In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

15 As Others See Us: H. C. C.’s Response to M. R.’s Letter to the Editor The Times (London), December 17, 1921 Mr. Rosenthal’s letter has shown his skill in defense and counter-attack with a good story for a weapon. I grudge him nothing but the weapon, the story of Matejko, the painter. That should have been in my hand, though I might not have wielded it as deftly as Mr. Rosenthal has. For what I set out to tell him was what his friend the Count told the painter, that his portrait of Brahms may be very ¤ne, but is not a bit like Brahms, to which he replies that my portrait of his piano playing may be highly estimable, but is not a bit like his piano playing. So we stand confronting one another and awaiting the verdict of an arbitration board.Mr.Rosenthal professes to produce a ¤nal arbiter in Brahms himself, but a correspondent has been quick to point out the ®aw in this argument of which no doubt Mr. Rosenthal is already conscious. “The ®owers that bloom in the spring, Tra-la, have nothing to do with the case.”1 Apart from the fact that my strictures were directed primarily towards his performance of a very different work from the Paganini Variations (the later movements of the Sonata in F Minor) what Brahms said of “the 21 years old Rosenthal” may have only the slightest bearing on a performance given a fortnight ago. No doubt after Brahms’s elderly commendation of his youth Mr. Rosenthal would not in elder years wittingly maltreat the youthful Brahms. But he knows, as every sincere artist does, that a thousand con®icting circumstances have operated on him through nearly 40 years of strenuous toil and travel,enlarging his vision in some directions, contracting it in others—quickening certain sensibilities and deadening others, shattering early ideals, and awakening (let us hope) the consciousness of new ones. Mr. Rosenthal would not be the alive man he is if his playing to-day were a replica of his playing in 1884. So when a hearer in 1921 exclaims, “But this portrait does not look in the least like Brahms,” it is at least conceivable that the artist has lost something amongst all the gains of an international celebrity. So much for his portrait of Brahms; his objection to mine of him reminds one that great artists are like ordinary people in one respect.Given two portraits of themselves they have a natural tendency to choose the better-looking one, and declare it to be the only faithful portrait. The other may have caught a ®eeting likeness which the subject is sorry to own. Mr. Rosenthal is not above the rest of humanity in this. He has found the pen-portrait of his playing which he likes, and was so obliging as to enclose a copy of it with his letter, a cutting from another paper, in which he had underlined these words:— The natural successor of Anton Rubinstein in the royal line of pianists. We have not his like to-day in any land. No wonder he prefers this as a portrait for general distribution to either of the two sketches which appeared in The Times, two entirely distinct sketches, it may be noticed, one of his Brahms the other of his Beethoven, drawn by different hands. This portrait, set in his own italics, is the ful¤llment of the pianist ’s dream just because it is so general, and his real objection to our sketches (I must drop back into the plural pronoun here) is possibly less that they contradict anything which Brahms or Beethoven said about the interpretation of their works, than that they were rather too “particularly adapted to the speci¤c performances ” under discussion, and therefore not suited to italicized reproduction. Granted that Brahms liked the selection from his Paganini Variations, and that the whole of the drama of The Tempest (not excluding the shipwreck) is packed into Mr. Rosenthal’s reading of the Appassionata Sonata, it does not follow that the listener need accept either without question on his own part. If Mr. Rosenthal thinks that the phrase “disregard of the composer’s intentions” lays claim to certain knowledge of the composer’s mind, I renounce it at once and substitute for it “disregard of what the composer wrote.” For the listener to any well-known music must be prepared to receive impressions...

Share