124
•. H. HAGGIN
in
fact and reasoning but also descriptions and evaluations -of pieces
of music that reveal his lack of mere critical perception-of the ability,
which Shaw had,
to
hear accurately what was to be heard
in
Mozart's
G-minor and Verdi's earlier operas, among other things.
Reporting the operation of the composer's mind was one of a
number of impressive-sounding things Newman thought of himself
as doing that he didn't really do. What he was concerned with was
that "the constitutional bias of [the composer's] mind makes him do
practically the same thing again and again when he is confronted by
much the same general idea to be expressed," so that "each composer's
general procedure can be reduced, by analysis, to a few simple formulae."
But it was Newman himself who once pointed out correctly that "the
same formula lay ready to Bach's hand on a hundred occasions, but
the inspiration that could vivify ... the formula was not always at
his command," and that this produced the difference between Bach's
workmanlike verse and his poetry. Clearly, criticism is concerned with
that difference-with what the composer achieves beyond his formulae.
It is in the particularities of this in each work that we get the real,
active, purposeful operation of the composer's mind, as against its
mechanical operation in his general formulae; it is they that constitute
the life which Forster says it is the critic's task to perceive and report;
and this life produced by the real operation of the composer's mind.
Newman, as we shall see, often was unable to perceive.
Another impressive-sounding activity Newman thought of himself
as carrying on was listening to music of the past with a mind purged,
as he wrote in 1929, "of the music ... written since the epoch when
the work was written," and "with ears contemporary with itself." OQly
with this discipline could one, faced with an opera like
Norma,
begin
to hear what "gave it its superior value in the eyes of its contemporaries,"
and did one's ears, "brutalized by the more highly colored music of
later times," recover "the sensitiveness of contemporary ears to the
finer shades of such music as Bellini's" and hear "the really vital
things in it," which he said were not the "saccharine and flaccid"
melodies but the "hundred passing little subtleties in the score." But
in dismissing the melodies as saccharine and flaccid Newman was not
hearing with the ears of Bellini's contemporaries what gave his music
its superior value for them; he was listening with ears of today--or
rather with his particular ears, which were unable to hear the beauty
of melodies like
"Tutto
e
sciolto"
and
"Ah, non credea"
in
La Son–
nambula
and
"Qui La voce"
in
I Puritani
that many listeners of today
are able to hear. And as for Bellini's contemporaries, they may have
