Edward Said had a lifelong passion for music, and possessed the rare ability
to write about it for the general reader with a lucid and penetrating
intelligence. To write about music at all, as he admitted, is difficult, and
consequently “Western classical music generally stands apart from cultural
consideration of the sort that makes film, painting, photography and of
course literature the common currency of intelligent discussion”. This is
truer now than it was a century ago – when Richard Strauss’s Salome was the
talk of Europe – and some pessimists have spoken of the gradual
disappearance of classical music from our culture, a view no doubt
encouraged by the downmarket drift of the mass media, many newspapers having
now virtually abandoned serious music criticism. Yet how can classical music
ever lose its appeal to the serious-minded? Its most acute current problem
may be the inability of contemporary composers to appeal to a wide public:
this has led many people to stay with rock music for their experience of the
new. Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, however, have never lost their hold, and
are unlikely to do so.
Nor has opera, the main theme of Music at the Limits, an invigorating
collection of essays from the last twenty years of Said’s life. Living in
New York, as music critic of The Nation, Said mostly reviewed productions at
the Met, a company he frequently criticized for its unadventurous
repertoire. Said was high-minded in his operatic tastes, preferring German
composers (Wagner in particular) to Italian – though he makes a spirited
case for Rossini. He writes a great deal about Wagner, with huge admiration
on the one hand, but with a continual need to question: one essay is called
“The Importance of Being Unfaithful to Wagner”. Unsurprisingly he preferred
more radical productions, and probably would not have agreed that all Wagner
needs is a producer who can get the singers to act, the simplest possible
sets,and no one trying to impose their own ideas about what the piece means
(Peter Hall’s production of Tristan at the Royal Opera House in 1971 was an
ideal example of this approach). In a review of Michael Tanner’s book on
Wagner, Said will not allow Tanner to dismiss the most unpleasant elements
of Wagner’s personality as irrelevant to the appreciation of his music,
though he does take to task those who claim that Wagner’s anti-Semitism
seeped into his operas. (We might think better of Wagner if only he hadn’t
insisted on putting all his prejudices into print, or telling them to Cosima
who devotedly wrote them all down; Chopin’s anti-Semitism was equally
virulent, but he is rarely criticized for it, probably because he didn’t
publicize it so actively.) Said particularly condemns Paul Lawrence Rose,
the severest of Wagner’s critics, calling him “a fundamentalist, a Khomeini
of the arts”, and, as a Palestinian who knows a great deal about
intolerance, he makes a moving plea for reconciliation, speaking out against
the ban on Wagner in Israel, and writing approvingly about his friend Daniel
Barenboim’s defiance of that ban.
Said’s other obsession was with Glenn Gould, the subject of five of the
essays. Said, who had a perceptive understanding of pianism, regarded Gould
as the most interesting pianist of the twentieth century apart from
Rachmaninov, and the supreme interpreter of counterpoint, the interplay of
independent melodic lines, which I concur with Said in seeing as the summit
of Western composition. As Said noted, Gould was one of the few
twentieth-century musicians whose reputation extended beyond the musical
world, not just because he was a “personality” but because of his
exceptional ability to appeal directly to the emotions and to the intellect,
as his famous 1955 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations shows. Said was
privileged to have seen Gould play in public on a number of occasions before
Gould abandoned the concert platform in 1964: he relates a characteristic
story about Gould performing Richard Strauss’s Burleske with the Detroit
Symphony Orchestra and, when not playing, extravagantly conducting the
orchestra, much to the annoyance of the real conductor, Paul Paray. It is
hardly surprising that Gould was soon unable to work except in the recording
studio, entirely on his own terms.
To admire Glenn Gould – or indeed Alfred Brendel or Maurizio Pollini, two
other pianists whom Said singles out – is not unusual, and it could perhaps
be claimed that Said’s views tend to be rather Establishment ones: he writes
a wholly adulatory article about Boulez, for example, without any mention of
Boulez’s Jesuitical dogmaticism or his musical narrow-mindedness. Similarly,
Said seems too respectful of Adorno: he makes good use of some of Adorno’s
more insightful observations but also quotes a number of his tiresomely
prejudicial opinions about composers he disapproved of, without criticism.
But as with Boulez, it is always stimulating to disagree with Said, and
reading the last essay in this book, appropriately about late Beethoven,
which Said felt to be more about the opening up of new horizons than
reaching conclusions, makes one sadly aware of just what a loss his
premature death has been.
Catherine Parsons Smith’s Making Music in Los Angeles reminds us of a time
when classical music had more obvious significance in general culture –
when, indeed, it was seen as a vital and active element in the growth of Los
Angeles from a town of 11,000 in 1880 to a city of more than a million in
1930. Opera companies were quick to make visits: the US premiere of La
Bohème was given in Los Angeles in 1897, the year a symphony orchestra was
established; by 1910, there was a higher proportion of musicians and music
teachers in Los Angeles than in any other American city. Smith’s intention
is to counter the view of Dorothy Lamb Crawford (as expressed in Evenings On
and Off the Roof) that, until the arrival of large numbers of European
émigrés in the late 1930s, Los Angeles was “culturally unfocused”. Yet
despite Smith’s assiduous and often fascinating account of a multitude of
musical events during the sixty-year period she covers, from 1880 until
1940, she cannot help but reinforce Crawford’s argument, as so many of the
admirable projects she records failed to take root. The Hollywood Bowl,
though it has been an enduring feature of Los Angeles musical life since its
opening in 1919, never became the kind of major arts centre its founders
intended. Henry Cowell’s New Music Society folded after two concerts in the
mid-1920s. Nicholas Slonimsky’s adventurous concerts with the LA
Philharmonic in 1933 were abruptly curtailed by bad reviews and protests
from the sponsors. It was not until the unexpected arrival of Schoenberg,
Stravinsky, Rachmaninov, Klemperer, Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley and many
others that Los Angeles suddenly and fortuitously acquired one of the
richest artistic cultures in the world, for the few years that it flourished.
Edward W. Said
MUSIC AT THE LIMITS
With a foreword by Daniel Barenboim
325pp. Bloomsbury. £20.
978 0 7475 9778 0
US: Columbia University Press. $29.95.
978 0 231 13936 6
Catherine Parsons Smith
MAKING MUSIC IN LOS ANGELES
Transforming the popular
376pp. Berkeley: University of California Press. $34.95; distributed in the UK
by Wiley. £19.95.
978 0 520 25139 7
David Matthews wrote his Sixth Symphony for the 2007 BBC Proms. His
book, Britten, was published in 2004.
