Trust Me?

How much can we trust nineteenth-century reviews of concert works and operas, in France and elsewhere?Footnote ¹ Were critics even trying to be trustworthy, if by that we mean accurate, honest, impartial? For example, did they make a habit of tailoring their remarks to meet their readers’ expectations? And did they at times use the latest premiere as an occasion for airing prejudices and grievances, promoting a trend they favoured, advancing a friend's career, or puncturing an enemy's aspirations?

Some recent music historians have been alert to these problems. Take the question of readers’ expectations. Lesley A. Wright, in her published dossier de presse for Bizet's Carmen, not only transcribes dozens of early reviews of that opera but also provides her own assessments of the newspapers and magazines in which the reviews appeared.Footnote ² Some periodicals were tailored to a particular segment of the reading public: e.g., amateur pianists; or educated women with money to spend on books, fashionable clothing and the arts.Footnote ³ Other periodicals (including many newspapers) promoted a specific political position that could bear upon much-debated topics such as religion, colonialism and national identity. And those politico-cultural leanings may help explain some carefully chosen phrase – or evasive silence – in a feuilleton (column of commentary) on music, the other arts or literature.

In addition, some of the most important music magazines were put out by firms that primarily published music (e.g., scores and orchestral parts). One of the most renowned such journals was a German-language one, the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, which came out from Adolf Martin Schlesinger's music-publishing firm. The BAMZ's rough equivalent in France was La Gazette musicale, founded in 1834 by Maurice Schlesinger (Adolf's son, born Moritz). After La Gazette musicale absorbed François-Joseph Fétis's Revue musicale (in 1835), Schlesinger dubbed the resulting combined magazine Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris, and hired a number of well-informed writers, including Berlioz and the young Liszt, to contribute articles.Footnote ⁴ (The Parisian Schlesinger firm published important works by Chopin and Liszt.) Similarly, Le Ménestrel was put out by Heugel, a prominent publisher of operas (by Offenbach and Massenet, among others) and lasted for a century (1840–1940). A publisher-owned music magazine would often highlight works in which the firm was financially and aesthetically invested. And it might, at times, downplay works published by other firms, or submit them to ridicule.Footnote ⁵

In spite of all this, many scholars and commentators have treated contemporary reviews as though each one conveyed to readers at the time, in frank and transparent fashion, its author's carefully considered views and reactions. Worse, we (for I surely am among the guilty) have sometimes taken reviews as revealing what most concert- and operagoers thought or felt, or how certain insightful taste-makers – composers, conductors, soloists, impresarios – reacted to a work, performance or performer. In fact, though, many critics aimed less to reflect current opinion than to shape it, even somewhat polemically. And often they were concerned, as well, to make themselves sound witty, authoritative and not easily fooled. We must keep all of this in mind when we study the printed ‘reception’ of a given musician or work.

The present article examines some reactions in the French press to two major and highly contrasting works by Félicien David (1810–1876). David was widely viewed at the time – at home and abroad – as one of France's leading composers. Thanks to a general revival of interest in forgotten Romantic-era composers, his works have recently begun to be rediscovered and, for the first time, recorded.Footnote ⁶ Until recently, the sources that I cite here (reviews and one important Berlioz letter) have, for the most part, gone unstudied.

The ‘Mediocrity’ of French Music at Mid-Century

David's critical reception reminds us that, in the mid-nineteenth century, French music was as important in the larger European and American musical world as the music of Italy and the German-speaking lands. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in part because of the prominence of German-speaking and German-influenced music historians, French musical works (and Italian as well) came to be regarded as second-rate, unable to survive comparison to works by, say, Beethoven or Mendelssohn, Brahms or Wagner. This prejudice has waned somewhat in the past few decades, with the (re)discovery of and new appreciation for major works by, say, Gounod and Saint-Saëns (see the final section of this article) or – among the many foreign composers who were likewise active in France – Cherubini, Meyerbeer and Verdi (Don Carlos).Footnote ⁷

