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and the fact that Papa Leopold overshadowed Mama Mozart. Craft
adduces no evidence and glibly drops these "new" perceptions. As a
result, Mozart is trivialized, and no plausible insight is revealed, either
about Mozart (since no scholarship is brought to bear on Craft's
claims) or about his music. Craft tries to explain the "weakness" in
Mozart's command of the fugue in relation to his "abnormal" child–
hood, but the result is unconvincing because the musical argument is
fragmentary. The discussion of fugal writing in Mozart, of which
examples abound, might be most interesting and might reveal an
aspect of Mozart's psyche, but Craft would have had to substitute
specificity for polemic to achieve that end. Likewise, Craft treats
Ravel's music as a predictable consequence of Ravel's childhood
psychological development without sufficient discussion of the music
itself.
More troublesome is that Craft displays facile assumptions about
the historical development of music. He shares the popular idea that
one work of a composer prefigures or anticipates a later one, that one
style breeds the next, that Mozart, for example, "already felt emotions
later associated with nineteenth-century romanticism." This pseudo–
Hegelianism permeates his discussion of Verdi, Liszt, and Strauss, who
are evaluated in a context of the development of musical style that is in
the framework of standard music history college texts which view the
evolution of music in progressive terms. Dubious claims of this variety
abound, such as "the songs Strauss wrote at the end of his life ... could
have been written nearly a century before." By what bizarre criteria of
personality or history? Related to the use of this simple evolutionary
assumption is Craft's static conception of "the good opera" and the
"ideal" libretto. Craft seems intent
to
display how masterpieces like
Don Giovanni, Electra, Falstaff, Aida,
and
Salome
could have been
improved. These works are not sacred, for sure, but such an approach
bears a burden of a well-developed platonic view of drama and
audience response and a cogency of argument which Craft
~ails
to
sustain.
What marks this book is the simple fact that Craft is a man of very
strong opinions. He criticizes Ravel's orchestration of Mussorgsky, he
dismisses Hugo von Hofmannstahl's version of
Electra,
and conde–
scends to Richard Strauss's orchestral music, not to speak of Liszt's later
works, or Kierkegaard 's analysis of
Don Giovanni.
His strong opinions
are not argued but rather asserted, as if perhaps eloquence alone
legitimates our reading them. In those cases where Craft attempts a
defense, his scholarship and breadth of reading are insufficient. For
