5
5
The Historical Basis of Antihistoricist Criticism
During much of recent history historicism and eclecticism became victims of their own runaway success. Although they never completely lost their foothold in popular culture and continued, often covertly, to shape the course of modern art, they have repeatedly come under critical attack. In his Preliminary Remarks Regarding Painted Architecture and Sculpture in Antiquity (1834), Gottfried Semper dismisses both as objectionably irrelevant:
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The young artist traverses the world, crams his notebooks full of pasted-on tracings of every kind, then returns home with the cheerful expectation . . . that soon he will receive the commission for a Walhalla à la Parthénon, a basilica à la Monréale, a boudoir à la Pompeii, a palace à la Pitti, a Byzantine church, or even a bazaar in the Turkish taste! What miracles result from this invention! Thanks to it our major cities blossom forth as true extraits de mille fleurs, as the quintessence of all lands and centuries, so that in our pleasant delusion we forget in the end to which century we belong!
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Yet joking aside, do we benefit by all of this? We desire art: we are given numbers and rules. We desire the new; we are given something even older and more remote from the needs of our time. We should understand these needs and arrange them from the point of beauty, and not see beauty simply where the fog of a distant time and place has shrouded our eyes. So long as we grasp at every old tatter and our artists sneak off into corners to draw bare subsistence from the moss of the past, there is no prospect for a productive artistic life.1
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Although Semper's antihistoricist arguments were largely irrelevant to music, whose most ancient examples were no longer extant in sufficient quantity to inspire any Classical revival, nineteenth-century critics, nevertheless, attacked the works of contemporary composers that showed even the least affinity for the music of masters living in the relatively recent past:
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This Symphony in C has what the French would call a 'faux air de Beethoven,' from beginning to end; and, perhaps, a more appropriate denomination for Schumann could hardly be found for the composer than that of a would-be-if-he-could Beethoven. Schumann went for his melody to a dried-up well. Schumann's faculty of invention was next door to null; and Schumann, though a laboriously studied, was, at the best, a half-formed musician. (Musical World, London, 4 June 1864)
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Three slow movements following each other become extremely tedious, and the most striking motif of the whole work, the leading theme of the last movement, is so much like the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony that, as another writer has admirably remarked, it should be put in quotation marks. (New York Post, 8 November 1880, reviewing Brahms's First Symphony)
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To me it seems quite obvious that the real Brahms is nothing more than a sentimental voluptuary. . . . He is the most wanton of composers. . . . Only his wantonness is not vicious; it is that of a great baby . . . rather tiresomely addicted to dressing himself up as Handel or Beethoven and making a prolonged and intolerable noise. (George Bernard Shaw, The World, 21 June 1893)
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The sole impression created by Bruckner's Seventh Symphony is that its composer, being without inspiration or individuality, has borrowed his materials from Wagner, and reproduced them in an intensely exaggerated and pretentious form. . . . Bruckner seems to have made up his mind that, as he could not approach Wagner in his own particular field of opera, he would masquerade in the lion's skin elsewhere. Every feature in the imitation is grossly and absurdly overdone. (Musical Notes, London, May 1888)2
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Ironically, this antihistoricist journalistic tradition of the nineteenth century itself became the basis for modernist music criticism. Stravinsky, whose Rite of Spring (1913) enjoyed an enormous succès de scandale for its ostensibly blatant break with music history, was later savaged with particular ferocity by modernist critics. They could neither understand nor tolerate the composer's many overt "love affairs" with the past that began just six years later with Pulcinella, a ballet unabashedly based on eighteenth-century sources. Composer Aaron Copland later described this paradoxical state of affairs:
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Everyone was asking why Stravinsky should have exchanged his Russian heritage for what looked very much like a mess of eighteenth-century mannerisms. The whole thing seemed like a bad joke . . . and gained Stravinsky the unanimous disapproval of the press. (Aaron Copland, Our New Music, 1941)
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Pulcinella and Stravinsky's many "neoclassical" works that followed it provoked a storm of controversy that raged on for decades, as the following excerpts demonstrate:
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He [Stravinsky] swaddles the texts in the borrowed overcoats of men who cut their musical garments to the shape of their emotions. Oedipus sings his tortured soul in the accents of Bach, but only in accents. The chorus shouts Gloria like the peasants in the coronation scene of Boris Godunov. (Samuel Chotzinoff, New York Telegram, 9 March 1928, reviewing Oedipus Rex)
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The whole score is in very short fragments. In a dozen different styles, which . . . remind [one] of many different works which other composers were thoughtless enough to write before Mr. Stravinsky made his appearance. . . . Stravinsky's looking backward . . . results in music which is 'ersatz,' artificial, unreal and actually unexpressive! . . . the opera remains a study in still-life. (Olin Downes, New York Times, 12 and 22 February 1953, reviewing The Rake's Progress)
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A composer who copies the development of a piece of music from a borrowed pattern—even borrowed from a masterpiece—is simply confessing his inability to renew a form of composition. . . . Considering the insignificance of the works on which Stravinsky squandered his talents trying to work out his retrogressive, contradictory synthesis, it is sad to think back on that mighty artist who, at the turn of the century, devised a revolutionary approach to the problems of rhythm in music." (André Hodeir, Since Debussy: A View of Contemporary Music, 1961)
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