Modern objections to Romantic music criticism often take aim at its hieratic posture, as if it were committed to the absolute metaphysical ‘truth content’ of the works it paraphrased. In fact the Idealist philosophical basis of sentimental-Romantic critical practice was a much more subjective interrelationship between feeling and reflection. As theorized by Herder, this formed the basis of Bildung, the originally anthropological idea of ‘cultivation’ later fetishized by the German middle classes. Through Kant and Schiller it tied into notions of ‘character’ and poetic ‘characterisation’, developed during the 1790s and soon a firm part of Romantic music criticism. Romantic poetic imagery could be pressed into the service of religious dogma, as it was by Joseph d’Ortigue writing on Beethoven’s instrumental music. But other forms of Romantic criticism after Herder used ‘characterisation’ instead as an empathetic path to understanding the diversity of musical cultures, an approach exemplified by Joseph Mainzer.

Debussy numbered himself among the army of critics commenting on Paris’s burgeoning musical life. This chapters sets this criticism and other writing in context by relating the writings to the organs in which they appeared and the causes they often sought to promote. Not only was Debussy an active and often brilliant critic for two periods in his life, he also both benefitted and suffered from critical activity. He even numbered a critic or two among his correspondents and friends. Debussy’s attraction to writing music criticism was largely as a source of income, but his writings left their mark on the imagination of his contemporaries, not least because they contain aspects of his thought and, through his elliptical style, raise and sometimes resolve problems of musical aesthetics.

The advent of the Bourbon dynasty in 1702 interrupted almost two centuries of Spanish dominion in Naples and opened up channels of artistic exchange between Naples and Paris. Arcangelo Corelli’s visit to Naples to celebrate the new king, Philip V, albeit allegedly ill fated, attests to the significance of the Neapolitan instrumental tradition and emblematically marks the start of the migration of Neapolitan musicians throughout Europe. The string virtuosi trained in the Neapolitan conservatories were the first players to familiarize French audiences with advanced Italian performance practices and had a crucial role in the dissemination of the Italian sonata in France. The initial resistance to the “eccentric” performances of these virtuosi, attested in the chronicles of the time, sparked debates on the respective merits of French and Italian music. Italian music became the expression of a new aesthetic and received the support of powerful aristocratic families and prominent members of the emerging French bourgeoisie, eager to distinguish themselves from the old regime. The new aesthetic approach appears in full display in the collection of solo violin sonatas published in Paris in 1712 by Giovanni Antonio Piani. In the preface to his collection, Piani provides examples of the advanced performance practices carried out by the Neapolitan virtuosi.

The history of American music writing – essays on music, criticism, reviews, pamphlets – is told in this chapter, beginning in the nineteenth century, when an identifiably American music still had not fully coalesced. The early twentieth century saw the arrival of strong music advocates and composer-writers who sought to create innovative music and write prolifically about these new sounds, for which they had become de facto evangelists. Early American music writers underscored the differences between American and European music. Essays on music took on an increasingly pedagogical function, teaching their readers about the intricacies and sometimes hidden features of new compositions. The earliest American music writing focused on classical music, but as jazz entered the scene, with its complex rules and unfamiliar rhythms and chord structures, a new cohort of essayists developed a language for writing about this American artform. Throughout the century, a more personal tone emerged in the music essay as composers, musicians, and music connoisseurs began to articulate their feelings, impressions, memories, and individual experiences.

When stereo LPs were launched in North American and European markets, record companies began a fierce marketing campaign to convince consumers of its merits. Stereo demonstration records played an important role, one of the most notorious being an offering by Concert-Disc that featured the sounds of a ping-pong match. Critics, on the other hand, reinforced a pat narrative about stereophony, seeing its vocation in a single three-dimensional sound image, not in the abrupt antiphony of sonic ping-pong. The term “ping pong” quickly became a critical term of abuse. Thus was born an enduring audio aesthetic for which “ping-pong” effects were to be scrupulously shunned in high-brow offerings, an aesthetic that would go on to infuse the way “serious” music was produced in the 1960s and 1970s. This chapter traces the genealogy and evolution of “ping-pong” sound effects and its relationship to the aesthetics of musical modernism.

This chapter explores Britten’s relationship with the critical press and various writers on music. The composer’s antipathy to critics is widely acknowledged, and his relationship with members of that circle could be contentious at times. In his article ‘Variations on a Critical Theme’, published in Opera in 1952, Britten addressed many of the concerns he had about music criticism in Britain and posited some remedies, but he only created further animosity in some quarters. Nevertheless, several music writers gained his confidence and respect, including Henry Boys, Donald Mitchell, and Hans Keller. Mitchell and Keller, in particular, attempted to elevate discourse about music in England and gave special attention to the works of Britten in their periodical Music Survey and in Boosey & Hawkes’s publication, Tempo, among other Britten-centred endeavours. The chapter focuses upon proponents and adversaries alike, including such disparate personalities as Eric Blom, Boys, Norman Demuth, Peter Evans, Frank S. Howes, Keller, Colin Mason, Mitchell, Eric Roseberry, Erwin Stein, Eric Walter White, and Virgil Thomson.

Strauss at the turn of the century was seen as an enfant terrible who used music as an instrument for candid, unsentimental, and realist explorations of the human experience. Although embraced by the public, critics attacked his works as self-indulgent; they found him glib and shallow, content with superficial drama punctuated by a desire to shock. After World War I, both the right and left dismissed his lush, hyperrealist aesthetic as a relic of a bygone era, one side lamenting that Strauss was too cosmopolitan and the other ignoring him as benignly irrelevant. When the preeminence enjoyed by radical modernism ended mid-century, a neglected historical reality came into view: the resilience of tradition. In that reassessment, Strauss’ innovations, with those of composers such as Pfitzner, Schrecker, Martinů, Korngold, Zemlinsky, Schoeck, and Braunfels, suggest an alternative formulation of the modern, one that helped define the trajectory of twenty-first-century music.

The early reception of Beethoven’s Eroica proves to be a complex phenomenon. The new audiences that emerged around 1800 were interested in understanding music both through listening and through reading about it in new journals devoted to music. Beethoven’s music was considered very difficult, but worth the challenge. The dominant image of Beethoven and the status of the symphony both played an important role in the Eroica’s early reception. From the nineteenth century onwards there has been a strong desire to understand Beethoven’s music by relating it to biography. In the case of the Eroica Symphony there has been a focus on the title, and on the unnamed great man or hero, as well as on the interpretation of the Marcia funebre. Authors such as Hector Berlioz, Ferdinand Ries, Anton Schindler and Carl Maria von Weber contributed to interpretations that ranged from relating the symphony to the ancient world to the attempt to establish a programme related to Napoleon, Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, Admiral Horatio Nelson or General Ralph Abercromby. So the Eroica has been understood variously as a political statement. Others commentators, such as Richard Wagner, saw Beethoven himself is the hero of this symphony.