal introductions of each piece from the stage. That must have been forty years ago. It still bothers me.
I was reminded of all this recently when a good friend and colleague, Gregor Benko, sent me two reviews of other members of my musical family that he had in an archive about the pianist, Josef Hofmann. These were added to my own collection of family reviews that I had assembled some years ago as I was writing a biography of my grandmother, the violinist Lea Luboshutz.[2] It included not only her reviews but those of other musical relatives. Almost all those I had collected were quite laudatory and I quoted some in the book to help establish that in their day, these performers were highly regarded.
Copy of the Luboshutz-Hofmann program at Carnegie Hall that received flattering reviews.
One of the reviews that Benko sent me was typical of those in my collection. It was from a publication called the Musical Digest and it was dated September 7, 1926. Describing a performance of César Franck’s violin sonata that my grandmother had performed in London with Josef Hofmann, the review stated that “never had so many hitherto undiscovered points in the music been brought to light all at once. Each movement was elaborately got up and presented with consummate ability.” A few months later, on January 26, 1927, the two musicians would play in Carnegie Hall with equally flattering reviews.
But it was not that London review that commanded most of my attention—after all, it was just another good one. Benko had sent another in the form of an undated, unsigned typescript. It reported on a concert given at the Camden (Maine) Opera House as a benefit for the Camden Hospital and it must have been from the mid-1930s. Camden was, at the time, part of the community that housed the Curtis Institute of Music’s summer music colony which Hofmann directed. Faculty and students would reside there for many weeks including those who were involved in the performance under review—teaching, studying and playing concerts, often for the benefit of local charities.
The performers for the concert under review included my grandmother playing violin; the English cellist, Felix Salmond; the Russian pianist, Isabelle Vangerova (all Curtis faculty members); and my uncle Boris Goldovsky, a Curtis student at the time who played piano in the opening number. The review was devastating.
Had the review focused on my uncle, I could have understood the writer’s approach. After all, my uncle was merely a student at the time and he had spent most of his days at Curtis studying conducting with Fritz Reiner rather than piano. (For the record, he had studied piano earlier in Europe with two of the greatest teachers—Artur Schnabel and Ernst von Dohnanyi.) But Boris received only one brief swipe about his drowning out of the others in the opening number. No, the surprise for me was the savagery reserved for the other three musicians—all of whom had enjoyed international careers.
I was especially surprised that some of the most biting comments were about the performance of Tchaikovsky’s trio—a piece my grandmother had performed to acclaim throughout Russia, including being selected to play it at Leo Tolstoy’s memorial service in Moscow. At about the same time, Vangerova had been making some of the earliest recordings in Russia and after the Russian Revolution had been touring and giving recitals throughout the USSR and western Europe. As for Felix Salmond, his chamber music playing (for which the review criticized him) was hardly shabby. He had premiered both Edward Elgar’s string quartet in E minor and his piano quartet in A minor. In addition, Salmond was selected by the composer to premiere his famous cello concerto. How bad could this concert in the little town of Camden, Maine be?
Lea Luboshutz and Felix Salmond in Maine at about the time of the concert and devastating review.
Why was I taking all this so seriously? I was reading a typescript, after all, that may or may not have been published in the local weekly paper with a circulation of a few hundred people. Or perhaps, it had been written by some smart-aleck students belittling their teachers anonymously—a common hobby for music students who like showing up their elders. On the other hand, the typescript had made its way to Josef Hofmann who was at that time the Director of the Curtis Institute. Could this review have been written by another faculty member letting Hofmann know his teachers were not playing well? Could the title—"Benefit Concert Given by Finished Players”—suggest that despite the performing careers of these artists, their performing days were behind them—they were “finished” (such is the paranoia that bad reviews engender). However, if the review was meant to damage the reputations of the performers in Hofmann’s eyes, it had failed since all three continued to teach at Curtis during his entire tenure as Director and well after he departed from the Institute. If it was meant to shame Boris Goldovsky in Hofmann’s eyes, why would the senior musician have given the young man a generously inscribed photograph describing Boris as “a friend and excellent colleague” at about the same time.
