Howard,
Felton and Fowler: "His compositions are generally regarded as
ponderous, overworked and cluttered with too many notes." Are they
writing about Reger or Mozart? (Even Burney quotes a friend as saying,
"[Mozart] is one further instance of early fruit being more
extraordinary than excellent.")
Chris
--- On Mon, 6/1/09, howard posner <howardpos...@ca.rr.com> wrote:
From: howard posner <howardpos...@ca.rr.com>
Subject: [LUTE] Re: review
To: "lute-cs.dartmouth.edu Net" <lute@cs.dartmouth.edu>
Date: Monday, June 1, 2009, 4:35 PM
On Jun 1, 2009, at 9:49 AM, Roman Turovsky wrote:
> before you really set out to position yourself as a shallow critic:
> you should at least try to acquaint yourself with Reger's music (a
> lot of it is rather grand, FYI...).
If I set out to position myself as any kind of critic, I'll do it by
writing about something that more than 100 people on the planet care
about. Nobody, with the possible exception of Rudolf Louis, ever got
positioned anywhere by writing about Reger. I suppose I could make a
stab at being the first if I wrote in Rolling Stone that he composed
the "first fascist sinfonietta," but it's a longshot.
BTW, aside from implying that it wasn't pithy, something Roman
doesn't voice disagreement with, I expressed no opinion about Reger's
music. Nor did I say I was unacquainted with it, though I suppose
he inferred as much by first inferring that I didn't like any of it
and then assuming that dislike stemmed from ignorance. And there's
no question that he's better known that one non-substantive
scatological snipe than for the Sinfonietta that occasioned it.
Roman is undoubtedly defensive because Reger has been unduly dumped
on, with a lot of published regurgitators (like Wallechinsky and
Wallace in The Book of Lists) picking up on Stravinsky's distate for
Reger and calling him the worst composer ever. Talk about memorable
critiques:
Stravinsky once remarked when he was young he met Reger, and "He and
his music repulsed me in about equal measure." Stravinsky would use
the description "dull as Reger." And if you're a big fan of outraged
pan reviews, try this excerpt from Felton and Fowler's list-book,
"Best, Worst and Most Unusual," under the entries "worst composer,"
worst piano concerto," and "worst string quartet":
[1]http://books.google.com/books?id=tpu2du-miikC&pg=PA56&lpg=PA56&dq=%
22dull+as+reger%
22&source=bl&ots=j_CM8T07mw&sig=GwyfdAFuizSyAoEI1mxxjWYRNq8&hl=en&ei=JD
A
kSvj1NJ6utAO998ShBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#PPA56,M1
Of course, if one critic's nasty notice could define the world's
worst composer, concerto or quartet, Beethoven could just as easily
have won those titles. So some listeners are surprised to find they
actually like Reger.
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References
1. http://books.google.com/books?id=tpu2du-miikC&pg=PA56&lpg=PA56&dq=%
2. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
