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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 November 2010
The “dean” of New York's music critics a century ago, Henry Krehbiel–born in Ann Arbor to German immigrant parents—was emblematic of a vibrant intellectual community that blended Germanic and American traits. As a dominant propagator of a distinctively wholesome American Wagnerism, he embodied both German Kunst and American meliorism. As a self-made critic, he combined weighty scholarly learning and prose with a nose for news and a popularizing bent. During World War I, the German enemy incited no more patriotic response than his. But Krehbiel was increasingly stranded in postwar America. A bearer of genteel culture, he retained his iron criterion of uplift; no such aesthetic anchor would stabilize art in times to come.
1 Chicago Tribune in Horowitz, Joseph, Classical Music in America (New York, 2005), 225.Google ScholarFrank Leslie's in Robert Rydell: All the World's A Fair (Chicago, 1984), 66.Google Scholar Buell in Robert Winter and Peter Bogdanoff, From the New World: A Celebrated Composer's American Odyssey, DVD-ROM <http://www.artsinteractive.org>.
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33 For an annotated version of Krehbiel's 4,000-word Salome review, go to the volume 8 contents page of <http://www.jgape.org>. This masterpiece of critical opprobrium calibrates the nature and magnitude of Strauss's challenge to reigning notions of art with exhaustive patience; the paragraphs average over 400 words, the sentences more than 30. In less leisurely times to come, no writer would attempt such density of utterance (unless in experimental fiction). It registers the freight train mass of Henry Edward Krehbiel at full throttle.
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