Friday, May 30, 2008

RETHINKING MOSES SMITH

Jerry Harkins



Don’t you just hate it when somebody reads something you wrote and says, “Yes, but are you aware of [something any idiot should have been aware of]?" I once wrote a term paper about Alexander Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard without knowing that they had been real, not to say famous, lovers. Fortunately, the professor was so upset that any student of his could think Pope ever wrote anything but doggerel that he didn’t realize that said student literally didn’t know what he was talking about.

Some years after I wrote “Assassination by Niggling: The Curious Case of Moses Smith vs. Serge Koussevitzky,” I came across “The Koussevitzky Case,” by the brilliant American composer and critic Virgil Thomson. [1] It is embarrassing to report that Thomson’s take on Smith’s biography of Koussevitzky is pretty much the dead opposite of my own. Given our respective credentials, readers will be forgiven for preferring his version.

And yet.

I knew, of course, that everyone who had known him liked Moses Smith and respected his work. Indeed, the point of my essay was to wonder how such a person could write such a nasty book. “By any reasonable standard,” I wrote, “the book is a hatchet job, an early example of a now familiar genre, the attack biography.” Like Thomson, I believe Koussevitzky was one of the great musicians of the twentieth century, and that he was ill-advised to file a bootless lawsuit against Smith. Unlike Thomson, however, I do not agree that Smith’s “niggles” were common knowledge (and by implication, true). Nor do I agree that, “Mr. Smith’s book makes Koussevitzky out to be a very great man indeed, but also makes him human.” Koussevitzky thought and I think he comes off looking like an ogre and a charlatan whose musical talent is very limited. Well, I’ve made that case elsewhere and see no reason to change my mind now.

But why did such a knowledgeable person as Virgil Thomson think Smith’s book was the fair, objective and positive (!) product of a scholarly mind? What am I missing? Or could it be that Thomson was simply defending a kindred spirit? Like Smith, he often damned his targets with faint praise. Consider this discussion of Porgy and Bess:

“Porgy is none the less an interesting example of what can be done by talent in spite of a bad set-up. With a libretto that should never have been accepted on a subject that should never have been chosen, a man who should never have attempted it has written a work that has some power and importance.” [2]

Indeed. Thomson was well known for using his column in the New York Herald Tribune to settle scores with those he thought had somehow “dissed” him. The website virgilthomson.org admits, “He was a bull in a China shop, not geared for making friends. He deflated Toscanini and Jascha Heifetz ("silk-underwear music").” It goes on to report on his problem with Gershwin:

“The Gershwin problem was more obvious. His natural genius was undeniable, he exuberantly and effortlessly exuded music like Schubert. But he had no formal training… and his music lacked structure and form, was not professional. Gershwin's Piano Concerto (1926) was a loose cannon next to Aaron Copland's (1927)…yet the Gershwin composition had the audacity to become an American classic, appreciated by millions, while the Copland, fine as it is, a period piece.”

To the extent this is accurate, it is a perfect example of the priestly rhetoric of music critics. Natural genius simply cannot compete with the holy writ of the standard music curriculum. With a few minor changes, Moses Smith could have written the same thing about Koussevitzky. In fact, he did write that Koussevitzky’s "...lack of a solid foundation cannot be concealed beneath the most ingenious patchwork of talents and random training." [3] Critics generally believe that their discipline is somehow intellectually if not morally superior to its subject. Nicolas Slonimsky, a conductor and critic in his own right (and incidentally one of Smith’s anonymous sources) compiled an extensive history of critical abuse. [4] Thomson was not the only critic who loathed George Gershwin. Here is Lawrence Gilman of the New York Times on Rhapsody in Blue: “trite…feeble…sentimental and vapid…fussy and futile. Weep over the lifelessness of the melody and harmony so derivative, so stale, so inexpressive!” On Porgy and Bess, he found the songs “sure-fire rubbish.” His colleague Herbert Peyser of the Telegram wrote that American in Paris “…is nauseous claptrap, so dull, patchy, thin, vulgar, long-winded and inane…” Oscar Thompson of the Evening Post called it “musical buffoonery…blunt banality…ballyhoo vulgarity.” Elsewhere I have proposed a law requiring a five-day waiting period before a critic can purchase a thesaurus.

So there remains the possibility that Thomson was wrong (and wrongheaded) and I am right. (By the way, I was surely right about Eloisa to Abelard. It is a great poem even if Pope didn’t make the story up. And Pope was right in his Essay on Criticism when he wrote about critics, “For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread.”)

Notes

1. Reprinted in Richard Kostelanetz (ed.), Virgil Thomson: A Reader, Routledge, 2002, pp. 132-135.

2. Anthony Tommasini, Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle, W.W. Norton, 11997, p. 302.

3. Moses Smith, Koussevitzky, Allen, Towne & Heath, 1947, p. 35.

4. Lexicon of Musical Invective, University of Washington Press, 1963.

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