Still, the prejudice (in the classical-music world) lingers on.Footnote ⁸ I was struck, for example, by the following recent ex cathedra put-down from the agile pen of composer John Adams:

Let's see: Debussy was born in 1862. I would quickly note that ‘the years before his birth’ (to adopt Adams's formulation) welcomed such accomplished and distinctive works as Meyerbeer's Le Prophète (1849); Édouard Lalo's remarkable Six Mélodies, Op. 17 (1856), to poems of Victor Hugo; Berlioz's Les Troyens (1856–58; partial first performance 1863); Offenbach's Orphée aux enfers (1858); Gounod's Faust (1859); and César Franck's Six Pièces pour grande orgue, Op. 16–21 (1858–62), a set that includes the spirited and oft-performed Grande Pièce symphonique in F-Sharp Minor. And all of this well before Wagnerism became an obsession with French musicians and the music-loving public.

In any case, that supposed trough of mediocrity, if one starts counting a decade or so earlier, includes the two works by David to be encountered here: his ‘ode-symphonie’ Le Désert (1844) and his only grand opéra, Herculanum (1859). These and numerous other works of David were received with delight and admiration at the time and have recently been revived in performances and recordings that have likewise met with enthusiastic response. Some have begun to receive detailed attention from scholars. The full score of Le Désert has even been reprinted, with a short historical introduction.Footnote ¹⁰ All this may serve to remind us that the sorting processes of music history and canon formation, which are necessarily reductive, have sometimes silenced works that, when encountered afresh and without prejudice, display much vitality and inventiveness.

I discuss these two works by David (and other of his works in passing) in chronological order because the critics of the day often related a new composition by David to his previous ones. Along the way, I endeavour to bring out a variety of themes relating more generally to the reliability of music criticism (the overarching topic of the present issue of Nineteenth-Century Music Review). Among the most important recurring ones will be:

• • the motivation (overt or covert, principled or petty) behind a given critic's assertions;

• • a given critic's ability (or lack of it) to comment on musical matters and to support his or her assertions and impressions with accurate technical details;

• • and – most mysterious of all – the weight exerted by the press in getting a work performed repeatedly and, over the long term, in establishing its reputation.

How to Treat a Brave New Work: Berlioz's Motivations for Praising Le Désert

As Nicholas Slonimsky and others have documented, critics have long resisted the most imaginative features of new works, and their resistance has tended to discourage repeat performances.Footnote ¹¹ Sometimes their opposition to a work derives from a prejudice against the composer or genre, other times from a lack of musical knowledge and training.

But intense enthusiasm, too, can cause one to wonder: might the critic have been exaggerating for effect? Berlioz raised eyebrows in precisely this way, we have recently learned, with his near-ecstatic review (to be quoted below) of the first performance of David's Le Désert: ode-symphonie.Footnote ¹² Throughout much of his life, Berlioz generated urgently needed income by writing essays and reviews for the Journal des débats and other periodicals. In a letter to his sister Nanci, published for the first time in 2017, he explained (as we shall likewise see) his reasons for having written so favourably about this extended and genre-bending work by a composer who, until then, had been known mainly for modest, though highly accomplished, songs and with whom Berlioz seems never to have become personally close.Footnote ¹³

Le Désert tells the story – ‘in concert’, without costumes or sets – of a caravan moving through an unspecified stretch of desert in the Arab world (perhaps in what is today Syria). It calls for tenor solo, men's chorus and orchestra, plus a narrator who, in rhymed verses employing much metric freedom, evokes the successive scenes. Those scenes or events include the lumbering progress of the camel train (the solo oboe, playing a mellifluous variation on the march tune, presumably represents a zurna), a desert sandstorm, women dancing in the evening, the sun's rise the next day, the muezzin's call to morning prayer, and so on.Footnote ¹⁴ (Le Désert is now available in two excellent though quite different recordings.Footnote ¹⁵) The work's subtitle, ode-symphonie – roughly translatable as ‘grand concert work with poetic recitation’ – was coined by David to reflect the work's nearly unprecedented combination of spoken poetry, tenor solos, men's chorus, and full orchestra. David may have had Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette partly in mind, since that is a symphonie dramatique with substantial passages for solo voices (mezzo, tenor, bass-baritone) and for (mixed) chorus; he may even have known Berlioz's briefer but even stranger Lélio (which uses performing forces nearly identical to those in Roméo – minus the mezzo-soprano – plus extended spoken recitations).

