News that the young Croatian pianist Dejan Lazic had askedWashington Post critic Anne Midgette to remove her mixed review of his 2010 recital from the Internet has been pinging around the web over the past several days. While Lazic’s reasoning—the “right to be forgotten” law enacted by the E.U. last May—relies on a new precedent, the rift between performers and their critics is not; just take a look at these five examples from classical music:
1. Eduard Hanslick vs. Wagner and Liszt
Eduard Hanslick, who Lazic sites in his letter to the Post, continuously stirred the pot during the late 19th century War of the Romantics, taking sides with both Schumann and Brahms. Meanwhile, Liszt and particularly Wagner bore the brunt of his evocative prose: He once described the Prelude to Tristan and Isolde as "the painting of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound” and the composer as a “boneless tonal mollusk.” Wagner, in turn, is thought to have modeled the antagonistic Beckmesser from Die Meistersinger von Nürnburg after Hanslick.
2. Virgil Thomson vs. Jascha Heifetz
Among insults, it’s hard to find a more original or indelible denigration than Virgil Thomson’s slight that Jascha Heifetz played “silk-underwear music,” which was the title of a concert review that ran in The New York Herald Tribune. The notorious review, which was quoted liberally in obituaries for both figures, went on to say of Heifetz: "The fellow can fiddle. But he sacrifices everything to polish. He does it knowingly. He is justly admired and handsomely paid for it. To ask anything else of him is like asking tenderness of the ocelot.” According to composer Paul Bowles, Heifetz never forgave Thomson.
3. Donald Rosenberg vs. Franz Welser-Möst
One of the most acrimonious feuds between performers and a critic in recent years spilled over from the pages of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer and into the courts in 2008. Critic Donald Rosenberg, who wrote the 2000 book The Cleveland Orchestra Story: Second to None, ruffled feathers with his criticism of the ensemble’s maestro, Franz Welser-Möst. The conductor, orchestra, and newspaper brass found Rosenberg’s critiques unwarranted and he was reassigned to a position where he would no longer review the orchestra. Rosenberg then sued his employer, unsuccessfully, to get his post back, with both Welser-Möst and conductor Christoph von Dohnányi testifying.
4. Olin Downes vs. Aaron Copland
In 1932, the annual Yaddo conference, held in Saratoga Springs, hosted a meeting of composers and critics to foster better understanding between the two sides. But in spite of good intentions the opposite occurred. At the center of the confrontation was The New York Times’s Olin Downes and composer Aaron Copland. Copland called daily newspaper critics a “menace” to contemporary music, to which Downes responded that composers such as Copland depend on those papers for recognition. The pair often exchanged words through letters and columns in the Times, about such items as Copland's book, Our New Music, or contemporary music concerts.
5. Martin Bernheimer vs. Ernest Fleischmann
When Ernest Fleischmann, the former executive director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic died in 2010, the New York Times reached out to his longtime sparring partner, LA Times critic Martin Bernheimer, who once wrote an article titled “The Tyrant of the Philharmonic” about the impresario. Not even death softened Bernheimer’s feelings, as he recounted for the obituary: “Ernest and I had a very jerky up-and-down relationship — more down than up. He was ruthless, a manipulator, and very smart and very progressive.”