Interesting and thought-provoking reply. With regard to the Bax/Bruckner dichotomy, the bottom line is that the great conductors kept playing Bruckner and, as Otto Klemp predicted, the world got used to it. Bax's trouble is that not many conductors want to play his music.
I also think it's possible that Wordsworth and Coleridge may have implied that an artist can only create a taste for his work in his own garden: in that way, music is intrinsically more 'universal' than the barriers language create.
Agreed, a critic can open one's eyes but in the end, a critic can only adjust one's eyesight so far; for example, I can listen to a critic telling me Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony Number one is a great and subtle and concise work of genius. After listening for three minutes I switch it off: literally, my lights go out, I am metaphorically blinded.
At a Coriole Music Festival in 2018, I sat through a performance of Schumann's opus 39 Liederkreis. The tenor was a chap making a name for himself, Daniel Carison, the pianist, now blazing in the firmament, one Andre Gugnin. Apart from wincing every now and then at bad German pronunciation, I loved it. There was an English chap sitting nearby, a rather scholarly gent, an author, etc who started a discussion about the poetry. I admitted I had no idea what the songs were about, assuming they were to do with love, adoration, the woes of love, reconciliation, the usual Romantic codswallop, and his eyes lit up, molto aghast that I wasn't following the lyrics. He assured me it was as important as the music. I mention this with reference to your comment about 'bad German doggerel.'You have defined precisely why I prefer to not know what mode of self- pity is being sung about.
Thanks for your enjoyable reply.
This raises a question. Can blind spots be cured? The history of Bruckner would seem to suggest that they can... sometimes. And, in my darker & gloomier moments, I sometimes wonder, “If (for instance) Bax had been systematically dinned into the ears of a reluctant & recalcitrant world by successive generations of the very greatest conductors for 50 years, as Bruckner was... would his reputation today stand very much lower than Bruckner’s?” (I’m old enough to remember how the world used to regard Bruckner, and Mahler too.)
Wordsworth and Coleridge used to say that the artist has to create the taste by which he is to be enjoyed (implying that this process often takes time and mental adjustment). In effect, Klemperer made the same point when he said, “You will get used to it, Walter.” Maybe my blind spots are cases where I haven’t yet got used to it (and, I fear, may not want to let that happen).
Reviews can sometimes help with the mental adjustment. For 40+ years I’ve listened to the 1960 La Scala Berlioz Troyens (or rather Troiani ) for the sake of Kubelik’s conducting, in spite of what I always regarded as a hilariously inappropriate performance of the central role. Along comes one Ralph Moore, who describes that performance as “suitably heroic,” “virile but not stentorian,” and even, to my jaw-dropping amazement, “capable of some subtlety.” I go back and listen with fresh ears, and... yes, I can indeed recognize what Mr Moore is describing. My mind has been educated (in one tiny respect).
I hope blind spots can be cured. I’m not proud of mine. They make me narrow-minded, petty-minded, splenetic, bilious, bigoted, lacking in breadth of sympathy... everything that I am, and that I don’t want to be.
The more blind spots I have, the narrower my prison cell is, and the more real pleasures I’m missing out on. We all pity the people who can’t enjoy a recording (however great its other merits may be) if a certain performer (typically Callas or Sutherland or Del Monaco or Fischer-Dieskau) happens to be on it. “How much they’re missing!” we say. Ah, but are we ourselves so different?
Perhaps one day I will even learn to endure that interminable load of whining self-pity in bad German doggerel called Winterreise .
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