Berlioz reviewed Le Désert in jubilant tones in the centrist newspaper Journal des débats (15 December 1844), and his words did much to establish the importance of David and of this work both in France and abroad. The lengthy paean opens with some claims about the work's magnificence and with categorical dismissal of the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart:

The review goes on to describe David's unusual work appreciatively and in detail. It focuses, of course, on the many ways in which the work's successive moments are, as Berlioz would have said, ‘descriptive’ (or, in language soon to become standard, ‘programmatic’). Here, for example, is Berlioz's account of the sandstorm in Part I. (I include the French wording because its specifics are so evocative.)

Two weeks later, as already mentioned, Berlioz wrote a (little-known) letter to the elder of his two sisters, Nanci (c. 1 January 1845). In it he reveals that some of his friends were surprised by his decision to praise so unstintingly and colourfully this new composer and work. Mentioning their objections then leads him to explain to Nanci, in carefully chosen words, how he views his role as a judge of new music. The letter also helps us understand why Berlioz used a youthful and little-known composer, David, as a stick with which to beat two renowned ones, Haydn and Mozart. Along the way, Berlioz makes clear that many Parisians at the time were reading his newspaper articles and reacting to them intensely (whether pro or contra).

Most crucially, these paragraphs about Le Désert end up addressing a basic question about music criticism, namely whether the writer should be an impartial observer or, instead, a deeply committed participant in the compositional community. Nanci must have asked her brother whether he truly believed that David's ode-symphonie was as wonderful as his review made it seem. The composer-critic replied with welcome frankness. (I translate this section of the letter here in its entirety.)

Berlioz here invokes the concept of partialité (partiality or, understood more actively, partisanship) in two seemingly irreconcilable ways. At first, he claims that he exercised much ‘selflessness and impartiality’ in praising another composer. After all, David was seven years Berlioz's junior and largely unknown. But, a few sentences later, the critic frankly admits the opposite: his review did not seek to offer some kind of absolute truth (objective, impartial) but, rather, to engage openly and passionately on behalf of a work that, in his view, blazed a new and fruitful path. And if that brave new work resembled his own efforts in important ways, tant mieux!

In his review of Le Désert, Berlioz was openly situating himself – and David's ode-symphonie – on the side of progress. More specifically, he was defending the concept of a work that was intended for the concert hall, rather than the theatre, yet was programmatic, i.e., strongly evocative of extramusical subject matter. (He would conduct David's Le Désert himself in Paris a few months later.) Haydn and Mozart, for immediate purposes, had to be relegated to the dustbin.

The novel concept of programme music was being hotly debated in Paris in the 1840s (along with related questions, such as whether instrumental music can evoke extramusical images and whether there is ‘progress’ in music history), thanks in large part to a loose confederation of composers active there: most prominently Berlioz, Liszt and (from December 1844 onward) David.Footnote ²⁰ All three helped spread the programme-music debate beyond France by making concert tours of the German-speaking lands. Berlioz and David conducted their programmatic works in such cities as Berlin, Leipzig, Vienna and Prague. (Berlioz had achieved renown, and stirred intense discussion, with Symphonie fantastique, Harold en Italie, and the aforementioned Roméo et Juliette.) Liszt toured throughout Europe as the age's greatest living pianist-composer. And, in the 1840s, he published numerous solo-piano pieces that referred explicitly to extramusical images or narratives: e.g., La Vallée d'Obermann, which first appeared in the Album d'un voyageur and was later incorporated into Années de pèlerinage, book 1. Berlioz, in his review of Le Désert, was hugging to his breast a sympathetic co-explorer of the programmatic, much as Liszt had declared Berlioz his comrade by arranging the Fantastique for piano solo and Harold for piano with viola. The letter to Nanci reveals how acutely Berlioz was aware of his musico-aesthetic kinship with David. Though, he also insisted, he would never have asserted the kinship so publicly had he not found Le Désert ‘beautiful’.

