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I simply don't like Jane and Michael together. I know, i knooow '' they're soul mates ''and i may be judging Michael over his physical appearance i don't like his face , but there' s something about him I've been following this show since it started, and to be honest with you, this is not a show I would normally watch or recommend. However, I love the show and have been sucked into the drama! The only problem I have besides it being slightly over the top is all of the subtitles. I can't count how many times I've had to pause and rewind to read them.
Please slow them down!!! If y'all can do that, I'll give you 9 stars. I can't do 10, it's still cheesy, but I love it and it's sucks me in. I would just like to read what is going on when they aren't speaking English. For the most part the story is OK. But it gets so same ole same ole, story wise. And all the politics in it make it unattractive to watch. When I watch a funny TV show i don't want politics in it. This won't be the last show i give up for this reason i'm sure! If this show would give up the politics and try to remain light heart-ed and funny it would be more than 5 stars.
Coming from a country that airs cheap telenovela, it's refreshing to watch an improved everything of what a telenovela should be. The plot is in itself far away from what a typical viewer is interested to watch. The plot is outrageous and in the nature of telenovelas. The creators made the show at high stakes but they also reaped greater rewards. The cast is perfect. Each cast can carry a scene a telenovela would but with a very "American TV-show" feel.
The fact the they are all talented, beautiful, and god-help-me-I'm-dying-of-laughter funny can't hurt. What I hate about telenovelas Aside from seeing them 5 times a week, yes, 5 times a week is the repetitiveness and pacing. That's not a problem with this show. I like how the show foreshadow scenes and repeat scenes with very minor but very impactful changes.
The "American TV-show" pace is perfect too. I just can say that if you like watching TV shows but is kind of bored of the mainstream vampires, sci-fi, superheroes, crime, teen girl, drama, kind. You might just be blown away with this gem of a show. This show need more hype. Jane could have been replaced with a better actor. I really liked this show, but during the second season I started to being very angry.
Jane's obsession about Michael, she dumped him in the first place, she is so selfish. They said sex will not solve anything but I think she needs that Telenovela or not she should be with Raf, the drama around could be made differently.. I'm so disappointed, coz I'm surely starting to hate the main character.. It's presented in a comedic style that isn't meant to be taken seriously.
I've seen others that commented that there was nothing funny about the situation and wondered why she didn't sue the doctor If this were a reality show, it would have to involve lawyers, investigators and medical professionals. Nothing about this show feels like reality. It is presented as entertainment. I found it entertaining. It is based on an earlier Spanish version that had the lead character as a 17 year old girl, which is way more realistic if she is supposed to be a virgin.
However the fact that the lead in this version is 24 adds to the humor. How many 24 year old educated attractive women in a serious relationship with a guy in law enforcement determined to stay a virgin until marriage could there be? I think if you like a good mystery this show also has suspense and satire, I think this show is worth checking out.
It doesn't hurt that all the actors are very attractive. Have just binged watched over the last couple of weeks, from episode 1 to episode 29 and sadly, as fun as the beginning was--it is on a slow and steady decline. It is clearly a telenovela, and amusing as such. A definite departure from credibility, but fun. I can't imagine why either Michael or Rafael are in love with her even in suspended reality.
On the other hand, one can see why both Michael and Rafael are interesting and desirable mates. They both have more passion and intensity as characters. The other characters are simply fun. Overall, the acting is great, but the script writers need to find some way to make the main character, Jane, charming again. Because right now it's a drag to watch her, and the other characters can't carry the show alone. After completing the first season of this show, I have to say it's definitely one of my favorites.
It's interesting and not something typical of other shows, since the storyline is so twisted. There for awhile, it felt like keeping up with everything that was happening in the season was going to be difficult, but it's definitely not if it is something that you find interesting. It's not too hard to keep up with, but the storyline is unique and perfect for those who are in their late teens through early 30's, in my personal opinion. I absolutely love this, the Spanish and English, the funny jokes, the chemistry all of it.
