WHILE THE End of History may be less fashionable now than of yore, the End of Classical Music is still going gangbusters, with an apocalyptic relish that echoes the Club of Rome’s mid-1970s pinnacle. This wearing of sackcloth often gives the impression of having been with us ever since King David, approaching retirement, sold his harp on eBay. In fact the genre as a genre – rather than an isolated study or two – is a modern invention. At or near its beginning comes The Closing of the American Mind (1987), where Allan Bloom proclaimed in his usual fact-free style that “classical music is dead among the young”. (Though not, we may observe, as dead as Bloom, who combined his moralizing with a Foucaultian eagerness to disseminate AIDS.) Even former New Criterion publisher Samuel Lipman – now also prematurely deceased – found substituting generalized harangues for serious analyses an increasingly addictive pastime. (In one strange 1985 outburst, Lipman dismissed organists as failed pianists.) More recently the ever-voyeuristic Norman Lebrecht favoured the world with not one but two sky-is-falling tracts: The Maestro Myth and Who Killed Classical Music?
New-York-based musicologist Joseph Horowitz ranks several cuts above Lebrecht in his capacity to read primary sources and to do serious research. Yet though free from Lebrechtian squalor, he shares Lebrecht’s basic temperament. That temperament, for all its assiduous paganism, is in reality one of displaced eschatological panic. The spectacle of religious despair severed from religious belief is frequently poignant but more frequently absurd.
What, in classical music’s past and present, drives Horowitz to such anguish? Pretty much everything, it seems. His job description seldom helps. The musicologist, like the literary critic, tends to arouse ribald (and sometimes justified) comparisons with eunuchs. Nevertheless it would be wrong to call Horowitz’s grievances fundamentally selfish, or indeed fundamentally personal. Doubtless they derive from a hatred of modern America; but this hatred can coexist with literary worth, as in their different ways Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Dwight Macdonald both showed. Why, then, is Horowitz’s protest so frequently tiresome, whereas Macdonald’s rages against the dying of high culture’s light continue to merit deference fifty years later? Does the difference lie in Macdonald’s humor, versus Horowitz’s lack thereof? Whence Horowitz’s sullen Gestalt?
Readers probably guessed from the last sentence that some serious Teutonic gloom was in the offing; and so, alas, it proves. Yes, Horowitz’s tome constitutes primarily a 600-page accolade to T. W. Adorno, whose jeremiads against American artistic life – as well as against Christians, families, “fascists”, etc. etc. – elevated kvetching into a moral code. If Adorno was the Messiah of Political Correctness, then Horowitz (although he limits his actual citations of Adorno’s name to an almost-bearable four) is certainly spreading the PC gospel with televangelistic fervor.
The book’s least Adornian, and accordingly most effortful, part is its first. There Horowitz has to confront the problem of why 19th-century America, which in literature boasted Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Longfellow, and Mark Twain – and which in painting boasted the Hudson River School – was so blatant an underachiever when it came to original music. (Three local composers alone from this time are still widely remembered: Stephen Foster, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, and Edward “To A Wild Rose” Macdowell, all superb miniaturists, all dead young, as if to anticipate Scott Fitzgerald’s maxim about no second acts in American lives.) If sheer philanthropic labors could have supplied epic compositional genius, then antebellum and immediately postbellum America would have been awash in it. The country’s musical infrastructure abounded in wealth and strength. By contrast, 19th-century Finland had almost no musical infrastructure at all, not even an adequate orchestra. Yet it produced Sibelius. Meanwhile Horowitz strives to hold his public’s interest in such obscure creators as Anthony Philip Heinrich, William Henry Fry, John Knowles Paine, George Frederick Bristow, George Whitefield Chadwick, and – in Dorothy Parker’s scathing phrase – “other triple-named apostles of optimism.” (For some reason, Horowitz ignores a charming egotist named Silas G. Pratt, whose claim on posterity’s consideration lies not in his own operas but in allegedly telling Wagner to his face, “You are the Silas G. Pratt of Germany.”)
It is instructive that when describing the Gilded Age’s impresarios and performers, Horowitz’s prose comes to life, as it never does when he depicts composers. He clearly enjoys expounding upon Henry Higginson (the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s visionary founder), Patrick Gilmore (organiser of outsize concerts), and three hitherto-famous conductors above all: Karl Muck (whose blisteringly assured direction can still be discerned, through the surface noise, on a few precious records), Theodore Thomas (whose sterling Midwestern advocacy of European orchestral music inspired a grateful Richard Strauss to write: “What we Germans owe him shall be held in everlasting remembrance”), and Anton Seidl (whose Wagner performances between 1888 and 1896 – on Coney Island, of all places – enable Horowitz to recycle material from his 1994 study Wagner Nights).
Less meritorious is Horowitz’s section upon Charles Ives: American modernism’s archetypal “holy beast” – to quote Tom Wolfe’s metaphor – and the Jackson Pollock of music. The Horowitz portrait of Ives – who died in 1954, aged 79 – is bland, airbrushed and conventional, full of praise for Ives the baseball-loving Whitmanesque democrat. Tactfully suppressed from view are those features of Ives’s disposition that would mar the amiable picture: notably his loathing of homosexuality (a loathing which today would debar him from any job more prestigious than that of street-sweeper), and his pathological contempt for Mozart, Wagner, Debussy, Ravel, or indeed almost any other composer who lacked the stupendous good fortune of being Ives.