Harsh Expectations after a Success

David's career, thanks to the overnight success of Le Désert, was now chronicled closely in the newspapers and music journals. Writers wondered aloud whether David could ever create a work as successful as that one, and indeed his next three works gave them fodder for their sometimes-malicious speculations. His oratorio Moïse au Sinaï (1846) was generally rejected as bland and colourless (a real disappointment from a composer whose orchestration in Le Désert was fresh and imaginative). His second (and last) ode-symphonie, Christophe Colomb (1847), was generally considered too similar in outline to Le Désert, and not sufficiently dramatic in Part 3, which centres on a mutiny by Columbus's sailors. (The wind ceases, and the mariniers fear that they will never reach land. Columbus entreats them eloquently to remain devoted. Almost magically, the wind stirs again, moving the ship onward.)Footnote ²¹ And his ‘mystère’ (actually a second biblical oratorio) entitled L’Éden (1848), was doubly disadvantaged. It tried to treat, in the polite confines of the concert hall, the Adam and Eve story, which inevitably alluded to nakedness and sexual relations; more damagingly still, the work arrived just at the moment when Paris was convulsed with the February Revolution of 1848.

David found a more secure footing when he finally essayed his first work for the stage: an opéra-comique entitled La Perle du Brésil (1851). His sensibilities, as the critics largely recognized, were well suited to opera and, not least, to one that, in this case, had a largely lighthearted exotic plot (involving Portuguese sailors and Brazilian natives). The tuneful aria ‘Charmant Oiseau’ (with extensive flute obbligato part) – for Zora, a member of a native Brazilian tribe – has remained a coloratura-soprano favourite ever since.Footnote ²² David went on to compose four other operas, the best of which is probably Lalla-Roukh (1862), an opéra-comique or opéra-lyrique – with spoken dialogue but also some serious moments – set in two distinctly exotic regions quite different from Brazil, namely what are today northern India/Pakistan and Uzbekistan. Berlioz would hail Lalla-Roukh, not least for its often delicate and imaginative orchestration.Footnote ²³

But it is David's only grand opéra, the four-act Herculanum (1859), that will retain us for the remainder of this article, because it shows, more than Le Désert or his other works, what David could do in an evening-long work full of sharply defined characters and often-intense drama. It also demonstrates vividly how disparate the reactions could be from critics who came with very different and largely unspoken agendas.

Must a Music Critic Be Musical?: Herculanum at the Opéra

The Paris Opéra was the nation's most prestigious opera house. Expectations were thus high for David's first (and, as it happens, only) work composed for that stunningly well-equipped theatre. Herculanum, thanks in part to lavish sets, costumes, and staging, turned out to be a financial success, performed there no fewer than 74 times – nearly as often as was, during the 1850s and 60s, Verdi's Les Vêpres siciliennes and more often than Mozart's Don Giovanni – and to a hall that was unusually full of paying customers.Footnote ²⁴

A rather lengthy four-act work employing a wide range of styles, Herculanum posed new challenges to the critics, some of whom fell back on commonplaces about David's earlier works and, more generally, revealed how incapable they were of judging musical events or even just describing them. As had happened with Christophe Colomb, they seem to have conferred with each other or copied from each other's reviews: how else to explain the fact that no fewer than 12 reviewers of Herculanum praised the exact same 24-measure melody?Footnote ²⁵ More suspicious still, the critics generally lacked the words to describe what makes this melody distinctive: at most, they wrote that it is ‘ravishing’ and ‘gracious and distinguished’ and that it matches the ‘ecstasy’ of the words.