Finally something Latin that I love to watch. Why aren't there more funny shows like this? I hate having to wait until Monday to watch it but it's worth the wait. I also like the fact that they showcase certain traditions that Latin families still try to keep in this generation. I just simply enjoy the show and I've even gotten friends and family to watch. I have to say that my favorite Characters are Jane, the grandmother, the mother and of course Rafael.
The dialog is fun to watch and you can relate to some of the characters also. Everything was fine until they've killed off Michael's character. Now that he's Michael dead, it's quite obvious that a little hussy Jane will find another daddy for her son, and that's where I exit. This show started out really well, from my standpoint. A little bit corny, a bit campy, but it didn't shy away from it. In fact, it embraced the fact that the dad Rogelio is a telenovela star.
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I loved the fact that it mixes with the unique blend that is Florida The romance is in the air, and the language flows naturally between English and Spanish, with subtitles that allow you to carry the conversation. I also love that every once in a while they DON'T provide the subtitles where it isn't essential.
Rossini's Le Barbier de Seville,'" Acta musicologica in press , an advance copy of which was most kindly provided to me by the author. The publishing firm of Janet et Cotelle was founded in Its period of greatest influence was the Restoration and early July Monarchy, and thus parallelled that of Castil-Blaze himself.
Like Castil-Blaze as well, it created its success by marketing the works of others. MacMillan Press, , s. The New Grove , etc. Paris ," Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung[hsipzig] No. As late as , the writer of the entry under "Castil-Blaze" in the Encyclopadie dergesammten musikalischen Wissenschaften der Tonkunst Stutt-gart: Franz Heinrich Kohler, wrote that he fully concurred with this latter review Vol.
Far from being directed to the aspiring professional musician, to the musically trained or even musically literate amateur, this quasi-encyclopedic work sought its readership instead among the general music-loving public. In his opening Avertissement Castil-Blaze states: Les bons praticiens y apprendront peu de chose.
The only prerequisite of those who would read his book seems to be a simple enjoyment of music, an enjoyment which he describes as being as natural as a walk in Janet et Cotelle, , "Avertissement," p. Castil-Blaze's intended reader need only have the ability to listen to the songs of birds and to concertos with equal pleasure, as if they were extensions of the same experience. They will be able to speak about it intelligently in society, as the average cultured bourgeois, per-haps, would be expected to be able to speak about art or literature.
It is in these venues, Castil-Blaze states, where musical opinion is most in need of correction. According to Castil-Blaze, the latter have not only been of little assistance in helping the public to understand the issues most fre It is essentially a book about how to judge music, i. As stated in the A vertissement, the work is not written for composers, but rather for audiences. It is not a theory treatise, nor is it a harmony text; it is, in fact, one of the first books in the genre of what would nowadays likely be called "music appreciation.
The following is its table of contents: De la musique II. De l'expression musicale, m. De l'introduction de l'imitation IV. De la composition VII. Du trio, du quatuor, du quintette, du sextuor VII. Des effets de la musique VIII. Des voix et du chant vocal IX. Des airs de danse X. De la marche XI. Du chant instrumental XIII. Des traductions, parodies et centons XIII.
The first volume deals with the small-scale building blocks which the composer manipu-lates to create the texture of dramatic music: In the second volume Castil-Blaze discusses the various large-scale forms which dramatic music takes on, e. At the end of the second volume he adds three chapters treating topics of special interest to him: An Appendix at the end of the second volume features musical illustrations that complement the musical discussion and are re-ferred to in the text. The range of historical, philosophical and literary sources cited in 49 his text is extraordinarily wide.
Adding to the aura of learning surrounding this work is the fact the many quotations are given in the original Latin, Italian, German and even Spanish. From this wide range of source material Castil-Blaze assembles for his readers a history of the musical stage in France and a description of its resources and characteristic forms. His breadth of reference within the field of musical stage works is as impressive as his knowl-edge of the secondary literature about it. In his Introduction alone, for example, he men-tions over stage works by over authors and composers.
