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Criticism: A State Of Emergency
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2010
Extract
My second quotation, that superbly cutting account of a husband, occurs in The Awkward Age. The imagery might, under only a little pressure, be made to serve as a description of the present-day music critic, an odd accessory to the world of music who is only rarely (like the fire extinguisher) of practical use:—a bucket on a peg, indeed, and all too often an empty one.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1955
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page 8 note 1 This statement is refreshingly contradicted by a recent notice in The Manchester Guardian of 9th September (Neville Cardus) in which an admirably outspoken corrective is administered to the popular conception of a much over-praised conductor's maltreatment of the classics. For the importance of this task, see my next paragraph.
page 10 note 1 After the completion of this article an example of the very synthesis I have in mind appeared in the shape of Martin Cooper's review of Dr. H. F. Redlich's new book on Bruckner and Mahler (c.f. ‘Two Giants Compared', Daily Telegraph 10th September).
page 11 note 1 Or as Proust puts it in La Recherche du Temps Perdu, “What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art. It is essential that the work … shall create its own posterity. For if the work were held in reserve, were revealed only to posterity, that audience, for that particular work, would be not posterity but a group of contemporaries who were merely living half-a-century later in time”. Earlier in the same passage Proust has remarked that “It was Beethoven's [late] Quartets themselves … that devoted half-a-century to forming, fashioning and enlarging a public for Beethoven's characters …“ [Ivans, C. K. Scott Moncrieff.]
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