Curtis Director, Josef Hofmann, did not appear to take the review too seriously based on the fact that all the faculty members remained at the Institute and Boris Goldovsky received this generously inscribed photograph.
In the end, the joke was on me. Here I was almost a century after the review had been written, obsessing about it. As Benko wrote me after learning my response, “The fact that you at first were fooled into thinking this was a terrible, real review is itself an example of the effect bad reviews can have on performers, the sometimes devastating power of nasty criticism on musicians.” Indeed, I was guilty of letting the review get under my skin. Taking a deep breath and remembering Boris Goldovsky’s advice to his singers about ignoring ALL reviews, I decided to develop a few somewhat tongue-in-cheek rules for musicians (and other creative people) concerning reviews.
Rules for Reviews for Musicians
If at all possible, don’t read any of your reviews. If the critics really knew so much, how come they aren’t on the concert stage or writing a symphony or a novel?
If you do read your reviews, don’t take them seriously, whether pro or con. It is as dangerous to believe adulatory reviews as negative ones.
Don’t send a response even if a publication invites you to. (As a reader of the “New York Review of Books,” I am always amused by the writers whose books are the subject of criticism who are invited to respond to the reviews. Once they do, the reviewers are invited to respond to the authors’ responses, always giving the critics the last word and the opportunity for one-upmanship.)
Don’t discuss and carp about a bad review with others. The sooner the piece can be forgotten and die the better. As my mother used to say, “Gain altitude.”
Tell a friend to read your reviews and save the best of the good ones. They will be useful in your publicity material (which is all they are good for). NB. Such was the practice of the novelist, George Eliot. George Henry Lewes read her reviews and only passed on the good ones.
If you can’t help yourself and you have to read a bad review and it bothers you, write a clever response. Make the critic look as bad and as ignorant as you can.
DON’T SEND YOUR CLEVER RESPONSE OR SHOW IT TO ANYONE.
Finally, throw out the review (or delete it) but save your response. If you ever feel compelled to return to a bad review, take out your response instead. It may make you feel a little better.
Notes
1. The composers whose works were being reviewed at the opening of this blog were in order of quotation: Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Debussy.
2. The review in question is quoted in its entirety below:
BENEFIT CONCERT GIVEN BY FINISHED PLAYERS
A so-called concert of Chamber Music was given last night at the Camden Opera House. Intended as a benefit for the Camden Hospital, its success in this particular was complete, inasmuch as the entire audience was removed to the hospital immediately after the concert.
The Beethoven Trio in B flat Major, Opus 11, opened the programme. Also every exit opened as the musicians in the audience left the theatre. This seemed most unjust to the writer, for the performance was noteworthy in every respect, with the possible exception of technique, ensemble, quality of tone, intonation, and other essentials indicative of general musical understanding. It should be added that the players were lost in their devotion to the music. In fact, Mr. Salmond never succeeded in finding his place, but this emergency was successfully met by Mr. Goldovsky, whose piano playing completely drowned out the other parts.
Justifiably miffed by the above circumstance, but completely unaware of its agreeable reception by the audience, Madame Luboshutz and Mr. Salmond omitted the piano entirely from the second number and played the Passacaglia by Haendel-Halverson without accompaniment. This unfortunate error of judgment, which precipitated immediate confusion between the performers, owing to the lack of rhythmical support, caused a near riot in the audience, which was quelled when it was announced that the final number would include the piano. After the performance, it was openly admitted that Madame Luboshutz and Mr. Salmond apparently learned music in no time.
The performance of the Tchaikowsky Trio which ended the program, left nothing to be desired, especially Chamber Music. The players had evidently decided that the one who played the loudest was the best musician. It is a matter of record that Madame Vengerova won handily, Mr. Salmond was a poor second, while Madame Luboshutz achieved her first real success of the evening, being seen, but not heard. It is worthy of mention that Madame Luboshutz, while somewhat indifferent to long notes, played the short notes with passionate, seductive abandon. Mr. Salmond, on the other hand, omitting the short notes entirely, scored heavily with the long ones, thus insuring a perfect rhythmical balance. As the concert ended, the management hastened to announce that the remaining concerts of the series would be indefinitely postponed, the first concert having “Capped the Climax.”