When a few years ago a Telegraph critic described Maxim Vengerov as ‘the best violinist not only of our time but of all time’, those who understood such matters cringed to the point of gurning. Referring in such terms to a vulgarian whose fiddling is as fast as it’s mindless was like calling Vinnie Jones the best footballer (or actor) of all time.
Since then I’ve known to take today’s musical criticism with a grain of salt, a wedge of lime and a glass of tequila. Clearly that genre has gone the way of musical performance – straight into the gutter. It’s as if writing and playing nonentities have colluded with a largely illiterate public to push real music down to the level of pop, long on cult appeal and short on musical content.
A few days ago I found more prima facie evidence of such a plot in an article written by a professional journalist but an amateur critic (call him AM for short). His name doesn’t matter – for my purposes he’s a phenomenon, not an individual.
He starts out by declaring in a tone that brooks no argument that ‘Beethoven is the Shakespeare of music’. Yes, and Shakespeare is the Praxiteles of drama, and Joyce the Schönberg of literature — such metaphors only ever hit the mark when they are witty (‘Wagner is the Puccini of music’).
But forgetting the lazy phrasing, the underlying assertion is that Beethoven is history’s best composer. This view, unlike say Enoch Powell’s worship of Wagner, is legitimate, though I happen to disagree with it. As a rule I refrain from ranking artists like athletes, but I make an exception for Bach, whose music to me represents the highest human, not merely musical, achievement.
Bach and Beethoven were antipodes in that, in a vector opposite to Beethoven’s, Bach looked back in his content and forward in his form. His inspiration came entirely from his own spirit, and his own spirit entirely from God. Beethoven, by contrast, drew some of his inspiration from the outer world around him, be that nature or, in say his Third Symphony or Fifth Piano Concerto, politics.
Bach revolutionised music for every instrument he knew, including the human voice, and some he didn’t know but anticipated with the prescience of a seer, such as the modern piano. But for all that, there was noble restraint in Bach’s music, a kind of artistic chastity that Beethoven often lacked.
Like a libertine who goes after anything with a pulse, Beethoven’s genius was splashing out in every direction, pursuing every possible or impossible idea to the bitter end. As a result, some of his music was bombastic, and some, especially his vocal work, not altogether convincing. Probably aware of this, he followed the classical form more rigidly than many listeners realise, and the popular view that he was the first Romantic composer has more to do with his spirit than his craft.
Still, let’s not argue about tastes. Beethoven was a genius, his overall output comparable to Bach’s, and our AM is within his right to place him on the highest perch. But having done so, AM then unleashes an uninterrupted stream of meaningless gibberish, of the kind that’s symptomatic of our time.
He claims that what he regards as Beethoven’s greatest achievements, his late sonatas and quartets, are ‘neglected by millions of intelligent, open-minded music lovers’. He includes Hammerklavier among such neglected pieces, whereas it rightfully belongs in the bombastic category (its great fugue apart), but let’s not quibble about that.
Let’s just say that, if such ‘music lovers’ do indeed neglect Beethoven’s superb late works, their minds are so open, their brains have fallen out. True, not many people walk around whistling the finale of Op. 111, but then one doesn’t hear them whistling Bach’s Goldberg Variations or Schumann’s Fantasy either. I’ll put it bluntly: anyone who knows and understands music knows Beethoven’s late or any other work well.
But it’s true that such overachievers aren’t counted in their millions. Here AM expects sublime artists to have the same broad appeal as that enjoyed by drugged-up plankton screaming amplified anti-capitalist obscenities all the way to the near-bankrupt capitalist bank.
Real music wasn’t written for millions; it was written for few by fewer. For even to begin to appreciate the grandeur of a Bach or Beethoven one has to have within his soul a particle of the same soaring spirit that animated their work, some semblance of the same discerning taste. Such people have never been thick on the ground, and they’re almost extinct in a civilisation where Freddie Mercury is taken seriously.
Real music can’t be democratic, with the public voting by the show of hands, each clutching banknotes. When it is, it stops being real music. As proof of this, most pieces performed widely were financed by private patrons, a majority of whom had refined taste cultivated from infancy. Without all those Electors, Archbishops and Margraves, playing the harpsichord or viola in their music rooms, we’d have no B Minor Mass or even Missa Solemnis. Democracy is more likely to deliver Jesus Christ Superstar, and this is a rule proved by rare exceptions, such as James McMillan’s St John’s Passion.
By bemoaning the narrow appeal of great music, our AM shows that he shares the philistine cravings of the multitudes. This impression is reinforced by his girlish gasps at the playing of HJ Lim, the sexy but giftless 24-year-old just signed by EMI.
Now if AM’s ranking of Beethoven was justifiable, his remarks on Lim show that he simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about. ‘Lim,’ he writes, ‘demolishes the stereotype of Asian pianists as mechanical virtuosos.’ That’s true in a way. Her banging, tasteless ‘virtuosity’ demolishes such stereotypes because she’s even worse than Lang Lang or Yuja Wang, which is saying a lot. Lim doesn’t understand the first thing about Beethoven and, in less barbaric times, wouldn’t have been let anywhere near his sonatas, late or early.
‘Her whirlwind technique renders familiar passages almost unrecognisable,’ continues AM. That’s also true: those who understand music wouldn’t recognise the passages mauled by Lim or other circus-type hacks, Asian, European or American, who’ve monopolised the world’s concert platforms.
Playing music they don’t really understand to a public that doesn’t really care, they do untold damage. And the likes of AM either exacerbate the damage or precipitate it, depending on your point of view. If, as Plato believed, music is the moral law, then we live in truly immoral times.