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example, he does not seem to comprehend Hofmannstahl's
fin de siecle
aesthetic universe or intellectual development. He considers it suffi–
cient to use Greek tragedy itself (whatever that might be) as the
criterion for condemning Hofmannstahl's particular revision of the
Electra legend. Likewise, he takes Kierkegaard entirely out of Kierke–
gaard's own context and treats him as if he were just another critic who
had published a review of
Don Giovanni.
The result is that within the entire series of essays on music little is
learned except that Charles Rosen's book on Schoenberg is excellent,
which it is, and that when Solti performances were ragged it was
because of acoustics at the Metropolitan Opera, and when James
Levine's were, it was Levine's own fault. Craft's choice of detail to
support his contentions is haphazard. Chancing to see a manuscript on
exhibit in Basel on a trip and using it as evidence of a major point on
Mozart's writing (without further research) is, for example, hardly
enough basis for the kinds of odd claims Craft likes to make.
The nonmusical essays also suffer from the faults of facile critical
slaps, unravelled intellectual assumptions, and trivial assertions
couched in overwritten prose. Sometimes, as in his essay on time, Craft
is entirely out of his depth, not even aware of philosophical and
historical work (Foucault, Pocock, E.P. Thompson, etc.) on the
subject. As a consequence, his essay is neither synthetic or perceptive.
Craft's attempt to demolish Eliot on the basis of his punctuation is just
short of ridiculous. Nothing is said about Eliot's substance, only about
Eliot's misuse of the semicolon and other grammatical minutiae. Craft
is generally merciless about writing, as might have been adduced
initially from the fact that the book's preface expresses gratitude to his
past English teacher. But Craft's objections are school marm pedantry,
and a bore to boot. Craft has the habit of taking some author's
understandabl e but perhaps a bit ambiguous paragraph and digging in
it to find egregious errors in language and logic. The errors he finds, as
in Alan Jefferson's work on Strauss (which is not distinguished), and
in Charles Taylor's on Hegel (which is much more), remind one of a
student who has to write a paper but hasn't had time to read the book
or do research. He flips to what appear to be easy targets on the
grounds of some slight, often irrelevant, ambiguity in language. Craft
himself employs a pretentious prose, full of turns of phrase which are
hardly exemplary, like "a Xerox of a march theme" and "plushy
upholstered .. . idioms" (done at Gimbels?), or this stellar example of
vague ideas and unexamined philosophical assumptions lodged in
turgid prose:
