Comment on Music
THIS is' a selection from the fortnightly essays Neville Cardus has contributed to the Manchester Guardian during the last fiveyears or so. Not long ago a similar selection of Ernest Newman's weekly articles was published. Cardus makes no secret of considering Newman and himself pretty well the only two living English music critics with anything readable or worth while to say, and although Newman has not given us his estimate of Cardus, he takes an equally poor view of most music criticism—for exactly the opposite reason: Newman's complaint is that most criticism is no more than a subjective setting-down of impres- sions that tell us more about the critic than about the music. Cardus, despite his admiration for Newman, takes Shaw's view that criticism can only be subjective, and thinks the critic's function is to try to convey his own experience of the music to the reader by all the literary ability and imagination he commands.
Few whose duty it is to read much about music will doubt that Cardus's is the better case, and there are few stronger arguments for it than his own best writing—which, alas, is not generously enough represented in this book. The style is easy, often anecdotal; the attempt at continuity of theme in the several sections means a certain repetitiveness, and some bees buzz very per- sistently in Cardus's bonnet. But scattered about the pages there are many illuminating or penetrat- ing comments—rarely an article without one at least, which is a much higher than average pro- portion in music criticism. They come thickest, tusually, when he forces himself . to write about
music and composers not on the narrow track of his main musical interests in recent years.
The finest category of his writings is hardly represented in this collection at all. Cardus can do best what none of his colleagues, old or young, can do consistently, if at all. He can give us a living description of a musical performance, as alive and musical as if we were hearing the con- cert itself. Almost the only glimpse of this Cardus here is in the article on Chopin and Pianists. To put beside this very readable bedside book we need another collection of his actual concert
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