In other chapters many stage works are discussed with reference to their first performances, subsequent reprises, the companies and singers performing them, and the repertoires of the theatres at which they were performed. He points out, for example, by means of a side-by-side compari-son of the opening of Mozart's Symphony No. Le Constitutionnel 8 July Other examples pique the reader's interest by demonstrating the underlying intercon-nectedness of "cultivated" and "popular" musical styles.
By means of other side-by-side comparisons, Castil-Blaze reveals how various airs and ensembles of the great works of the lyric stage, e. The idea of isolating a single mu-sical parameter to show how fragile and subtle are the determining elements in musical expression is an extraordinarily good teaching technique, and the examples which he gives in the course of this discussion obviously made for very engaging reading. The critic of Le Constitutionnel was obviously delighted with them; in fact he admires the entire chapter de-voted to L 'Expression musicale.
Such examples as these are not only instructive, but also entertaining, and it is Castil-Blaze's gift to be able to convince his readers with the force of his arguments on a subject as alien as the technicalities of musical structure while still delighting them with the discovery of new relationships in old and familiar material. It is a quality which provoked men-tion in every review of the work. The reviewer in the Allegemeine Musikalische Zeitung cited above refers in his first sentence to the great "spirit" Warme which characterizes Castil-Blaze writing.
And the reviewer from Le Constitutionnel devotes almost an entire paragraph to this point: Le style de M. By vigorously confronting such topics as the nature of the traditional opera libretto, the administrative structure of the French national theatres, the unusual man-ner of classifying lyric voice types in France and of distributing them in stage productions, Castil-Blaze raised important new questions for public debate, questions which challenged the centralized control of state institutions and their repertories by the French government.
Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, op. His authority to speak, like theirs, lay not only in the knowledge which he had acquired in his subject area, but also in his ability to make practical application of that knowledge. In this respect, the publicity notice for Castil-Blaze's French adaptation of LeNozze di Figaro which greets the reader at the beginning of Volume I pub-licizes not only the adaptation which it announces, but Castil-Blaze's credentials as a practicising musician as well.
Castil-Blaze thus reveals himself to be a writer whose command of music, and of the re-spect of his audience, is multi-faceted. He is first of all an historical authority on the French lyric stage. He is furthermore a teacher and popularizer of considerable gifts as well as an engaging and witty writer. Finally, he is a reformer whose engagement in the practical is-sues facing the contemporary repertoire is as impressive as his authority over the repertoire of the past, and is backed up by his experience of writing for the stage. Castil-Blaze and Geoffroy By hiring Castil-Blaze as their new musical feuilletoniste the Bertin brothers had, in many ways, hired another Geoffroy.
They had hired a writer of solid erudition with an en-gaging writing style whose spirited and well docimiented critiques of the musical practices of his time separated him cleanly from his contemporaries and made his feuilletons required reading for Parisian audiences. Indeed, a comparison of Castil-Blaze and Geoffroy has much to reveal about the changing nature of French theatre journalism in the early nine-teenth century.
First of ail, the regional, intellectual and professsional backgrounds of these two writers was entirely different. He had of course been given professional training in Paris but had nonetheless spent essentially his entire professional life in the prov-inces. His taste of musical life in the capital lasted only a few years during his period of study around the turn of the century, and he had spent the better part of his mature life, it appears, viewing Parisian musical life from a distance. Geoffroy, by contrast, was a lifelong Parisian insider. Furthermore, Geoffroy viewed the theatre with the eye of an eighteenth-century generalist, confident that his deep knowledge of the classics and his im-peccable credentials as an academic were all that was needed to confront the full range of the-atrical offerings of his time.
