Edward Said had a lifelong passion for music, and possessed the rare ability to write about it for the general reader with a lucid and penetrating intelligence. To write about music at all, as he admitted, is difficult, and consequently “Western classical music generally stands apart from cultural consideration of the sort that makes film, painting, photography and of course literature the common currency of intelligent discussion”. This is truer now than it was a century ago – when Richard Strauss’s Salome was the talk of Europe – and some pessimists have spoken of the gradual disappearance of classical music from our culture, a view no doubt encouraged by the downmarket drift of the mass media, many newspapers having now virtually abandoned serious music criticism. Yet how can classical music ever lose its appeal to the serious-minded? Its most acute current problem may be the inability of contemporary composers to appeal to a wide public: this has led many people to stay with rock music for their experience of the new. Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, however, have never lost their hold, and are unlikely to do so.

Nor has opera, the main theme of Music at the Limits, an invigorating collection of essays from the last twenty years of Said’s life. Living in New York, as music critic of The Nation, Said mostly reviewed productions at the Met, a company he frequently criticized for its unadventurous repertoire. Said was high-minded in his operatic tastes, preferring German composers (Wagner in particular) to Italian – though he makes a spirited case for Rossini. He writes a great deal about Wagner, with huge admiration on the one hand, but with a continual need to question: one essay is called “The Importance of Being Unfaithful to Wagner”. Unsurprisingly he preferred more radical productions, and probably would not have agreed that all Wagner needs is a producer who can get the singers to act, the simplest possible sets,and no one trying to impose their own ideas about what the piece means (Peter Hall’s production of Tristan at the Royal Opera House in 1971 was an ideal example of this approach). In a review of Michael Tanner’s book on Wagner, Said will not allow Tanner to dismiss the most unpleasant elements of Wagner’s personality as irrelevant to the appreciation of his music, though he does take to task those who claim that Wagner’s anti-Semitism seeped into his operas. (We might think better of Wagner if only he hadn’t insisted on putting all his prejudices into print, or telling them to Cosima who devotedly wrote them all down; Chopin’s anti-Semitism was equally virulent, but he is rarely criticized for it, probably because he didn’t publicize it so actively.) Said particularly condemns Paul Lawrence Rose, the severest of Wagner’s critics, calling him “a fundamentalist, a Khomeini of the arts”, and, as a Palestinian who knows a great deal about intolerance, he makes a moving plea for reconciliation, speaking out against the ban on Wagner in Israel, and writing approvingly about his friend Daniel Barenboim’s defiance of that ban.

Said’s other obsession was with Glenn Gould, the subject of five of the essays. Said, who had a perceptive understanding of pianism, regarded Gould as the most interesting pianist of the twentieth century apart from Rachmaninov, and the supreme interpreter of counterpoint, the interplay of independent melodic lines, which I concur with Said in seeing as the summit of Western composition. As Said noted, Gould was one of the few twentieth-century musicians whose reputation extended beyond the musical world, not just because he was a “personality” but because of his exceptional ability to appeal directly to the emotions and to the intellect, as his famous 1955 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations shows. Said was privileged to have seen Gould play in public on a number of occasions before Gould abandoned the concert platform in 1964: he relates a characteristic story about Gould performing Richard Strauss’s Burleske with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and, when not playing, extravagantly conducting the orchestra, much to the annoyance of the real conductor, Paul Paray. It is hardly surprising that Gould was soon unable to work except in the recording studio, entirely on his own terms.

To admire Glenn Gould – or indeed Alfred Brendel or Maurizio Pollini, two other pianists whom Said singles out – is not unusual, and it could perhaps be claimed that Said’s views tend to be rather Establishment ones: he writes a wholly adulatory article about Boulez, for example, without any mention of Boulez’s Jesuitical dogmaticism or his musical narrow-mindedness. Similarly, Said seems too respectful of Adorno: he makes good use of some of Adorno’s more insightful observations but also quotes a number of his tiresomely prejudicial opinions about composers he disapproved of, without criticism. But as with Boulez, it is always stimulating to disagree with Said, and reading the last essay in this book, appropriately about late Beethoven, which Said felt to be more about the opening up of new horizons than reaching conclusions, makes one sadly aware of just what a loss his premature death has been.

Catherine Parsons Smith’s Making Music in Los Angeles reminds us of a time when classical music had more obvious significance in general culture – when, indeed, it was seen as a vital and active element in the growth of Los Angeles from a town of 11,000 in 1880 to a city of more than a million in 1930. Opera companies were quick to make visits: the US premiere of La Bohème was given in Los Angeles in 1897, the year a symphony orchestra was established; by 1910, there was a higher proportion of musicians and music teachers in Los Angeles than in any other American city. Smith’s intention is to counter the view of Dorothy Lamb Crawford (as expressed in Evenings On and Off the Roof) that, until the arrival of large numbers of European émigrés in the late 1930s, Los Angeles was “culturally unfocused”. Yet despite Smith’s assiduous and often fascinating account of a multitude of musical events during the sixty-year period she covers, from 1880 until 1940, she cannot help but reinforce Crawford’s argument, as so many of the admirable projects she records failed to take root. The Hollywood Bowl, though it has been an enduring feature of Los Angeles musical life since its opening in 1919, never became the kind of major arts centre its founders intended. Henry Cowell’s New Music Society folded after two concerts in the mid-1920s. Nicholas Slonimsky’s adventurous concerts with the LA Philharmonic in 1933 were abruptly curtailed by bad reviews and protests from the sponsors. It was not until the unexpected arrival of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Rachmaninov, Klemperer, Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley and many others that Los Angeles suddenly and fortuitously acquired one of the richest artistic cultures in the world, for the few years that it flourished.

Edward W. Said
MUSIC AT THE LIMITS
With a foreword by Daniel Barenboim
325pp. Bloomsbury. £20.
978 0 7475 9778 0
US: Columbia University Press. $29.95.
978 0 231 13936 6

Catherine Parsons Smith
MAKING MUSIC IN LOS ANGELES
Transforming the popular
376pp. Berkeley: University of California Press. $34.95; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £19.95.
978 0 520 25139 7

David Matthews wrote his Sixth Symphony for the 2007 BBC Proms. His book, Britten, was published in 2004.

Explore The TLS

• TLS Selections

• TLS Archives

• TLS Arguments

• TLS Writers

• TLS Letters

• Poem of the Week

• Then & Now