A Musical Season, by Andrew Porter

Scholar and Critic
A Musical Season. 
by Andrew Porter. 
Viking. 288 pp. $8.95.
“Editors,” as Bernard Shaw wrote, “by some law of Nature which still baffles science, are always ignorant of music”; and so “an editor who can tell at a glance whether . . . a leading article . . . or a news report is the work of a skilled hand or not” will accept from a music critic “every conceivable blunder and misdemeanor that a journalist can commit.” Nor was Harold Ross an exception: in the years in which he was publishing in the New Yorker the work of the remarkable writers he had gathered on his staff, he was content with writing on music that was not worth reading either for what it said about music or for any intellectual or literary distinction. And this continued to be true of the New Yorker long after Ross had been succeeded by William Shawn. Then in the fall of 1972, a London music critic named Andrew Porter, whom the New Yorker brought here as guest reviewer for the season, began to write the reviews and essays that are reprinted in A Musical Season. I had first learned of Porter's writing when someone had shown me his reviews of a New York City Ballet season in London, which had delighted me with their accurate perception. And after that readers had occasionally sent me his reviews of opera recordings in the Gramophone—almost the only competent reviews in that magazine—which had shown him to be as perceptive about music as about ballet. The 37 weekly round-ups in A Musical Season confirm those impressions, but also provide surprises, some of them baffling.
The collection includes three reports on the New York City Ballet, which prove to be insufficient; but Porter needs no more than his one each for the American Ballet Theater and Joffrey Ballet to set out completely the realities of their repertories and performances, and thus to correct the excessive claims for them by the man who speaks for the New York Times on the subject. What Porter says of Balanchine's “latest tribute to Petipa's Raymonda,” his Cortège Hongrois, also is valuable not only in itself but as a correction of Clive Barnes's dismissal of it as “a pale version of what we have retained of the Petipa.” Recognizing in Balanchine “the most masterly” of those who today “command . . . the grammar and geometry of the language that Petipa perfected,” Porter writes that “on occasion [Balanchine] quotes Petipa verbatim; mainly, he creates his own compositions in that elegant, exacting, and precise tongue. He composes purely, perfectly, within the canon of Maryinsky academic-cum-national steps.” And concerning Balanchine's earlier Don Quixote Porter provides corrective observation not only of the second-act court dances, the “cold, precise dances in which aristocratic formality suddenly takes on the accents of menace”; but of the pas classique espagnol which Balanchine has substituted for the villagers' dances in the first act, and which is “a wonderful set of dances, superbly fashioned,” but with no relevance to the dramatic ballet that is suspended at that point for a mere dance divertissement.
“Love need not blind one to faults,” says Porter of the faults he points to in the Balanchine operation; nor, I add, does admiration keep me from mentioning my inability to understand how Porter, writing about Balanchine's Jewels, can speak of the pas de deux of Rubies in his “liveliest Stravinskyan vein” and the one of Diamonds in his “grandest Maryinsky manner,” and not find it necessary to say anything about the one for Moncion and, originally, Mimi Paul in Emeralds, overwhelming in the cumulative impact of its slow walking style unlike anything ever seen before even in Balanchine's work. Nor can I understand how—having seen “not without a pang” another dancer in the roles in Don Quixote and Diamonds “shaped for the style and movement of Suzanne Farrell”; and having seen Rubies with John Clifford and the marvelous Gelsey Kirkland in the roles made for the strikingly different styles of Edward Villella and Patricia McBride—Porter didn't think he should see Rubies a few days later with Villella and McBride in their original roles. Nor can I understand his not speaking of the pas de deux in Emeralds made for the unique style of Violette Verdy. There are other such faults of omission; there are also a few faults of commission—e.g., the very fancy and disputable statement about the pas de deux of Apollo; and I must mention a major omission in another area—of comment on Jerome Robbins's Dances at a Gathering, Goldberg Variations, and Watermill, which, Porter concedes in one early roundup, he “should have said something about,” but never does.
Most of the book is about the music Porter reported on to New Yorker readers, including opera not on records but in the opera house. His generally accurate statements about what he heard are what I expected; but there are surprises in some of his statements about what he saw. Since his eye noted that the Washington Opera Society performance of L'lncoronazione di Poppea “moved swiftly, in a striking unit set by Neil Peter Jampolis,” I am astonished by a comment on the Metropolitan's Don Giovanni in which he speaks of Herbert Graf's production—“firm, traditional, and apt; though old, it remains fresh”—but isn't impelled to say anything about Eugene Berman's scenery, which not only is the most extraordinarily beautiful and dramatically effective I have ever seen in an opera, but is remarkably devised for the swift movement of this particular opera without the usual interruptions between its scenes. And I am astonished by the statement about the New York City Opera's “very decent repertory Carmen” with José Varona's “traditional” sets—this about a first act cluttered with newly devised scenic details which obscure the scene's essentials but make possible the happenings thought up by Tito Capobianco that distract attention from the principals' singing and action. Nor do the words “wonderful, and impressive,” which Porter applies to the Schneider-Siemssen scenery for the von Karajan staging of Wagner's Ring, seem to me applicable to, among other unmentioned details, the hollowed-out base of an enormous tree that Schneider-Siemssen substitutes for the room in Hunding's hut as the performance area of the first act of Die Walküre—one that repeatedly draws attention to its deficiencies and occasional absurdities in relation to the action. And I am baffled by Porter's comment on the new Metropolitan Otello—e.g., the second act, in which Zeffirelli, for no imaginable reason, transfers Otello's study from the traditional room in the castle to outdoor battlements extending across the back of the stage and leaving only inadequate space on the extreme left for Desdemona to be seen with the chorus in the garden; or the third act, which Zeffirelli places not in the traditional great hall lined with the columns behind which Otello conceals himself to observe and overhear Iago and Cassio in the foreground, but in an armory, where Iago can indulge in some newly thought-up play with swords, and where Zeffirelli perversely conceals Iago and Cassio behind the racks of weapons with Otello in full view in the foreground. How Porter can see in all this “a bold, imaginative, and experienced approach” enlivening a production “basically conventional” with “clever solutions to the tricky points of stage disposition (the garden chorus, the overhearing scene)” I can't imagine.
