Memoir

The conductor led soloists and orchestra in a well-paced reading of the 5th Brandenburg Concerto which, if not stunning, was at least not troublesome either, save one glitch: the first movement harpsichord cadenza slowed the pace too far out of proportion for comfort, reducing the thrilling cadenza to a tepid interlude.

It seems likely that music critics have aroused the contempt of musicians ever since shepherds in the ancient Arcadian hills told the god Pan what they thought of his piping on the syrinx. In the pidgin poetry of the outspoken conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, a regular target of London critics, they were “quite hopeless—drooling, doleful, depressing, dropsical droops.” “Feuilletonists,”¹ wrote the volatile composer Hector Berlioz about most French music critics, “obliged to write on anything and everything within the domain of their feuilleton (gloomy domain, bog-ridden, infested with toads and grasshoppers). . .”

To the argument that music critics are failed performers who criticize their more talented competitors, critic Martin Bernheimer replies, “You don’t have to be able to lay an egg to know if you’ve been served a rotten one.” So, although some still consider critics members of the world’s second-oldest profession, the rest of us might adopt the more tempered view of poet James Russell Lowell, who found “wise skepticism” among good critics of all types. Music critics Samuel Lipman and Charles Rosen come to mind. Many notable exceptions, however, prove that even the best critics can be miserably wrong. “It stinks to the ear,” wrote the powerful Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick after an early performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto—before it became one of the most famous concertos of all time. George Bernard Shaw labeled Brahms a “Leviathan Maunderer.”

An occasional professional flutist, I have never been panned by a captious critic, maybe because I don’t …