ARGUMENTS
115
as unprecedented in the extremes of its ostentatious vulgarity and of–
fensiveness as Gould's had been in the extremes of its slow tempos:
... So then the Gould boy comes out, and you know what,
Ossip? ... The Gould boy played the Brahms D-minor Concerto
slower than the way we used to practice it. (And between
you, me, and the corner lamppost, Ossip, maybe the reason he
plays it so slow is maybe his technique is not so good.) . . .
And it was amazing to find in the
Times
a prose that proceeded on the
level of "Every now and then Mr. Richter played a phrase in the
most ravishing manner possible. Then he would turn around and play
without apparent liaison with the previous phrase." Similarly one was
not surprised that the editors of the
Herald Tribune
didn't recognize
the deficiencies of perception in what Paul Henry Lang wrote about
Gesualdo or Berlioz; but one was amazed that they should have
tolerated Lang's atrocious writing, his outrageously offensive references
to Stravinsky's professional collaboration with Robert Craft. An done
is amazed again that they should tolerate the archly boyish gushing of
their not
that
young new critic, Alan Rich-about how "all the things
that are wrong with [Menotti's
The Last Savage]
just don't seem to
matter," since "there comes a time when high esthetic principles must
be thrown to the winds, and this, dear reader, is the time"; about how
the eclectic Menotti has this time "made the whole continent of
Europe his oyster. America too, for that matter; didn't we hear
Sardula's Act Three aria in 'The Sound of Music'? Of course we did.
But how seductive it all is! . . . Only a churl could cavil at such
treasures, hollow as they may be"; about the production that "is
gorgeous beyond dreams," the cast that is "glorious," the orchestra
that is "right on its tippy-twinkletoes."
The incident reported by Mrs. Newman, on the other hand, was
one in which an editor, despite his lack of special competence, did
attempt to exercise control over the music critic's operation. In 1950,
when Newman had been writing for the
Sunday Times
of London for
more than thirty years as the most prominent music critic of his time,
one of his weekly articles was returned to him by the paper's new editor,
who thought it suitable only for the small group of musicologists and
asked for one that would be addressed to a larger group of the paper's
half-million readers. In reply, after pointing out that this was the first
time in all the years he had been writing that an article had been
returned to him by an editor, Newman raised the question whether
he or the editor was better qualified to be the judge of what the more
intelligent part of the musical public was interested in reading about.
