“The Lives of the Great Composers”, by Harold C. Schonberg

653 pages, W.W. Norton & Co., ISBN-13: 978-0393013023

Harold C. Schonberg was the senior New York Times music critic for twenty years and was the first in his field to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, in 1971. Before passing away in 2003, he was the author of many articles and eight books, including The Lives of the Great Composers from 1970, although the copy I reviewed was extensively revised in 1997. There are any number of books aimed at the general audience that chronicle the lives of the great composers of Western music, and the 21^st Century reader who peruses this book will get some engaging takes on composers of the common practice period. He will also get a glimpse into some outmoded attitudes towards music, for even with its updates since the first edition of 1970 the book shows biases and blind spots common to Schonberg’s generation. These biases can be reduced to two factors: a blindness to early music, and a repertoire-centered mindset.

Can one imagine a history of Western painting that begins with, say, Rembrandt and ignores everything that came before? This is similar to what Schonberg does as his view of music history is centered on the 19^th Century; the pre-Bach period is only lightly sketched in, while he devotes pages upon pages to all manner of romantic composers. This would have been fine if the title of this book was The Lives of the Great Romantic Composers, but seeing that this is supposed to be more inclusive than that, it falls rather short of its principle. To be sure, Schonberg attempts to justify his non-inclusion of earlier composers thus:

Their work is simply not heard, by and large, in concert halls around the world...audiences tend to find the music archaic, or lacking in personality, or just plain dull.

Oh…alright, then; we cannot talk about earlier composers if their work is simply not heard or if it is just plain dull; God forbid that an historian should educate his audience to composers and their works in the interest of enlightenment. Perhaps sensing how limiting his work was, Schonberg added a chapter on Monteverdi for the 1996 edition, but there is still no accounting for the hundred-year gap between Monteverdi and Bach – there no great creators, no strong personalities, in that period, I suppose. As a result of this unconscionable neglect, the reader gets no sense of Bach’s roots in the German baroque tradition of Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber, Dieterich Buxtehude or Heinrich Schütz, to name but a few; indeed, to read Chapter Two, “The Transfiguration of the Baroque”, one would think that Bach’s achievements sprang from the very soil. In addition to this time gap, there are examples of clumsy editing where Schonberg simply cut and pasted in some new text for the revised edition but the new text does not make sense with the older text around it (for example, the ending of the chapter on Handel). And don’t get me started on Schonberg’s one-sided (and inaccurate) account of the equal temperament system of tuning, just another example of the outmoded attitudes found in this book.

Another problem with the book is that it has a concert-hall, repertoire-centered view of music: whether a composer is-or-is-not in the active repertoire is, for Schonberg, an inordinately important yardstick and he uses it as an excuse to dismiss an important 20^th Century creator such as Arthur Honegger in a few curt sentences: “[O]n the whole Honegger has slid from his once-high position, and his music is vanishing fast from the concert halls” (meanwhile, in a transparent gesture of Politically Correct virtue signaling, the peripheral Dame Ethel Smyth merits two rather detailed paragraphs and even a photo; seriously, outside of your typical college Feminist Study department, who gives a shit about Dame Ethel?)

Added to all of that is Schonberg’s conceit that that words can convey musical ideas: opinions about musical beauty are about as useless as opinions about beauty of any kind and cannot be described, much less rationally explained. Schonberg, however, obviously believes that he knows what people will find beautiful, if not now, then sometime in the future when they will, presumably, come to their senses and agree with him. Schonberg, as you can see, has this colossal ego, backed up by a not-so-impressive ability to predict or explain taste; if he did, he certainly wouldn’t be so constantly surprised at how certain composer he had figuratively buried have amazingly, and unpredictably, come back to life (he also shows a nasty streak of claiming expertise is most every field, believing, for example, that Freud made the study of the human mind into science, proving Schonberg’s science to be time-warped circa the 1920’s).

In his musical opinions, Schonberg is irritatingly back and forth, one minute pointing to lack of popular appeal as proof of something that later he claims to be irrelevant. The book contains far more of Schonberg’s personal opinions than disembodied facts. It’s obvious that Schonberg considered himself as some kinda Freudian hipster-doofus with a downbeat, analyzing the doings of composers in a 1920’s style of phony-baloney psychoanalysis. That really wasn’t what I thought I was getting myself into. For some reason Schonberg doesn’t seem to comprehend that individual human differences exist and have always existed and always will, making predictions of the type he is making, not only impossible, but often invalid and pointless. And THAT is the basis for Schonberg’s failure: he’s confused about human nature and can’t fathom, as but one example, why most people always have and always will reject dissonant music (answer: it sucks).

Ultimately there is too much Schonberg and too little great composers. I could really care less about the man’s opinions, his Pulitzer Prize for Criticism be damned. Furthermore, I don’t think the whole “lives of the great composers” approach is a good way to learn about music history as it forces you to focus on personalities instead of the whole richness of musical development.