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Strange are the workings of the Fates. A couple of weeks ago, as I rummaged through the collected writings of Olin Downes in search of his adulatory bloviations on the matter of Jan Sibelius, the telephone rang with the news of Harold Schonberg’s death. Olin Downes had been chief music critic at The New York Times from 1923 to 1955. Harold Schonberg had held that post from 1960 to 1980. It was Harold who had given me my first leg up in New York; I was at the Times for two years starting in 1961 until the Herald-Tribune made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Everybody knew that the Tribwas close to the end of its illustrious lifetime, but Harold rightly insisted that I take the job — “if only,” he said, “so that I can be writing against a pro for once.” We were on good terms then, but that didn’t last. Harold didn’t take to being disagreed with in print; he didn’t, for example, like being ragged about his famous disemboweling of Glenn Gould on the day of the Brahms Concerto. (“Maybe the reason he plays it so slow,” Harold had written in a strange and ill-conceived review couched in an affected East European accent, “is that his technique is not so good.”)
Enthroned at the Times, Harold was the last of a breed, of critics at that august journal whose power over lives — of rising young musicians, of established virtuosos and of composers native-born or imported — was that of chief justice or, at times, of Lord High Executioner. The breed had achieved its first full glory in the time of Olin Downes, who never wrote alone but always as half of the team known as the “editorial we.” The Almighty God was the other half. Downes had first wielded his scepter at the Boston Post as long ago as 1906, when Boston and New York were pretty much cultural equals. He held his throne when Gustav Mahler and Arturo Toscanini shared the Metropolitan Opera podium, when Richard Strauss was the dangerous young upstart and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring boded ill for the future of mankind.
Downes found greater comfort in the lush upholstery of the Sibelius orchestra. He heard Debussy’s La Mer at its American premiere with misgivings (“to us this music lacks the vast, elemental tone”); he found more to praise in the clear-eyed neoclassicism of Ravel. No critic in this country — and perhaps only Eduard Hanslick in Europe — held so much power while so much of the substance of classical repertory was taking shape. At the end, music had pretty much left him behind. In 1948, in the collected writings, there is a pathetic exchange of correspondence between Downes and Arnold Schoenberg, brought on by the former’s abject detestation of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony: the one correspondent unable to cope with where music had gotten to in Mahler’s late works, the other unable to cope with the possibility that criticism might consist of the “nay” as well as the “yea.”
Harold dissolved the partnership of the “editorial we,” but he could never go as far as identifying himself in the first person singular. He imposed an absurd clumsiness whereby the “I” in an interview always had to be “a visitor,” and until late in his hegemony you couldn’t use the word cello without preceding it with an apostrophe. He had one other bugaboo, which may have cost the musical world some important critical thinking. The notion that a critic could also be a composer was anathema to him; never mind the precedents set by Berlioz, Schumann, Debussy and others. He couldn’t accept the possibility of a fair hearing by one practitioner of another’s work, and in at least one instance while I was at the Times, he obliged a writer of exceptional brilliance, and of the exceptional insight into contemporary music that Harold himself lacked, to choose between hats and, therefore, to leave the Times. (One of the first things I did at the Trib was to give that writer-composer, Eric Salzman, a job.)
He did, of course, have support for his attitude. Back in the 1940s and ’50s, the Trib had a staff of critics that was a veritable beehive of composers: Virgil Thomson as the queen bee, and Lou Harrison, Arthur Berger, Paul Bowles among the workers. (Interesting trivia note: Berger, Harold and I were all, at one time in our careers, part-timers for the long-gone, unremembered New York Sun.) Thomson did, indeed, gain somewhat naughtily from his position; performances of his own music became much more frequent after his accession, and performers who favored his music got to see their names in print more often than before. (Look at Betty Freeman’s photograph; this is the glare of a man you don’t mess with, or dare to ignore.) Was this blatant misuse of power on Thomson’s part? Maybe so, maybe no; more important, it seems to me, is the wisdom contained in Virgil Thomson’s collected writings, the insights of a man who, from his own vantage point well inside the art of music, was therefore singularly well equipped to penetrate everything around him. (Thomson’s writings, by the way, are still in print; those of Olin Downes are not.)