True, one of those reviewers might seem to be offering a kind of technical observation:

The writer was the 22-year-old Paul de Saint-Victor, soon to become an important drama critic. Did he mean that the melody is in the Aeolian mode and therefore ancient- and/or exotic-sounding? This might seem a plausible reading, given Saint-Victor's double-allusion: to the second-century novel Daphnis and Chloe, by the Greek writer Longus, and to a tropical island with palm trees and Creoles. (‘Créole’ at the time tended to refer to a person of European ancestry who had been born and raised in an overseas French colony, such as the Caribbean island of Martinique.)Footnote ²⁷ But the melody is not at all in Aeolian mode (i.e., a minor mode with lowered degrees $\hat{6}$ and $\hat{7}$ ). Rather, it is in a clear G major, with a firm modulation to the relative minor halfway through.

Perhaps Saint-Victor instead intended to evoke the Aeolian harp (named after the Greek deity Aeolus, keeper of the winds). If so, he presumably meant that the melody sounds as if it is being stirred effortlessly by a breeze passing across open strings, untouched by human hand: for example, a simple, slow-moving tune incorporating, or accompanied by tonally static accompanying arpeggios.Footnote ²⁸ But, again, the music maintains a normal forward-moving harmonic rhythm and involves no arpeggios.

Most likely, Saint-Victor merely meant what he said in the rest of the sentence: that the melody in question was sweet and nonchalant, a characterization that is consistent with the stereotype (at the time) of a ‘Creole’ as being graceful, relaxed, even indolent.Footnote ²⁹ Perhaps Saint-Victor did not know that the word éolien could suggest specific musical features and devices (a scale different from modern-day tonal norms, or – quite different musically – a harp's notes resonating without human direction). Did not know, or did not care.

By contrast, three critics who wrote about Herculanum did know and care about matters musical: Berlioz, Ernest Reyer (1823–1909), and the music publisher Léon Escudier (whom we shall discuss a bit later). Reyer, a highly proficient composer who would later write three estimable operas (La Statue, Sigurd, and Salammbô), went to the core of the matter. His review, which appeared in the Courrier de Paris, has thus far escaped discussion in the scholarly literature. Reyer praised David's ability to write memorable melodies almost no matter what the dramatic situation:

Reyer makes concrete and accurate musical observations about various numbers. He notes that, in a chorus of persecuted Christians (opening of Act 2), each phrase by the women is answered by a ‘different cadence’ from the men. (This is critic's shorthand: he means ‘by a cadence on a different degree of the scale’.) And Satan's sudden appearance soon thereafter is heralded by a mysterious soft effect that he describes precisely: ‘pianissimo strokes on tam-tam and bass drum, supported by a soft roll on the timpani’. The latter decision, Reyer argues, shows David not falling into the ‘trap’ (his word) of imitating the relatively noisy fantastical scenes in operas by Weber or Meyerbeer.Footnote ³¹

Berlioz, more rebellious by nature than Reyer, objected to some relatively conventional passages. Still, he praised many of the work's major numbers, and his nuanced descriptions – often touching on matters of dramatic appositeness – help convey the impact that David's music makes at each respective moment. (He also praised in detail the often-eloquent libretto by the established poet Joseph Méry.) Here are three relatively precise musical or musico-dramatic descriptions, mostly laudatory, from Berlioz's lengthy review:

