1 - Ernest Newman and the Challenge of Critical Biography

Summary

JEAN Sibelius once facetiously remarked that a monument had never been erected in honour of a music critic, implying that critics were irascible and unworthy hacks whose opinions were best ignored. Yet a monument—of sorts—was erected for Ernest Newman. It was not of the bricks and mortar variety, but of the literary kind, a clerihew:

Ernest Newman said

‘next week, Schumann’

But, when next week came

It was Wagner just the same.

Monuments, of course, are not always accurate representations of their subject. Rodin's controversial sculpture of Balzac, first displayed in 1898, is a case in point. Although Rodin believed the artwork accurately captured the writer's persona, the critics and public, expecting a true likeness of Balzac, were let down. The same is true for what this clerihew tells us about Newman. Its suggestion that Newman was preoccupied with Wagner is rather wide of the mark, as this book will show.

Although Newman's work was at times dominated by writings on Wagner, it was not his sole focus. His essays and books spanned a wide spectrum of national literatures (novels, poetry and plays) and biographies (or biographicalstyle books) on composers including Gluck, Elgar, Strauss, Wolf, Beethoven and Liszt. He wrote extensively on rationalism and evolutionary theory, the reception of Russian and English music, and a host of other literary, social and musical topics. Underpinning most of Newman's writings was a commitment to critical and historical method derived from British and European critics, historians and biographers, though such methods were not always faithfully applied.

This book explores the wide-ranging intellectual influences that affected Newman's life work as exemplified in a broad selection of essays and books that I think best represent his work as a music historian, critic and biographer. It is not a book about Newman the great Wagnerian (though his work on the composer occupies parts of chapters 3 and 7 and all of chapter 9). Nor is it a book that merely records his critical responses to particular composers on whom he wrote extensively, such as Berlioz. Rather, this critical biography is concerned with the motivations—intellectual, personal and economic— behind Newman's work. It examines the circumstances that gave rise to particular books and articles and the reasons for their creation. I show that a cast of European intellectual writers influenced Newman's work, although this influence is not always apparent.