Despite his formidable command of the fimdamentals of crafted speech, his critical writings rarely deal with technical details, but rather concentrate instead on the moral dimensions of the dramatic literature which he reviewed. These works were judged as evidence for either the maintenance or the decline of moral values in society as a whole.
Castil-Blaze, however, was distinctly more modern in outlook than Geoffroy. A lawyer by training, and thus a member of the professional classes, he had been employed as an ad-ministrator, and was used to applying practical solutions to the problems of managing public institutions.
His wealth of background knowledge and his manner of indicating clearly the rational rather than tradition authority for his judgements could be expected to appeal to the same class of readers that looked for similar qualities in political writing in the press. If Castil-Blaze struck a chord, therefore, with the readership of the daily press in Paris in his feuilletons of the next twelve years, it may well have been in part because he represented the aspirations of the professional classes that increasingly began to claim power during the Res-toration, classes whose chief political instrimient was the press.
Free of associations with powerful state institutions such as the university or the government, Castil-Blaze spoke to his readers as one of them. He treated them as interested amateurs who, if they so desired, could become knowledgeable and informed audience members if they would merely take the trouble to educate themselves systematically in the fundamentals of music.
His own career as a trained lawyer turned professional music critic and adaptor of stage works gave them ample assurance that this transformation was indeed possible. Apart from these differences in background, it is chiefly in his treatment of the lyric the-ater and of the discipline of criticism itself that Castil-Blaze distinguishes himself from his predecessor Geoffroy.
The dominating new idea that characterized Castil-Blaze's writings as a whole dm-ing this period was the concept that opera was not a literary endeavour, but a musical one, and writing about it was a task that should be reserved for the musically literate. The implications of this view for the type of music criticism he espoused and for the critical per-spective on opera displayed in his writings will be the subject of the remaining chapters of this work.
Indeed, he became the first special-ized music critic, so-called, in any of the Parisian daily newspapers, and the appearance of these feuilletons marks the starting point of the continuing presence of specialized music criticism in the French press. This development is remarkable from two points of view.
First of all, it is noteworthy that specialized music criticism in France did not first take root in a marginal publication, i. The leading newspaper in Paris at this time was Le Constitutionnel, the newspaper of the Liberal opposition, with a circulation of 16,; the Secondly, it is remarkable that specialized music criticism arrived in the French press in a fully-formed state. Castil-Blaze's feuilletons stand out in high relief against a background of critical writing about music that had produced no intermediary figures.
No previous writers had even approached his combined depth of knowledge, breadth of interests and talent for written expression. The modern music critic as we would recognize him or her today — mu-sically literate, historically informed, and conversant in the current musical events of his time — appears to have arrived all at once in the French press in the figure of Castil-Blaze, seem-ingly without any significant antecedents.
But such a view would undervalue the contribution of his own unique personality and the forceful appeal of his new views on the nature of the lyric stage as major factors in the ar-rival of this new development in music journalism. It should be noted that these numbers do not repre-sent the number of readers for each publication, but merely the number of subscribers. News-papers were sold only by subscription at this time and each copy might be read by as many as twenty persons in commercial reading libraries cabinets de lecture which gained great popu-larity in this period.
Moreover, once in this post, he continually sought to remind his public of the progressive step that this new style of critical writings represented, and frequently contrasted the quahty of his own com-mentary with that of less musically literate writers in order to reinforce his point. His contri-bution, therefore, was in no sense accidental, but rather deliberate and intentional in every way. Moreover, the outstanding characteristics of his criticism as a whole — his concentra-tion on the practical aspects of music-making and his rejection of a literary or generalist phil-osophical approach to musical issues — are first applied in an important way in his views on the nature of music criticism.
It would be well, therefore, before examining his more general critical outlook, to discuss first his approach to the very journalistic discipline in which these views are communicated, i. For in discussing music criticism Castil-Blaze reveals many of the salient characteristics of his approach to music as a whole. In particular, he reveals the wide spectrum of knowledge sources that inform his opinions, the depth of detail that he is willing to apply in supporting his opinions, and the range of topics that caught his attention.
