# The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Musical Chronicle (December 1923)

MUSICAL CHRONICLE
TWO miserable performances took place the fifteenth and sixteenth of October. But that is not news. News is never that a dog goes mad and bites a man, but only that a man goes mad and bites a dog; and three hundred odd singers and players wading under the direction of Mr Bodanzky through a lengthy work devoid of all value, and the Philadelphia Orchestra muffling a Beethoven symphony under the baton of Mr Stokowsky, are events quite as banal as spasms of canine frenzy. If these concerts justify any mention whatsoever, it is merely because of certain comments passed on them in one of the morning newspapers; having set forth to draw the picture of a machine, we cannot in fairness leave off before having limned all its component parts.
The Pfitzner "romantic cantata," premier offering of our own little society for the appreciation of corpses, is a classical work of impotence. Men full of something to sing have not to play upon their audiences' sympathies through extra-musical means. But this manoeuvre seems habitual with Pfitzner. Some years since, when Busoni wrote Towards a New Aesthetic of Music, and demonstrated the logic of not twenty-four, but of one hundred and three gamuts, Pfitzner sought to discredit the theory, not by refuting Busoni on musical ground, but with talk of "We Germans do not need new scales"; "Wälscher Tand," et cetera. And the "romantic composer" is still playing, a trifle overmuch, that particular scale. His cantata he labels Von Deutscher Seele. Himself he calls a romantic composer; and the audience is assured that this choral piece, like all other of his works, "was created from an inner necessity which is really only a higher play-impulse." Throughout the composition, sourness tries to arrive at milk by making the gesture of golden-heartedness. And, of course, the goods are mysteriously derailed somewhere en route. A true romanticist would not to-day be found attempting to write "romantic" music. There is not a fresh and expressive note in the long work. Throats, instruments, sound unending emptiness. First you wonder what is suddenly the matter with yourself. Later, you wonder what is, and has for a long while been, the matter with Pfitzner.—And the Seventh Symphony under ​Mr Stokowsky was flat, stale, full of the most ridiculous exaggerations of forte and piano. The tone of the orchestra was stringy heavy and coarse throughout. The marvellous interstellar introduction was almost rhythmless. A terrible want of fineness was at play all the while.—But this is not what we came to say. What we have to say has to do neither with Mr Bodanzky's delicious genius for the inferior; nor with the insensibility of Mr Stokowsky. It has to do merely with the reports of the two concerts published by a certain critic, Mr X———.
Mr X———'s report of the Pfitzner perpetration was marvellously evasive. He found the music "Impressive"—and added "that is the best one can say of most of the work," as though attributing impressiveness to a work were not doing a very great deal. Elsewhere, he called it "a mixture of good and bad," and then hastened to add "Pfitzner is at his best when he is working within limitations," by which almost Goethean phrase Mr X——— signified that "by far the most significant music in the score is that which is set to words. [The] choral writing is solid and idiomatic, and he [the composer] usually contrives to say his say through this medium with uncommon expressiveness and terseness. Perhaps the best bit of music in the score—is a lovely a capella setting" et cetera. Mr X——— also liked "his imitative moments, although pretty literal"; finding that "oboes and clarinets crow with diverting roosterish- ness at the line Wenn der Hahn kraeht auf dem Dache, and a passage descriptive of the stars rising over the sea is pricked out with a cheerful array of bright string pizzicati and little jets of woodwind fire." However, "Mr Pfitzner is not Wagner," and so on, all along the top of the fence. But if Mr X———s piece on the Bodanzky evening was a perfect evasion, his piece on the evening of the Philadelphia Orchestra was just as uncritical. Our friend found it difficult to write about the concert "for the simple reason that a couple of handsprings and three rousing cheers are about the most comprehensive expression of opinion" he found he could think of at the moment. "No orchestra in the world could possibly be as good as Mr Stokowski's sounded" that night. "The tone of the orchestra seemed pure molten gold most of the time, the sort of playing that would make any music sound well, let alone Schubert and Bach and Beethoven, and its response to the conductor was as perfect as its tone."
​The musical life of a place like New York is not a portion of the veritable body of existence. It is more something detached from the reality, a sort of shadow-day. The concert people do not make music with what they live outside the concert hall. That, never enters it. A vital criticism, however, would stomach no such shadowy music. It would demand a whole of life for the concert room. The critic no less than the performer is the champion of values. If the performer brings the meat to market, the critic sees to it that the meat is fresh. It is his work to insist that the standards of life remain undegraded. But the critic, to have a sense of values, must bring his sensibility with him into the hall; and the critics typified by Mr X——— seem persistently to check their sensibilities outside with the umbrellas and overshoes, and to bring to play on the performances a quality of intelligence which they would not dare apply to any other business of life. They, too, fall into the pattern of the music-people. Hence, any one who so wishes can insult the public with empty music and empty playing. For someone in the press is sure next morning to pat him on the back as though he had done a worthy deed.
Paul Rosenfeld