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an improvement over what we were getting from the critic emeritus
of
The New York Times,
Harold Schonberg, who on one occasion
went so far as to allege that "the big names of yesteryear" (that is,
composers) had had sufficient exposure ("every orchestra played its
share") and that the public, having had "a chance to immerse itself,"
had decided against their music. But ultimately Lipman restores us
to the same premise: the composer is delinquent because his music
does not have immediate appeal.
Those of us who reject immediate appeal as a criterion of artis–
tic excellence are assumed to believe the contrary: good art
always
goes unrecognized in its time. Some people
do
believe this, and have
been known to rig boos and catcalls at their premieres. There are
also people who maintain that audiences have only to familiarize
themselves with new music - any of it - to embrace it. One need not
go to either of these extremes to acknowledge that a work has a
better chance to last if it does not give up its secret too easily, if it
allows us, as Henry James put it in the preface to
The Wings
oj
the
Dove,
to "feel the surface, like the thick ice of the skater's pond, bear
without cracking the strongest pressure we throw on it." The attempt
to discredit any such initial difficulty
U
ames called it a "luxury") that
a fine new work of art may impose led the English critic, Ernest
Newman, to the preposterous conclusion that the glorious introduc–
tion to Mozart's "Dissonance" Quartet, K . 465, is really a "dubious
piece of writing" which "does not quite 'come off.'" For only in this
way was he able to exonerate Mozart's pedantic contemporary,
Giuseppe Sarti, who, speaking for the audience of his day, said the
work was packed "with such capital errors," that no one with "sound
taste" could conceivably have written it.
The purveyors of the decline theory have a circumscribed
notion of what music should be. When Lipman states we 'judge
every fresh masterpiece by the standards of the hallowed past," he
seems to be positing a reasonably objective, traditionalist principle
for dealing with music in terms of what it has been. But when he also
states, "the nineteenth century remains for the music-loving audi–
ence the century of choice and the very model of musical creation,"
and when he further indicates that as a critic he acts as the public's
agent in seeing to it that this principle is adhered to, the objectivity
falls away. On what basis can such privileged status be bestowed
upon the nineteenth century? Is it that it produced more master–
pieces than any previous century - which would be to judge works of
art by bulk, as if they were potatoes. Or is it that if we were to take a
