" I think one can look to a kind of collective opinion from people who are experienced, knowledgeable, enthusiastic and informed when it comes to gauging the value of a work. "
With apologies for taking it out of context and with all due respect to him I've extracted a sentence by Ralph Moore from the "Cherubini's Les Abencerage's" thread to examine it in the light of some of my recent reading, to show that, perhaps, " I think one can look to a kind of collective opinion from people who are experienced, knowledgeable, enthusiastic and informed when it comes to gauging the value of a work" doesn't allways guarantee a correct assessment especially when the "Enthusiastic" element is notably lacking in the critic's feelings about the subject under discussion.
I think that most informed people nowadays recognise that Debussy is one of the major musical figures of the turn of the last century, but it wasn't always the case that he was recognised as such.
Cecil Gray in "A survey of Contmporary music (1924)" wrote in his chapter on the composer, "Whole passages and sometimes even whole pieces such as "Voiles"...are harmonized almost throughout on one single chord, and "Pelleas" has with justice been called "the land of ninths." Indeed, in his harmony , Debussy is as curiously limited, monotonous, and restricted as in his melody. His rhythms too are singularly lifeless and torpid as a general rule , and this fault is generally admitted by his greatest admirers."
As if to confirm that Gray's sour opinion of Debussy wasn't an isolated instance, the next book I picked up "Music in my Time" by the American Daniel Gregory Mason (1873-1953)-(although Mason published his book in 1938 there is hardly a mention in it of the important influence of popular music and jazz on contemporary composers; Gershwin, who had died the previous year isn't even referred to) - contains this assesment (following the revelation that Ravel's "sentimentality" has made his music intolerable to the writer) :-
"Debussy's harmonies, especially his sliding, clamped-together ninth chords reproducing a single melody at five levels simultaneously and thus virtually reducing harmony to zero, proved so seductive to the merely sensuous ear, that I used some of them , with really startling inappropriateness, in the first version of my Quartet on Negro Themes, and only came to my senses in time to expunge them in a later edition."
Mason goes on to quote triumphantly his friend Paderewski as saying,
"Debussy is a man of great skill in harmony and orchestration, but he writes music not for its own sake but as a handmaid to someting that is not music......Not long ago I heard Pelleas and Melisande in Paris. It is ingenious, it has many beautiful effects , but from beginning to end it is subdued, soft, monotonous - everything is subordinated to the text, nothing is musically salient - pages and pages without one triad, without rhythmic vigour - never one manly accent."
Mason's assessment of Paderewski's own Symphony as "A perfectly wonderful masterpiece: such beauty, tenderness, nobility, majesty." was contradicted somewhat by Paderewski's compatriot Szymanowski who said of it "I can't find words bad enough to say about it."
Time has shown that Gray , Mason and Paderewski were largely wrong about Debussy so anybody who relied on their expert opinion - which it obviously was - could have been grievously mislead in their view of the composer.
There are many instances where expert opinion has made a major boo boo. Spohr's remarks about Beethoven's Ninth Symphony are too well-known to need quoting. To be fair to Spohr , Beethoven was as controversial a composer amongst commentators in his own day as Debussy was in Gray's and Mason's.
In recent years we've even seen a well-known magazine reviewer disagree completely with himself when he waxed decidedly coldly about a cd of a well-known piano work when it was first issued only to declare it one of the best available versions when it appeared under the name Joyce Hatto. Egg/face comes to mind.
Sometimes the old attitude of "I don't know much about it but I know what I like" might serve a person just as well when making a choice as relying on the opinions of experts.
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