Wagner

Wagner*

Ernest Newman (TIME, Oct. 13), long critic of the London Sunday Times, is for this year guest critic of The New York Evening Post. There is probably no critic writing in English whose estimates of contemporary music are of more interest.

Newman can outwrite the cleverest of the sophisticates. His literary manner is a nimble and adaptable instrument, bubble-light, steel-keen. His taste is of the highest degree of nicety, his appreciations broadly tolerant He is courageously frank, never self-consciously clever. Above all, he has what is usually lacking among our native critics in Music as in the other Arts--a profound background of intelligent scholarship.

Mr. Newman's work on Wagner lias for some time been known to the musical intelligenzia through the English edition. It is perhaps the first authoritative work to face frankly the facts of Wagner's life without malice and with a genuine admiration for both the man and his work, but with no effort to gloss the occasionally distasteful phases of the man's character.

Very few people of prominence have left as much information about themselves as Richard Wagner. Far from any display of reticence, he positively hurls his private life into the teeth of posterity, notably in the voluminous autobiography Mein Leben. So Mr. Newman feels at liberty to peer without shame into dubious corners of the Master's life. It might be supposed that, with an autobiography whose avowed intent was "unadorned veracity," the private life of the composer would not be a hard matter to probe. Unhappily, Mr. Newman finds that, far from being a frank revelation, Mein Leben falls just short of actual falsehood.

Wagner was totally incapable of seeing the other side of anything. With superb, domineering egotism, he was wont to summon his own witnesses, marshall his own facts, present them himself, give a verdict in his own favor.

Notably, his biographer finds, Wagner was unjust to Conductor Lachner, to Robert von Hornstein, his friend, to his first wife Minna, to all hostile critics. His disposition was tempestuous, overbearing; he never paid his bills; not merely asked, but demanded loans of his friends as a condition of continued friendship; was enraged at Minna for her imbecilic protests at his open amours; indignantly resented any interference-- even the most pacific--from the husband or family of any lady who chanced to be the object of his rather various affections. A boorish, choleric, tactless, amorous gentlemen was this Wagner, improvident and insolent, luxurious and sensual, incorrigibly sure of himself and of his mission, totally oblivious to the unhappiness he brought on his associates, utterly bigoted.

Mr. Newman is unmerciful to the man Wagner. His object is not, however to condemn him, but to make him the more real by the contrast of his pettiness and infirmities of character with his essential greatness of achievement. There is an enormous gap, we find, between the man and the artist--"the most many-sided of musicians."

Mr. Newman's work is well and entertainingly written, with a wealth of scholarship and a shrewd insight. He is never carried away by his theme, always preserves a just sense of proportion. And his inspection of the great musician's personal idiosyncrasies is far from devoid of a sly humor.

*WAGNER AS MAN AND ARTIST-Ernest Newman-Knopf ($5.00)