The Ring

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Scheduled to make her debut earlier in the season, she was rehearsing with Grane, famed war horse, when she became tangled in its lead-string; there was a moment's scuffle, the horse stepped upon Mme. Larsen-Todsen. Mme. Muller, a 23-year-old soprano from Czecho-Slovakia, was loudly and justly applauded when she made her first U. S. appearance in Die Walküre.

No Critics

Ernest Newman, writer on Music for The New York Evening Post, told in cipient "journalists" of the Columbia School that "there have never been, there is not today, of the music critics, one who can be called a real critic."

Thereupon Deems Taylor, writer on Music for The New York World, col- umnized, saying:

"An active contemporary critical fraternity that includes in its ranks such contributors to the permanent literature of musical comment as Lawrence Gilman, William J. Henderson and Ernest Newman, cannot be said to be utterly destitute of real critics.

"Broadly speaking, though, Mr. Newman is absolutely right-certainly so far as concerns the newspaper critics. I sometimes wonder whether, strictly speaking, we have any right to be called music critics at all. At least nine-tenths of our time and energy is spent in writing appraisals of performances. The music, most of it, is not new, and what we write, when boiled down, amounts to but little more than saying that it was performed better or worse than it was the last time we heard it. Reduce any average newspaper music critique to its lowest terms, and you will arrive at something like this: 'The Symphar-monic Orchestra gave a concert last night in Carnegie Hall. Mr. Damfurt-berg, this week's guest conductor, gave a perfectly terrible performance of Weber's Oberon overture, and a very good one of those Handel concerti grossi. He took the first movement of Chykovsky's* Fifth Symphony faster than he should, sentimentalized the second, was too slow in the third and was superb in the fourth. The concert ended with the Tannhauser overture as usual.'

"The kind of criticism Mr. Newman is talking about cannot be done on a newspaper. For a critic is essentially a person who feels and thinks; and though feeling may, on occasion, be swift enough to catch the third edition, thought takes time. The weeklies might manage some real criticism, only they don't."

*The famed Russian composer's name can be spelled in a variety of ways; Tschaikowsky is the chosen of TIME.

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