Castil-Blaze's writings represent an important point of origin for modem music criti-cism. He fleshed out the aims of the discipline and the specific requirements of the critic in a way that none in France had done before. Some writers had proposed that music be ac-cepted as an independent art, but none had specified what this might imply for the critic who must analyse and comment intelligently on this art. No formulation of the principles of music criticism, no description of the art of the music critic had been outlined, and no body of writing had emerged embodying these principles and putting them into practice to match that produced by Castil-Blaze.
It will be the purpose of this chapter to examine Castil-Blaze's views on 1 the need for specialized music criticism; 2 the qualities of the ideal music critic and how he reflected these qualities in his own criticism; 3 the qualities of objectivity and practicality that charac-terize his critical judgements; and 4 the range of topics discussed in his feuilletons. While this account is hkely fanciful — to begin with it dates the conversation from instead of — it certainly does not contradict the degree of self-confidence and forth-rightness evidenced by Castil-Blaze in his writings about the importance of competent music 3.
The sixty pages of Chap. In this chapter he argues a parallel between music criticism and other forms of spe-cialized criticism well accepted in journalistic practice; he describes the inadequacy of previ-ous writing about music; and he isolates the element of musical literacy as the key element missing in music criticism to date. Castil-Blaze's point of departure in this chapter is the established practice of having var-ious disciplines treated in the press by expert commentators, each competent in a specialized field.
Bouillon sur la f einture, M. Boutard sur la sculpture et l'architecture, M. Yet from the point of view of public interest, he argues, music is certainly the equal of archi-tecture or geography; and from the point of view oflntellectual complexity, music is surely too complex a subject matter to be entrusted to a generalist writer. Music critics, he writes, may be divided into three camps: The worst aspect of this latter kind of writing is that its authors, among whom he mentions the well-known writers Marmontel, La Harpe and Geoffroy, would often do much harm by slandering composers and works later recognized as classics.
In these early feuilletons, Castil-Blaze repeatedly emphasizes that real music criticism consists of more than an appreciation, no matter how just, of the purely literary elements of an opera and that the time is gone when a writer can limit his comments on the musical score to reporting audience reaction. He attempts, more-over, to have his readers pity such writing more than hate it by his analysis of the causes for some of the quasi-intellectual sallies which some writers have made into the actual musical score of an operatic production.
The problem, he explains, is that since these writers have only their raw sense impressions to guide them, unmediated by the intervention of reflection and critical thinking, their judgements are tainted with other impressions received and stored in the same way, i. And this, he insists, accoimts more than anything for the uncritical sup-port which French opera has received from its commentators. Ils rendent compte de leurs sensations, c'est tout ce qu'ils peuvent faire In a feuilleton from late he describes, for example, the efforts of previous critics in the following way: A-t-il applaudi, la musique est enchanteresse, divine.
He does not wish to discredit the intellectual capa-bilities nor the genuine talent for written expression which he finds in the best French writers who have written on music. He takes great care to distinguish cleanly between their true depth of thought and not inconsiderable literary gifts, on the one hand, and on the other their knowledge, pure and simple, of matters musical.
Marmontel, La Harpe, Geoffroy, and above all Rousseau are all given credit for their accomplishments in their respective literary and philosophical domains, but he emphasizes that those accomplishments simply have no relevance when they write about music. When they write about literature or philosophy, he insists, they write with the authority that their education and intellect grants them, but when they attempt to write about a subject such as music, which is outside of their training, their comments are no more significant than those of writers without specialized knowledge in any field.
His comments on Rousseau's Dictionnate de musique illustrate well the distinc-tion that he wishes to make between the philosophical thinker and the musical commentator: The question remaining, of course, is "What qual-ities are required in a writer who wishes to contribute to such a body of critical literature?
