The Musical Highbrow Menace by John Barbirolli

At 8pm (BST) on Saturday, May 9, BBC Radio 4 is broadcasting a documentary on Sir John Barbirolli in its "Archive on Four" series. Produced by Gramophone's Adrian Edwards, the programme, hosted by James Naughtie, includes contributions by conductors Sir Mark Elder and David Lloyd Jones, and Gramophone contributor Andrew Farach-Colton. (The programme will also available to listen to for a week following its first broadcast on the BBC iPlayer.)

To coincide with the programme, we revisit an article that John Barbirolli contributed to The Gramophone in 1931, and many of the points he makes are still worth considering today.

THAT highbrow is an ugly and much-abused word I admit. Yet experience suggests that the designation itself is no better and no worse than its namesakes in the musical world deserve.



For the highbrow should not be confused with the true music-lover, broadminded in tastes and outlook alike. On the contrary, he is a self-opinionated, disgruntled individual who adopts a patronisingly possessive attitude towards music, musicians, and the public that might be considered amusing were it not so often definitely harmful.



Personally, I have every sympathy with the ordinary man who enjoys such music as the "1812" Overture, Liszt's Liebesträume Number Three, and popular operas like Faust and Butterfly. But I have none whatever for the superior person who remarks with a sneer, "My dear fellow, you don't call that music!" For this attitude inclines the novice either to feel himself a hopelessly unmusical ignoramus or, alternatively, to determine to uphold his preferences in defiance of "all that highbrow stuff." And neither viewpoint will help or encourage him to increase his musical knowledge one iota.



Yet if these superior people could, or would, realise that, for us ordinary mortals, musical appreciation must begin with works that can easily be understood – I well remember when to hear the "1812" was the thrill of my existence – there would be more chance of the general public's growing to love and appreciate the greatest things in music. In present circumstances, the vast majority, influenced by highbrow cant and criticism, imagine these to be the sacred preserve of a few chosen spirits.



One favourite highbrow grievance is that the average British audience actually prefers to hear opera sung in its own language. Opera, the highbrow declares, should always be given in the original tongue. This is, of course, pure intellectual snobbery. That few of these people themselves possess more than a nodding acquaintance with German or Italian is amply proved by their fulminations against the banality of English libretti. Were they capable of following the originals, they would realise that no translation could be more futile than many of the foreign texts.



In addition, they ignore the fact that on the Continent, which they perpetually uphold as the paradise of operatic perfection, German operas are translated into Italian and Italian operas into German because even the musical foreigner likes to understand what is being sung!



A further destructive form of musical snobbery came under my notice recently – that of the type of critic who gibes at a Falstaff audience for obviously enjoying Falstaff's vulgar jokes on the stage, and equally obviously failing to appreciate the subtle humours of Verdi's scoring for bassoons. But why should the ordinary man be expected to understand the intricacies of orchestral scoring? He simply wants to enjoy Falstaff in his own way. Informed that his own way is beneath contempt, he will probably shrug his shoulders and decide that this opera stuff must be too deep for him and that, after all, musical comedy is more in his line.



Most of us have met the musical amateur who, having heard a dozen or so of the world's leading musicians, proceeds to belittle them in order to impress his less knowledgable friends. "Chaliapine?" he will say, "Well, of course, his voice isn't what it was." Paderewski he dismisses for "thumping" and playing wrong notes, Heifetz's fiddling is "expressionless," Kreisler's "sentimental," Sir Thomas Beecham conducts like a dancing dervish; and so on, and so on, until the distracted novice begins to wonder whether any of these supremely great artists can be worth hearing at all.



Indeed, I am inclined to believe that the musical highbrow is doing more to prejudice the future of music in this country than all the jazz bands, music halls, cheap radio sets, and inferior gramophones in existence. For his gospel of sickening superiority and intolerance inevitably influences the great mass of potential music-lovers – the average men and women whose opinions are formed largely by what t hey read and hear.



It is the highbrow who drives the ordinary man, in sheer self-defence, to avoid concerts and opera like the plague, laugh at the very idea of buying a "classical" record for his gramophone, and switch off his wireless set at the sound of the words "Symphony Concert." And to those of us who love music sincerely and would wish all the world to share our own intense joy in it, this is a saddening thought.