Critics

Abstract

Biographical details about music critics often arrive at us fragmentarily, through a multiplicity of sources often intended for quick consumption; highlights of a critic’s day-to-day and the reputation they might have had among their contemporaries might also survive, in scattered form, in diaries and oral histories. Other critics—particularly in more recent decades—have adopted a first-person, confessional voice through which details of their personal lives might be revealed. After considering these issues with reference to a number of brief examples pertaining to a range of eras and geographical areas, the chapter will explore more closely a range of case studies featuring music critics who opposed fascist regimes: Massimo Mila, Adolfo Salazar, and Alfred Einstein. The chapter will critically consider how the biographical narratives that musicology has constructed for these critics have balanced—sometimes in not completely satisfactory ways—issues of displacement, political commitment, national identity, modernism, and canons.