But in another sense his models were perfectly clear to him: Defining the qualities of the music critic, then, was a matter of translating the established qualities and credentials expected in the arts critic of his day into a specific suite of skills applicable to the music critic. These skills may be di-vided into five categories: The prime requirement of a music critic, according to Castil-Blaze, may appear extraordinarily obvious to us today, but it was proposed with the forcefulness of a writer who faced stiff resistance to such an idea: Only if the critic is able to study the score, Castil-Blaze argued, will his comments be able to compare in intellectual weight and density with those expected of the serious critic of Uterature or art.
The ability to read a musical score is not only necessary because the critic must know what kinds of elements comprise a musical score in order to know what effects are being attempted — i. It is important that the critic also have an opportunity to form a judgement that in some way is independent of the performance that occasions his review.
He should, in other words be able to "teU a good work in a bad performance," just as a literary critic would be able to tell the merit of a play by Racine no matter how badly performed: Castil-Blaze carries the point even further stiU. The critic must be able to review an opera from the score alone, if necessary, just as a literary critic might review a published tragedy that had never been produced on the stage.
Il est pourtant plus facile de juger un ouvrage dans le silence du cabinet que In referring to musical literacy as a modem development, he writes: Full scores of many operas were being published in increasing numbers, and the library of the Conservatoire contained a large collection of manuscript copies of unpublished full scores which were available for consultation.
It was in this library, open to the public every day until three in the afternoon, that Berlioz, for example, studied the scores of Gluck in the s during his student years after his arrival in Paris. But perhaps the most important concept in the requirement that the music critic be musically literate is an unstated one: He believes along with A.
While this may seem obvi-ous to us now in the twentieth century, it must be remembered that the large amount of intel-lectually concentrated "seriotis music" — largely instnmiental music — of which the modem canon is comprised has made this concept second nature to us.
But the musical canon of early nineteenth-century France, as outlined in Chapter 1, was only marginally composed of instrumental works. Furthermore, important and respected opinion-makers such as Geoffroy could generalize that music, on the whole, was a lesser form of pleasure, overly in-fluenced by the whims of fashion, in which the engagement of the intellect was a sign of Castil-Blaze's own ability to work from the composer's score is perhaps the most strik-ing new aspect of his criticism.
The overture which, if discussed at all by other critics, had normally been discussed as a kind of mood picture or simplistic narrative in sound, is frequently analyzed by Castil-Blaze as an abstract musical structure. He cites the formal disposition of its themes, its modulations, its patterns of motivic development and its orchestration. See Chapter 1, p.
The thoroughness of Castil-Blaze's training at the Conservatoire may be glimpsed in the fol-lowing anecdote: Garcia, ballet de M. Castil-Blaze, however, writing about the same overture, finds different issues to discuss: Garcia accompagne le second motif de son ouverture d'un trait de second violon qui est d'un bon effet. Il me semble cepen-dant que ce trait seroit entendu avec plus de plaisir s'il ne paroissoit que quand le pre-mier dit le motif pour la seconde fois, ce chant et son accompagnement devant figu-rer deux fois encore vers la fin de l'ouverture.
Castil-Blaze's knowledge of the score is evident as well in his comments on the cuts that have been made in the production, on the insertions, on the ornamentation added by singers and in many other deviations from the established text. Castil-Blaze obviously knows what is on paper and what has been added or subtracted by those responsible for the performance. These, as 19 well, are details that could only be written about with certainty after studying the score. Technical Vocabulary and Terminology.
The ability to consult the musical score would be of no use without a second requirement of the music critic: The proper use of terminology, in Castil-Blaze's view, is what most He writes the following, for example, in discussing Henriette Sontag's performance of a passage from Rossini's Otello: Insight is inextricably connected with the vocabulary used to communicate it, and insight can only be communicated in the terms recognized by practitioners of the art it-self. Castil-Blaze uses the analogy of the literary critic to make this distinction clear.
