Post Victorian Music With Other Studies And Sketches

Author : Charles L. Graves
Publisher : CreateSpace
ISBN 13 : 9781500718558
Total Pages : 382 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (185 download)

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Download or read book Post-Victorian Music with Other Studies and Sketches written by Charles L. Graves and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2014-08-01 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a collection of papers reprinted from the Spectator, with some alterations. An author with a sterner sense of self-criticism would have excluded some of these articles, entertaining perhaps at the time they were first published, entertaining and perishable. Mr. Graves might be characterized as a flippantly violent conservative. Richard Strauss is to him Antichrist in music. Mr. Graves objects to the "Symphonia Domestica," apparently because the orchestra is very large and there is an introspective and self-advertising programme. The article on "Elektra" begins: "Genius—modern musical genius—according to the witty perversion of a well-known composer, may be defined as 'an infinite capacity for giving pain,' and no better illustration can be found than the work in which Strauss has described Hofmannsthal's squalid perversion of Sophocles' drama.'" Mr. Graves then enters on a crescendo of abuse. Leaving his opinions out of the question, we might justly say that Mr. Graves's book contains pleasant gossip, and there is a spirit of jesting that is not disagreeable except when malice enters. The malice is shown in attacks on persons who are so unfortunate as not to agree with Mr. Graves. The author is handicapped by his endeavor to be funny at any cost; his friends have assured him that he is a humorist. What is the use, for instance, of preserving this sentence between covers? "There was one (professional accompanist), a foreigner, of whom it was cruelly said that his face resembled a meat pie in the window of an eating-shop in the Tottenham Court Road, and there was certainly not more soul in his playing than in a meat pie." One of his best articles in the book is that called forth by the death of Arthur Johnston, music critic of the Manchester Guardian. The article is sincere, sympathetic, 'and for once Mr. Graves does not try to be funny." —The New Music Review, Volume 11 "Exceptionally sane and liberal critical papers on music and musicians, less limited in scope than the title indicates. They include Manuel Garcia, Patti, Viardot-Garcia, Mendelssohn, etc. The criticisms of Strauss' operas and his "calculated eccentricity,'' the papers on '' American musical criticism,'' on "The modern orchestra" and on the growth of the taste for the German Lied are especially interesting. Reprinted from The Spectator." —The Booklist, Volume 8