Many things we thought we knew have been found to be false. Things like “the world is flat,” or “the sun revolves around the world,” make us a bit more cautious when arriving at a conclusion or passing judgment.
Regarding aesthetic matters, one sees that works of art are great mysteries whose qualities and laws are far beyond our knowing. Whether they are good or bad is a more confounding issue still. Beethoven’s great mystery, the Ninth Symphony, has been perceived in many ways, as many, in fact, as there have been listeners. It seems sublime to some, monstrous to others. The music historian and novelist Romain Rolland said it was “an unsurpassed triumph of the human spirit.” Yet, Ludwig Spohr, the German composer and Beethoven’s contemporary, called it grotesque, tasteless and trivial.
Robert Schumann thought that Richard Wagner “to put it concisely, is not a good musician,” and that his music was “often quite amateurish, meaningless and repugnant.” The childlike composer Anton Bruckner, however, upon meeting Wagner, fell on his knees and kissed his hand. The elder composer had to rein in Bruckner during a performance of “Parsifal,” asking that he not clap so loudly.
Bruckner in his turn was called “a fool and a half” by the rich and powerful Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, but Jean Sibelius, a deeper mind and more generous heart, called him “the greatest living composer.”
But the Russian composer himself suffered the assorted slings and arrows of people supposedly “in the know": His great B flat minor concerto was not well received at its premiere. Nikolai Soloviev, composer, critic and professor at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, remarked “Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto, like the first pancake, is a flop.”
Let Each Judge
These witnesses for the prosecution and for the defense lead to only one possible verdict: All criticism is precarious, personalized, and subject to change. There is and can be no explanation of why one piece of music pleases one man and displeases another; it is, and will remain, a mystery.A phrase from a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier says, “We older children grope our way, from dark behind to dark before.” But in our groping, we now and then come upon something more or less solid, something that we might use as a touchstone for what lies beyond pleasing or not pleasing: What is good or bad, truthful or counterfeit.
We have time itself, for example, the judge that decides what will be remembered, and what forgotten; we have what Virginia Woolf described as “the feeling of being added to.” Most solid of all might be philosopher Immanuel Kant’s idea in “Critique of Judgment,” that “if the fine arts are not imbued with moral ideals that are common to the whole of mankind, then they can serve only as frivolous entertainments to which people resort to deaden their discontent with themselves.”
Let each of us question and judge. Einstein tells us we should never lose a “holy curiosity.”