Most of the critics made less mention than did Berlioz and Reyer of the work's meshing of music and drama, perhaps because they came with a preconception of David as a primarily lyrical composer or because, as Sylvia L’Écuyer observes, they were using their eyes more than their ears: ‘There are passages … in Herculanum when David was able to convey a sense of terror approaching Burke's definition of the Sublime. These were largely ignored by the critics, or simply overlooked, having been upstaged by the spectacular décor.’Footnote ³⁴ Among the strongest of these passages is the finale to Act 3, involving the four main characters in a tug-and-pull of emotions, with Hélios (a recent convert to Christianity) finally agreeing to stay in Olivia's love nest and renounce the virtuous Christian virgin Lilia. Reyer recognized this ‘final quartet’ in Act 3 as among the sections of the work that are ‘very remarkable’ and ‘rightly received much applause’. Berlioz adds a technical detail about the act's final pages: ‘in the coda … the composer has made effective use of syncopation. The stress on the second beat of the four-beat measure charges the voices with great energy’. Here both critics demonstrated the competence upon which true independent judgment rests.

Hunting out ‘Resemblances’ – and Bearing a Grudge

In general, competence – at least of a specifically musical kind – was in short supply among the music critics of Paris. Instead of competence, there was sometimes ill will disguised as a defence of originality and supposed high standards. Critics often compared a new piece to ones with which readers might be familiar. Some cited a specific moment (by the same composer or by another composer) that a phrase or motive in the work being reviewed arguably resembled. This particular strategy often spilled over into direct or implied accusations of plagiarism that could be motivated by self-interest or wounded pride.

The plagiarism strategy is quite visible, at least to music historians today, in a review of Herculanum that appeared in La France musicale. This venomous squib was penned by Léon Escudier, a critic who was also a music publisher. (The Escudier firm, which Léon ran with his brother Marie-Pierre Escudier and Jules Maurel, was the primary house outside of Italy to publish Verdi's operas.) As Gunther Braam sagely observes, Escudier had an axe to grind. The Escudier firm had been sued by Félicien David more than a decade earlier for trying to hold him to a disgracefully disadvantageous contract. The naïve young composer had, under financial pressure, granted the Escudiers the rights not only to Le Désert but also to all his future compositions, and for a mere 1,200 francs. The legal proceeding was widely reported in the musical press and was resolved in David's favour. By 1859 (over a dozen years later), few readers probably remembered the episode; thus Escudier could wreak his vengeance with impunity.Footnote ³⁵

In the Herculanum review, Escudier accused David of being excessively gentle or childlike as both person and artist and, more condemning still, of being too unmanly to create true art: ‘As for the human passions, he does not feel them nor would he be capable of replicating them … All he can come up with are effeminate accents.’Footnote ³⁶ Escudier buttressed this characterization (which today seems blatantly misogynistic) with more or less transparent claims of plagiarism, naming multiple composers whom David had supposedly copied, including Méhul, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Meyerbeer and Halévy.

Lilia's powerful Credo in Act 3, much praised by other reviewers (and indeed considered by Berlioz superior to a parallel moment in Donizetti's Les Martyrs), is written off by Escudier as ‘a second edition of the Christmas carol by Adolphe Adam’. (He means ‘Minuit, chrétien[s]’, widely known in English today as ‘O Holy Night!’. It comes from 12 years earlier: 1847.) True, the two pieces are hymn-like and succeed in conveying a mood of deeply rooted faith. At a more detailed level, David's opening four-bar phrase is similar in rhythm to Adam's, but that phrase uses very different pitches (e.g., it starts on $\hat{5}$ rather than $\hat{3}$ ). The only other arguable point of resemblance is that both tunes eventually modulate to iii; but, again, David's melodic line at that juncture is utterly different from Adam's. In short, Léon Escudier has cherry-picked, for his own defamatory purpose, a few technical details that must have sounded impressive and incontrovertible to a reader not well versed in what we would today call music theory.