Porter, as I said earlier, is generally accurate about what he has heard—the superb singing of Jon Vickers and Teresa Zylis-Gara in Otello, Murray Perahia's beautiful playing in a Mozart piano concerto, Erich Leinsdorf's insensitive conducting of Die Walküre, among many examples. But here too there are surprises. He begins a review by illuminating for his readers the art of the Lieder-singer:
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The poet's lines must suggest to her the unwritten details of rhythmic phrasing: here a sweet, lingering accent, there a sudden urgent advance. Verbal sense will indicate the vocal hues. Yet vivid declamation is not in itself enough; Lieder-singing, like just about every other kind of music-making, needs a command of pure line—line that is beautiful and eloquent in an “absolute” way.
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And a passing reference, many pages later, to “Elena Gerhardt, the greatest of Lieder-stylists,” suggests to me that he learned from her wonderful recorded performances what he describes so well. Anyone capable of appreciating those performances should be able to hear that some of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf's performances are beautiful examples of the Lieder-singev's art, but others are flawed by excessively mannered and affected phrasing and expressive hamming—exaggerated pouting, archness, gasps, whispers—that reveal a lack of Gerhardt's controlling sense of measure and fitness, which is to say her unfailing taste. And having heard all this at Schwarzkopf's recitals and on her records for twenty years, I am dumbfounded when Porter tells his readers that “Elisabeth Schwarzkopf is of all Lieder-singers before the public today the most accomplished,” and fills two pages with the details of the marvels at her recital.
On the other hand he begins a review of the New York City Opera production of Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea—a work outside of the operatic repertory that musicians and the public know—with an enlightening description of the dramatic character and musical style of the work; the problems created for its performance today by the incomplete notation of its musical substance and instrumentation, the unfamiliarity with the manner of its performance, the voices it was written for; and what Porter thinks is wrong with the Raymond Leppard performance version—all this to establish the basis for Porter's criticisms of the way this version was used, staged, acted, and sung by the New York City Opera. The review shows Porter to be, like Donald Tovey, an example of the rare combination of authoritative scholar and perceptive critic (and I think it important to understand that the scholar's knowledge about, and the critic's perception of, a work are different things, and don't necessarily occur together: Bernard Shaw and W. J. Turner, who were not musical scholars, were great critics; Paul Henry Lang demonstrated in the Herald Tribune, and David Hamilton has recently demonstrated as Porter's temporary substitute in the New Yorker, that a scholar's knowledge doesn't give him the critic's perception and judgment).
The review also is an instance of a scholar's knowledge being useful to performers and listeners—which Porter is mistaken in thinking it always is. He has the scholar's infatuation with scholarly activity seemingly unrestrained by regard for the value of what it is concerned with. Unlike the information about L'Incoronazione, the three pages about the sources of the libretto of The Magic Flute are uninteresting and not necessary, as Porter says they are, for someone to be stirred by the work or to recognize what has made a performance effective or the opposite. And I can't imagine New Yorker readers sharing the interest in “a neglected byway of musical history” that impels Porter to devote several pages to discussion of an opera, Zandonai's Francesca da Rimini, which, in the end, he establishes has little musical value or music-dramatic effect; or the interest in anything and everything contemporary that impels Porter to discuss at length a work of “flawless mediocrity,” von Einem's The Visit of the Old Lady, or even the works of Henze that Porter admires inordinately. Moreover, it is true that someone producing an 18th-century opera needs the information a music historian can provide about the character and range of the voices of the castrati who sang some of the roles, in order to decide what voices to use today; it is not true, as Porter contends, that a soprano of today, in order to sing a role in a Haydn opera, needs to know what the historian can tell her about the soprano Haydn wrote the role for. Capobianco reveals lack of historical understanding in having Elizabeth and Leicester roll on the floor in Donizetti's Maria Stuarda; but the poignancy of Beverly Sills's singing of the two notes of Mary Stuart's “Ah! si” does not demonstrate, as Porter contends, that historical understanding is required for Donizetti's music, and Mozart's, and Mahler's, to “yield its full eloquence.” And the 1915 Metropolitan Il Trovatore that was talked about for decades thereafter was produced by Toscanini without Martin Chusid's treatises on tonal structure in Rigoletto and La Traviata, which Porter, reviewing a Metropolitan performance of Il Trovatore, thinks “should be mastered by the men . . . directing [the] performers” in Verdi's operas at the Metropolitan.
But one must, in conclusion, apply to Porter what Tovey said of Schubert, and say that his occasional inequalities of performance cannot make him a critic of less than the highest rank.

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