The Power of Music Criticism

            The _Berkeley Barb_ was an underground newspaper established by Max Scherr in Berkeley, California and published from 1965 to 1980. As one of the most influential newspapers produced by the ongoing counterculture, the _Berkeley Barb_ was instrumental in reporting on news and propagating writings concerning the anti-war movement, the Civil Rights movement, and the Free Speech movement. The purely historical value this newspaper provides is immense: it affords us intimate, ground-level insights into the cultural zeitgeist of the Bay Area during a period of intense ferment and activity. The _Barb_ was not, however, strictly dedicated to political news and commentary. It also provides exciting avenues from which to observe the ongoing development of the Bay Area musical culture from the mid-1960s to the end of the 1970s.


            This paper provides an overview of the diverse and colorful cast of composers, artists, ensembles, and performance spaces covered in the pages of the _Berkeley Barb_ by drawing on voluminous pieces of criticism, concert calendars, and interviews that attest to the richness of the musical environment. I focus on such figures as Ben Jacopetti, Roland Young, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe; venues such as the Open Theater; and criticism relating to such watersheds as Woodstock, Altamont, and the failed Wild West Festival. These many and varied examples are illustrative of how the musical culture developed-as well as how it sometimes faltered-in the Bay Area of the 1960s and 1970s.

Around 1750, various elements came together to turn Berlin from a musical backwater to one of the leading European centers of music in both practice and theory. First, there was Frederick II's ascension in 1740 to the Prussian throne, which soon drew many notable musicians to the court. But equally important (and less recognized) was the creation of a robust public sphere of music theorizing and criticism, largely thanks to various periodicals issued by Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg. Marpurg's periodicals helped create a public sphere in which people of various walks of life could discuss and criticize music openly. From the beginning, Marpurg worked energetically to promote a national style for the German nation by heralding the music of influential contemporaries who were active in the German-speaking lands. In order to maximize the outreach of his periodicals, Marpurg appealed to amateurs as well as professionals, male and female readers alike. Over the following generation, the music-literary scene in Berlin soon became one of the most dynamic in all of Europe, covering all aspects of contemporary musical life while using the language and tools of the most progressive musical theories circulating in Europe.  


The Seven Years' War (1756-63) serves as a useful dividing point between two distinct phases of this literary activity.  First, there was the pre-war generation of critics (e. g., Marpurg and Kirnberger) who reflected the conservative aesthetics of the court of Frederick II and looked upon operas by Graun and Hasse as the best models for contemporary music. After the war, there rose a newer generation of critics (e. g., Reichardt and Spazier) who extolled the works of Gluck and Mozart. Yet, these schools were united in the broader mission of advocating for a German national style that set itself apart from French and Italian models. While Forkel's 1802 biography of Bach is often cited as the beginning of the connection between music and nationalism in Germany, music theory and criticism can be seen to have functioned as a nation-building agent in periodicals in Berlin for at least half a century.

Published music criticism has played a disproportionate role in the historiography of opera in Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century. In addition to harvesting opera reviews for indications of the nation's musical self-awareness, scholars have mined them for factual details about opera troupes active in Russia, singer biographies, performance practices, day-to-day theater operations, and public perception of distinct national operatic traditions and of specific composers and their works. For the reign of Nicholas I (1825-1855)-I contend-this methodology is flawed and unsustainable, because the "facts" transmitted by the sources are, by and large, fictitious. Reviews systematically distorted the reality. Some reviews were state-commissioned; all were state-sanctioned. Even when written by writers from outside the official network, the censorship mechanism ensured that what reached the reading public reflected the political needs of the state. With the state imposing the narrative, opera reviews served to communicate Nicholas's cultural policy to the masses, in the process controlling public opinion of various state initiatives, shaping reception of operas and composers, manipulating expectations over new troupes and censored librettos, and projecting a sense of accomplishment.


In this paper, I interrogate the nature of historical evidence contained in published music criticism from this period, while exploring the function of opera reviews in the context of Nicholas's cultural policy. To build my case, I first examine the state's philosophy of theater criticism as it was codified in Russia's censorship statutes of 1826 and 1828. I then present case studies, strategically selected from different junctures in Nicholas's ever-evolving opera project (e.g., importation of Italian opera troupes and modernization of the operatic repertoire), reading published reviews generated in these moments against corresponding state documents preserved in the Russian State Historical Archive. Such a juxtaposition affords a unique view of an inverse relationship between what was being reported in the press and the reality as captured by official documents. These documents make transparent the state's view of theater criticism as a tool for propaganda.