[David,]

Slonimsky's Lexicon is one of my favorite books. You would perhaps also like his memoirs, Perfect Pitch.

Louis's review strikes me as very typical of German-language artistic commentary of the time, and of the next 40 years as well (until it became, shall we say, politically incorrect). And it isn't always just anti-semitic as I recall, Hanslick dismissed the Tchaikovsky violin concerto as "odorously Russian". Your question "is this real criticism at all?" is a good one. It isn't as if Louis isn't on to something the clarinet in the 3rd movement of Mahler's 1st does sound very klezmer-like. I wonder whether recognizing national styles is always illegitimate. Does it spoil or enhance our ability to appreciate Bartok to hear the Magyar folk-sensibility in the themes (even when he isn't using actual folk songs, for instance in the string quartets or the piano sonata)? If Liszt hadn't called the Hungarian Rhapsodies, or Brahms the Hungarian Dances, "Hungarian", would we be missing something? Perhaps the difference is that Mahler is writing universal music, so that nationalizing it is a reductionist, ad hominem, criticism.

Two weeks ago I went to hear the Georgetown Symphony do Carmina Burana and I kept hearing it as Nazi music, mixing the sentimental, the profane, the healthy-sexual, the modern-technological (the scoring is very modern and Orff used the same instrumentation in Catulli Carmina as Stravinsky in Les Noces), the ersatz-volkisch, the ersatz-Mittelaltertumlich in a way that seemed as inimitably Third-Reich as Leni Riefenstahl. Perhaps I'm committing Louis's fallacies in reverse.

David Luban