Sadly for Horowitz, Ives – about the last American composer for whom Horowitz can feel unrestrained enthusiasm, or much enthusiasm at all – had no influence on American creativity until his juniors started ostentatiously championing him during his crotchety old age. It is Horowitz’s curious belief that the 1930s, that veritable efflorescence of American classical composition – Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Howard Hanson, Walter Piston and half a dozen only slightly less distinguished figures all emerged at this time – could do almost nothing musically right. Hence Horowitz’s condemnation of Copland for not being Bartók, Shostakovich, or Kurt Weill. Hence his rating of Barber’s talents below those of Benjamin Britten, a verdict with no firmer basis than the fact that Britten self-consciously flaunted his transgressive proclivities while Barber mostly concealed his. Hence his dismissal of Hanson as representing “a dead end”.
In such decrees, he sounds all too embarrassingly redolent of those Gilded Age newspaper critics whom he censures, and who – save for James G. Huneker, by far the best stylist among them, and the least pompous – remained so inept compared to their British or European counterparts. For artistic acumen, these critics substituted Brahminical nagging, ridiculous when not downright odious. Their educative method can be summarized in three words: “Eat your broccoli.” “I challenge any living man to say honestly”, harrumphed The New York Tribune’s Henry Krehbiel, “that he ever came away from the performance of a symphonic poem by Richard Strauss with any finer impulse of his nature quickened … Strauss [is] the prince royal of tonal decadents.” Horowitz rightly rebukes such effrontery; yet how does it differ, in essentials, from his own? Those panjandrums denounced the modernist ideologies that he worships, but his taste for inhabiting bully-pulpits is at least as great as was theirs.
The bully-pulpit attitude becomes particularly inopportune in Horowitz’s obsessive attacks upon Toscanini. Just as earlier he reworks Wagner Nights, so here he shamelessly rehashes his 1987 philippic Understanding Toscanini, unwilling or unable to admit how completely such subsequent researchers as Toscanini archivist Mortimer Frank have discredited his findings. Of course Horowitz never condescends to explain how Toscanini the ostensibly crude swindler of American dupes acquired international respect before the average American had even heard of him. Was Toscanini’s early European reputation a total fraud? Were such Toscanini eulogists as Verdi, Puccini, and Respighi, not to mention Toscanini’s encomiastic fellow baton-wielders (Karajan, Klemperer, Pierre Monteux and George Szell, to name merely four), all idiots or liars? These queries Horowitz disdains to answer, preferring to harp upon Toscanini’s lack – a comparative lack only – of interest in performing contemporary composers. Why Toscanini should have felt compelled to perform anything that he did not want to perform is mysterious, especially since fear of arousing Horowitz’s chagrin could hardly have entered into the old man’s calculations.
But then Horowitz, for all his shows of worldly-wise sarcasm, is as deeply squeamish and moralistic as only an Adornian can be. For no readily identifiable reason, he careens from a competent analysis of the gadfly composer-critic Virgil Thomson into a tirade against white-supremacist thinking (and cannot accurately report even that: he tellingly misidentifies Madison Grant’s most famous book as The Passing of the Great White Race, though Grant’s title nowhere contains the word “white”). Just as objectionable to Horowitz are operatic productions that, like those of the Met, have tended to eschew inane directorial fantasies. He consoles himself as best he can by recounting such transient avant-garde satisfactions as a 1970 staging of Verdi’s Masked Ball which made the hero into a pederast.
Elsewhere it is down, down, all the way down. The Three Tenors’ concert and recording triumphs have merely “diluted and vulgarized what they purported to disseminate.” Compared with what? The heroic non-vulgarity of Janet Jackson? The bookish refinement of Jennifer Lopez? The aristocratic murmurs of Eminem?
That the Three Tenors phenomenon should have passed its peak more than a decade ago, without the wound it clearly inflicted on Horowitz’s psyche having healed in the interim, is symptomatic. Despite the occasional allusion to post-9/11 America, most of Horowitz’s survey (and this is among its most disappointing elements) might as well have been written 15 years back. Thus, he has nothing to say about cyberspace’s wider musical repercussions, for example. We could argue until kingdom come – or, to quote the felicitous phrase of New Yorker journalist Alex Ross, “until Britney Spears writes her first piano quintet” – about whether the Internet’s impact on classical music has been primarily good or bad. (Major classical record companies and their mass-market outlets find it overwhelmingly bad. As feature-writer Stephen Chakwin said in the September-October 2003 American Record Guide: “If I ran a bricks-and-mortar music store, I would be thinking about the hand weavers in early-19th-century England and looking for a new line of merchandise.”) Yet this presupposes that we have internalized the Net’s existence. Horowitz seems not to have done so. His is an entirely pre-cyberspace intellect, especially via his supposition that mere petulance somehow endows him with ethical authority as artistic gatekeeper.
Underneath all the Horowitz patter about protofeminism, postcolonialism, and posthistoricism, there lurks a Matthew Arnold. Which is another way of saying a Moaning Minnie, without even an Arnold’s versifying gifts. Horowitz’s diatribes against commercialism – he even finds room to quote at length from Joe Klein’s Clinton biography, the musical significance of which is not exactly self-evident – inspire the sardonic question: if the profit motive is as intrinsic an evil as Horowitz maintains, why does he not give his book away gratis?
R. J. Stove lives in Melbourne, Australia.
© The American Conservative, 2005
