Music at the Limits
Edward Said Columbia University Press, 344pp, $29.95
No finer award awaits the critic than to have his journalism collected in book form. The volume on the shelf suggests a reckoning has taken place, that within its pages is contained the truth of the artistic world the writer covered and thought about. Such stocktaking is almost entirely absent from this collection of Edward Said's lengthy reviews and biographical essays about concerts and operas in New York, culled mostly from the left-wing weekly magazine the Nation.
From his perch in the English department of Columbia University, the Palestinian literary critic and passionate amateur pianist turned his gaze on Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Opera and the New York City Opera from 1983 until his death in 2003 at the age of 67. In 1999, Said co-founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, a group of young musicians from Israel and Palestine, as well as Spain and several other Middle Eastern countries, with Daniel Barenboim. The two men's recorded conversations were published in 2002 as Parallels and Paradoxes.
Said's love of music ran deep. But while he was an influential literary thinker and writer on orientalism and the notion of the Other, his music reviews bear the marks of an amateur, albeit a well-read and stylish one. In October, the eminent American musicologist Richard Taruskin wrote, with a smart crack of his whip, that "the Nation used to let Edward Said play at classical reviewing". He could not have been more tartly correct.
One way to spot a critic without a great deal of experience is an excessive use of superlatives, and they turn up repeatedly in this volume. In the very first essay, we are told that "no one could do counterpoint, reproduce and understand Bach's fiendish skill, more than [Glenn] Gould". Such a description relieves Said of the duty to describe the breathtaking clarity Gould brought to Bach, and renders any disagreement moot; after all, Gould did it to the greatest extent imaginable, so the story must be over.
Opera being a narrative art form, Said is on surer ground here, as he can serve as literary critic of the libretto and not a music critic. A passionate devotee of Wagner's operas, he writes movingly of the Metropolitan Opera's 1990 staging of the complete Ring cycle. Yet here he flies off into strange comparisons when he writes, referring to exchanges between Wotan and Alberich, and Wotan and Brünnhilde: "[I]n their self-consciousness they are manifestly unlike the unselfconscious tub-thumping bloody-mindedness to be found in Verdi and Puccini, Wagner's contemporaries."
Who, ticket prices being equal, is ever forced to choose between the verismo Italians and the pompous German's music dramas? Sometimes a listener seeks out the tear-jerking of Traviata; at other times the wholly integrated drama of Wagner may be more cathartic. But they don't need to be placed in opposition.
Most egregious are Said's attempts to communicate a piece's inner workings. He writes that Chopin's B minor Scherzo has an "ascending and then downward echoing chordal progression", a phrase that will puzzle the layman and annoy the engaged listener, both of whom will be aware that all music goes both up and down. When he writes of the "soaringly serene lines" in Beethoven's Missa Solemnis that "defy normal intonation", it induces a cringe. However high they lie, those lines are still governed by intonation. And every opera-lover who has ever seen an audience erupt after a dull run-through of La Bohème will be confused by Said's assertion that Beethoven's "Fidelio is the one opera in the repertory that has the power to sway audiences even when it is indifferently performed".
The rest of the article on Fidelio, originally published in the London Review of Books, is strong, as are those on Richard Strauss and on Daniel Barenboim. Indeed, the book's truest sentence is of Barenboim, when Said writes that he "conducts dozens of opera and symphonic works from memory, plays the piano and conducts at the same time, and seems never to practise". The sentence captures that man's maddening contradictions. When he was music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the unsettled, improvisatory style of his music-making led to amazement at the greatness of the result, or its sloppiness, but it was more often the former. With more observations on that level, Said's music criticism would have taken pride of place next to his literary criticism.
Marc Geelhoed is associate music editor of Time Out ChicagoForgotten Continent: the Battle for Latin America's Soul, Michael Reid, Yale University Press, 352pp, £19.99
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