While defending the right of the generahst, the "man of taste," to judge the "effects" of art — i. In the newspaper where writers were used to describing the productions of the lyric theatre in a vo Le livre ne l'a pas dit. Mais heureusement pour moi, M. Duvicquet even ends a discussion of the singer Martin in a production of LuJJiet Quinault with the following comment: Castil-Blaze's Dictionnaire de musique moderne Paris: Castil-Blaze includes a footnote giving the price of the work and an indication of where it can be purchased.
His concern for the proper use of terminology is part of his larger concern for linguistic precision in general. Not only is he careful to use the proper technical vocabulary for the for-mal procedures and harmonic patterns used in musical composition, but it almost appears to be a mannerism in his writing that he is fond of defining technical terms for his readers, as a means of contributing to their ongoing education.
The various terms used for describing and cataloguing the voice types used in the lyric theatre are a favourite subject of discus-sion. He also sought to clarify for his readers the meaning of certain Italian indications such as andantincP and his interest extended as well to more general linguistic usages in the French language which he wished to influence. As will be discussed in Chapter 6, his definidon of voice types is ex-tremely precise, defined in terms of exact pitches that represent the outer limits of the range, and extensive descriptions of the quality of tone and roles suitable to each voice type.
Castil-Blaze's interest in technical vocabulary remained strong for the rest of his life. Castil-Blaze, he devotes several pages to the question of vocabulary. His side-by-side listing of old and new usages on pp. Typographical errors were of particular concern to him since they reflected on his scholarly credentials, and because he himself was very careful to point out the spelling inaccuracies which he found in the work of others. It was at once the basis for meaningful communication about music, and as well an indication of careful thinking and a scholarly approach to subject matter.
The third major skill which a music critic must have is to be able to use the two skills discussed above — the ability to read scores and the ability to use terminol-ogy with precision — in order to create an accurate and convincing verbal description of the overall style of the music being examined.
Furthermore, he must be able to extract the man-nerisms and identifying characteristics of each composer and be able to use the comparative method to distinguish him from his predecessors and from his contemporaries. These skills in stylistic description and comparison are the fundamental intellectual tools of the critic, as Castil-Blaze sees him, in any field whatsoever. Again, it is by analogy with critics of literature and the visual arts that Castil-Blaze brings this point home.
He asks rhetorically what kind of critic of painting would be trusted by his public if he could not tell Titian from Rembrandt? What literary critic — what mere schoolboy, even — would not be able to distinguish Pascal from Montesquieu? The average music critic of the literary This feuilleton lists a number of inaccuracies contained in Mme Bawr's work. Observe how in the following discus-sion of a duo from Spontini's Fernand Cortez clear stylistic description mixes with a cross-composer comparison tracing some of Rossini's orchestrational style to Spontini: On voit que M.
Pure stylistic description, then, is a strong component in Castil-Blaze's writing. It forms, so as to speak, the foundation of his analysis of any music under consideration. In an age of increasingly complex scoring and where advances in instrumental technique were occurring rapidly, this skill makes him a valuable source of infomiation. Paganini is a case in point. Castil-Blaze's description gives us a much more concrete idea of his actual playing style than we would get from reading the astonished gasps of most of his fellow journalists of the time: Paganini fait marcher ensemble ces trois jeux.
Il attaque une roulade avec une grande prestesse, et l'archet et le pizzicato se la partagent sans en ralentir le mouvement. The fourth prerequisite of the music critic is a prodigious memory, exercised in the recall of an enormous repertoire of scores which the critic must have studied and analyzed for style. The best music critics, he notes, might have whole scores by heart and be able to play them at the piano, much as some Uterary critics are able to recite vast stretches of Virgil or Horace.
