THE WEAK IN REVIEW

posted by James Reel

    Norman Lebrecht, one of those writers who is great fun to read even though much of what he writes is wrong-headed, has, rather late in the day, produced this tribute to Anton Webern. It was Webern’s dire influence that killed public appreciation of classical music in the third quarter of the 20th century, when hack imitators with no musical talent insinuated themselves into American universities, declared that Webern was god, and cranked out arid little scores that were all formula, no inspiration. They presented it as music from the head rather than the heart, but the body part they actually employed was the colon. What Webern did was fascinating, but once he’d done it, what was the point of generating more of the same—“system” music to which individuality was alien? Composers who wanted to move forward with Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone system would have found much more success had they emulated Schoenberg’s other pupil, Alban Berg, who used 12-tone techniques to create vital, expressive, communicative music, unlike the junk produced by Webern’s academy-ensconced impersonators.
    At any rate, my argument with Lebrecht isn’t about Webern, whose influence is now nil (he still has a few imitators, but nobody pretends to care anymore). My complaint is about this foolish claim:

Scan the entire canon, Passacaglia to posthumously published piano pieces, and you will not find one weak work of Webern's, or one that fails immediately to proclaim its authorship. In the history of western music, that statement is true only of Beethoven and Wagner.

    That statement is most assuredly not true of Beethoven or Wagner. Has Stormin’ Norman ever heard Beethoven’s Musik zu einem Ritterballett, or Wagner’s Die Feen or Das Liebesverbot, or any number of other early or half-hearted scores by these composers? Face it: Beethoven and Wagner and Mozart and every other composer wrote a fair amount of derivative student trivia and uninspired junk. (Mendelssohn wrote his junk late in his career; Brahms wrote his early, but destroyed it all.) Why pretend they were all instant geniuses who sprang pristine from the virginal loins of Euterpe? Even the greatest music and the greatest musicians are real, fallible and human, and that’s what makes the flashes of brilliance so much more remarkable.
    On a topic related to my rant, David Hurwitz, America’s answer to England’s Norman Lebrecht (a description that Hurwitz would probaly find galling, considering his general dislike of Lebrecht’s work), has something important to say on the subject of musical cultists:

Excellence is the sworn enemy of the cult mentality in its musical manifestation, because one of the prime characteristics of this mindset is self-righteous anger on behalf of the object of worship. If everything that [conductor Jascha] Horenstein did had been exceptional and generally recognized as such, then he would not need a cult to support his claim to immortality. The music doesn’t matter. The quality of his conducting doesn’t matter. What matters is the satisfaction that cult members derive from belonging to the group, and the recordings are merely triggers that activate and reinforce the herd instinct.

    Read the rest here.