BOOKS
301
The New York Review
format, all five essays on Mozart are diffuse.
There is little discussion of the musical text, of the scores, or of the
libretti in detailed structural terms. At best, the "effect" of works in a
general way is discussed, for example, how effective a drama a particu–
lar opera is. As a result, the essays do not bring the reader into contact
with the actual music in question. Many of these essays have a dual
character, as trenchant rev iews of recent concerts or books on the one
hand and as serious forays into the deeper significance of Mozart's
work on the other. As reviews of concerts, they fail to convey enough
descriptive detail to make any sense to the reader who happened not to
have been present at the concerts in ques tion, unlike George Bernard
Shaw's criticisms of London musical life or Edward Hanslick's reviews
from Vienna. Reading these pieces is somewhat like being a third party
to a conversation at an after concert reception where two people are
arguing about the performance which one missed. Craft attempts to
ridicule Harold Schoenberg, music critic of
The New York Times,
in
one essay, but in a polemical manner without enough description of
the source or the occasion of Craft's objections. Despite Craft's acerbic
and sarcastic tone, all one has gathered at the end of that particular
essay is that the two men responded differently to a performance of
The
Marriage of Figaro .
Finally, despite Craft's self-conscious attempt at
demonstrating his imaginative perception as a spectator, the implica–
tions behind the choice of the particular concerts he chooses to review
fail to become clear. Why, beyond mere jealousy, spend two pages on a
Salzburg Festival poster featuring a picture of Leonard Bernstein in
tails?
Craft's criticism and analysis of music, apart from particular
performances, the analytical dimension of his essays, lack a direct
systematic or detailed attitude to the music itself. Craft has a strong
attraction for bizarre counter-factual hypotheses; about whether music
would have been different if Mozart had never lived (he thinks not),
about what Mozart's health as a young boy would have been like had
he not travell ed so much, and the like. Such questions have merit at the
levels of careful argument, not as rhetorical substitutes. Craft has little
idea about disease and hea lth of children in the eighteenth century, and
displays a strange case of ahistorical arrogance. He is forever rendering
modern psychological judgments about composers. For example, in
Mozart's case, the Countess in
Figaro
is the mother Mozart never had,
his "juvenile" jokes in adulthood (to others, his marvelous sense of
humor) were the result of the press ures of youth, and his scatological
letters are partly a response to too frequent separations from his mother
