To the Editors:
Your September issue carries a piece entitled “The pupils of Clara Schumann and the uses of tradition” by Samuel Lipman. It has been drawn to my attention as I am the compiler of the records referred to and the writer of the set’s notes. As the “review” aspect of the piece is entirely dismissive, I will request the courtesy of your columns for a considered answer.
What does Lipman mean by “the uses of tradition”? In the body of his article he tells us: “the great pianists of the past have rarely been scholars, have always been supreme egotists, and have invariably made styles, not reflected them.” In other words, “the uses of tradition” for him are precisely zero. He is self-confessedly unqualified to understand these records.
From this contradiction flows his entire piece. He cannot perceive, he tells us, the stylistic similarities shared by all the Schumann pupils. These similarities have been clear to every other reviewer whose opinions have so far come to our notice—eight in all.
He confuses rhythmic security with dullness. This may be because the playing on these records represents a style unfamiliar to him. He ignores entirely the remarkable tonal balancing and voice leadings everywhere apparent in these records.
He grossly exaggerates Adelina de Lara’s mistakes. Her occasional slips never come anywhere near obscuring the music’s proportions. And her rhythmic control—especially in the Brahms Haydn Variations, in which he finds only “a certain weak-kneed sentimentality”—is of the greatest firmness. These are not matters of “taste” or “opinion” but of facts, clear to anyone not violently biased.
Mr. Samuel Lipman has written a bad review in every sense. I question whether he can produce a single responsible critic to agree with any one of his violent remarks. If he cannot, then you, Sirs, owe the producers of these important records a fresh and fair review.
Jerrold Northrop Moore
c/o Oxford University Press
Oxford, England
Samuel Lipman replies:
Mr. Jerrold Northrop Moore questions “whether [I] can produce a single responsible critic to agree with any one of [my] violent remarks.” I can indeed, and the critic I will now cite is a noted aficionado of the same kinds of pianistic traditions of which Mr. Moore has appointed himself a conservator. In The Great Pianists (1963), Harold C. Schonberg writes of the very performances (when they were first available on records) Mr. Moore urges upon us:
Adelina de Lara, another Schumann-lady, might have been a good pianist; but the Clara Schumann Society in the 1950s did her no service by having her record several large-scale Schumann works. De Lara was seventy-eight at the time, and whatever her intentions, she did not have the coordination to put them into practice.
So much for the unanimity of praise to which Mr. Moore points. But I cannot help thinking that in requiring of me that I cite critical authority for my own musical judgment Mr. Moore makes clear that for him, in intellectual matters as in musical ones, nothing worthwhile exists unless it has been properly validated before—in a word, by tradition. So Adelina de Lara’s playing takes its value (at least for Mr. Moore) from its association with Clara Schumann; is my judgment then to take its value from the precedent of Harold C. Schonberg?
Nonsense, of course. De Lara’s playing, like everyone else’s on the Pupils of Clara Schumann set, must be listened to for itself, for its own musical and pianistic accomplishments. If all this playing doesn’t convince without the attribution to Clara Schumann, it can scarcely convince with it. Similarly, my critical verdict on Mr. Moore’s compilation must itself be judged in terms of the piano-playing I have attempted to evaluate.
As piano-playing, the work of Adelina de Lara and her peers falls far short of high (or in many cases even professional) artistic achievement. To impute to their work the greatness of the past is, in my opinion, to fall victim to the nostalgia which is already so widespread in performing musical life today. And when nostalgia becomes the criterion of art, the result can only be a barely disguised philistinism.