Geoffroy is singled out as both a good and bad example of the direct relationship be-tween study and critical value. Castil-Blaze notes that Geoffroy is well worth consulting, when dealing with literature, due to his immense learning. In music, however, he is corre-spondingly valueless because of his profound ignorance in matters musical: When entertain-ing groups of music lovers, he would draw mischievous delight in mixing up the words and music of various pieces, putting Italian music to non-Italian words, and vice versa, in order to expose the superficial nature of his audience's understanding of the Italian musical style that they believed themselves to be so thoroughly immersed in: The value of such accumulated knowledge, and the whole point behind acquiring it, according to Castil-Blaze, is to be able to focus on that por-tion of a musical work in which the imaginative creative achievement of the composer re-sides, that which principally represents its aesthetic worth.
This component must be distinguished from those elements which are derivative. An example of this distinction is noticeable in the quoted passage on p. In writing of this ability, Castil-Blaze refers to the fifth quality of the music critic: Castil-Blaze's ideal music critic is called upon to adjudicate a wide range of similarities, on a scale from the accidental to the deliberate: Or they might refer to the construction of ensembles; e. No one who reads Castil-Blaze's articles can fail to notice this characteristic.
The success of the works of Rossini gives him ample room to exer-cise his skill in recognizing re-used material, and he often displays his knowledge of this Ibid composer's works with enormous flair. He describes an aria from the second act of Cenerentola, for example in the following terms: His identification of similarities in musical material is an essential component of his view of the music critic as an intellectual who is competently grounded in the fundamentals of his art. The range of similarities that he is able to point out in the following passage from a review of Rossini's La Donna del lago — including not only melodies, but also formal pat Apart from the adjudication of the first theme in Garcia's overture to La Mort du Tasse see previous note 46 , he defends, for example, a duo from La Cenerentola against the charge of being patterned after one in IIMatrinionio segreto in his feuilleton of 8 October The evidence from which he argues in making his judgements is heavily supported with analytical descriptions or quotations from the score itself.
Such a style is clearly distinguishable from the more poetical, personally referential rhetorical style of Romantic criticism, typified by the writings of E. While enthusiasm and heated conviction are also important qualities of Castil-Blaze's style, they are presented in a completely different fashion: His appeal is more that of a defence lawyer or prosecuting attorney at-tempting to convince a jury than of a demagogue attempting to stir up a revolutionary mob.
Castil-Blaze's style of reasoned argiunent and pose of cold objectivity are, like many other characteristics of his writing, self-consciously adopted and deliberate, and he even men-tions them as such. For example, in devoting his entire feuilleton of 10 September to Giuditta Pasta, the singer who was stunning all of Paris with her dramatic performances of Rossini, he justifies the length of his discussion of this singer in the following terms: This pose of impartiality, of judging a work or a performance more on the type of merits and evidence approved by musical profes-sionals and connoisseurs than by the whims of audience coteries, produces some rather jar-ring juxtapositions of approval and disapproval in his writing.
Essays in Honor of Barry S. Yet Castil-Blaze's reasoned presentation of evidence drawn from the musical score did not make him a "bookish" critic of merely theoretical conviction but little practical experi-ence. He was as well an equally perceptive observer of the details of stage performance, and from various hints one has the impression that he attended the rehearsals as well as the per formances of the operas that he reviewed. His attention to the details of stage perfor-mance is as focused as his discussion of the score, as evidenced by the following description of a scrambled performance of the quintet from Rossini's Otello: He has a genuine admiration for "what works" on the stage, for what is dramatically effective in live performance as well as what is intellectu-ally ingenious on paper.
One can tell that even his analysis of the score itself is not simply abstract and intellectual. As will be dis-cussed in later chapters, one of his ideals for dramatic music is that it be idiomatically writ-ten for a specific voice type and performed by the voice type for which it was composed.
Range of Subject Matter The music critic, then, as Castil-Blaze envisages and embodies him, is a resource of en-cyclopedic intellectual dimensions. He is a writer who offers his readers the opportunity to hone their own skills in judgement as connoisseurs of fine music in the manner in which the readers of competent literary or art criticism might expect to have their minds engaged by specialists in these respective fields.
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