Epilogue

David's career, which had begun with a sudden hyper-reaction to the bold yet very accessible novelties of Le Désert, ended in a more normal but no less worthy sort of glory, thanks to the many beauties of the aforementioned Lalla-Roukh and the ongoing (to our own day) popularity of the aria ‘Charmant Oiseau’, from La Perle du Brésil. His last two operas failed, in different ways: Le Saphir (1865) sank quickly, despite many enchanting moments, and La Captive did not reach performance during his lifetime. Thus, as a whole, David's career was idiosyncratic and uneven. Yet it resulted in numerous works that have proven to be well worth reviving in whole or part (including selected arias, duets, ensembles and orchestral numbers).

For present purposes, it is worth stressing that certain trends or patterns in the critical reception of his works are applicable to the works of other composers of the era. Take, for example, Gounod's Le Tribut de Zamora (1881), a tuneful and dramatically potent grand opéra that received major productions across Europe (and even in New Orleans and in the Algierian city of Constantine, today known as Qusanṭīnah), then sank from sight for a century, but recently received its due through a first-rate and highly praised recording produced by the Centre de musique romantique française (located at the Palazzetto Bru Zane, Venice).Footnote ³⁷ Many reviews of the first production (at the Paris Opéra) claimed, disparagingly, that one notable recurring tune echoes the Marseillaise. Footnote ³⁸ (In fact, it does not, except in having a march rhythm and patriotic words.) This near-unanimity suggests – as in the case of the 12-fold praise for Hélios's love song in Herculanum, two decades earlier – that critics were conferring with each other, perhaps even conversing hastily in the hallways of the Opéra. Or it may be that a critic who was writing a week or two after the first performance repeated an opinion that he had found in a review that had been published days earlier. This was not necessarily a bad thing: near-unanimous praise for one or a few features of a work (or numbers in a work) could help boost ticket sales, giving a new work a chance to make its mark. Berlioz's review of Le Désert clearly helped the work and its composer greatly (as his letter to Nanci indicates), but it did so in conjunction with other favourable reviews, such as the one that Berlioz mentions (by Théophile Gautier, in La Presse), and another in the Escudiers’ La France musicale, as well as fantasies and variation sets that were soon published by such noted figures as Carl Czerny, Friedrich Burgmüller, Stephen Heller and Henri Vieuxtemps. (The latter's arrangement for viola and piano of one movement from Le Désert – the ‘Rêverie du soir’ – embroiders David's sweet melody with delicate traceries and has recently become a standard item for viola players.)Footnote ³⁹ These enthusiastic public responses stimulated a demand for further performances and for more information about its little-known composer.Footnote ⁴⁰

Saint-Saëns's remarkable and musico-dramatically effective (and, again, long-forgotten) opera Proserpine (1887) repeats a somewhat different pattern that we saw with regard to Herculanum: namely two critics who were highly skilled composers hailed the work (Reyer and, in this case, Gounod), whereas the critics who were less well informed on musical matters made little mention of the work's many magical details; or, to put the matter more generously, they proved incapable (despite good intentions) of putting into words any such effects that they did perceive.Footnote ⁴¹ Hugh Macdonald has recently stated outright that ‘the best music critics of this period were themselves composers’ and that the rest ‘did more harm than good’.Footnote ⁴² To the extent that this is true, the cause may in part be lack of musical competence – and an attempt to distract attention away from that inadequacy.Footnote ⁴³

But perhaps some critics had personal reasons (in the manner of Léon Escudier, as seen above – a musically competent critic) for writing as they did, or else deeply held aesthetic preferences that made them resistant to other kinds of work. Examples of the latter are Berlioz's often-disparaging remarks about operas of Bellini, and Paul Scudo's biting rejection of anything very different from the operas of Mozart and Rossini that he so admired.

All these possibilities and considerations are worth keeping in mind as we survey the critical writings of the nineteenth century and try to extract from them some sense of how musicians, cultural administrators, music lovers, and the general public reacted to works of that era: including not only works that have long been known and loved, but also fascinating and, in some cases, influential works that, thanks to the efforts of specialist scholars and risk-taking performers, we are just now beginning to rediscover.