What the Critics Say
About Mr. Van Vechten's Work
What the Critics Say About
Mr. Van Vechten's Work
Mr. Van Vechten has written and Alfred A. Knopf has published two other books which should appeal to those who like "The Music of Spain." The first of these, "Music and Bad Manners," contains the following seven essays: Music and Bad Manners, Music for the Movies, Spain and Music, Shall We Realize Wagner's Ideals? The Bridge Burners, A New Principle in Music, Leo Ornstein.
"Interpreters and Interpretations" contains the following fourteen essays: Olive Fremstad, Geraldine Farrar, Mary Garden, Feodor Chaliapine, Mariette Mazarin, Yvette Guilbert, Waslav Nijinsky, The Problem of Style in the Production of Opera, Notes on the Armide of Gluck, Erik Satie, The Great American Composer, The Importance of Electrical Picture Concerts, Modern Musical Fiction, and Why Music is Unpopular.
Here is what Henry Blackman Sell of "The Chicago Daily News" has to say of Mr. Van Vechten's work:
As one of that annoying clan who don't know anything about music except that we know what we like, I hereby raise my voice to hymn Mr. Van Vechten's intelligent pronouncements as a boon, a joy and a liberation. Henceforth when I peruse the ponderous passages, which so often pass for erudition in contemporary music criticism, I shall not sorrow with myself in the mortification of ignorance, as of yore. No, no, I am free. I have read of music and musicians in articles and essays written by a man who is accredited in the most trustworthy quarters as being a fellow well up in the nice points of his delicate trade—and I have understood.
For two years I have avoided Mr. Van Vechten's annual volume ("Music After the Great War" was published in 1915 and "Music and Bad Manners" in 1916) for no more worthy reason than a convinced aversion for books on music; their tangled sobriety seems such a poor guide to the joys of the concert, the opera or the performer.
Wholly by chance, fortunate accident, I flipped open his latest, "Interpreters and Interpretations," and this is what greeted my astonished gaze: