Defending the Music: Michael Steinberg at the Boston Globe,1964-1976. Oxford University Press, 2026, 609 pages.
BOOK REVIEW — Although Michael Steinberg wore many hats over the course of a career in classical music spanning more than half a century, it is as critic and program annotator that he is best remembered. Between 1995 and 2005, Oxford University Press published three volumes of program notes Steinberg wrote for the orchestras of Boston, San Francisco, New York, and Minneapolis (The Symphony, The Concerto, Choral Masterworks), and in 2006 a book of essays, For the Love of Music (co-authored with Larry Rothe).
Now Oxford has published a 600-page anthology of columns Steinberg (1928-2009) wrote during his 12 years (1964-1976) on the staff of the Boston Globe. So highly valued was Steinberg at the Globe that the paper periodically reminded readers that a good reason to subscribe was Michael Steinberg.
The idea to publish this material came from Steinberg’s wife, Jorja Fleezanis, concertmaster of the Minnesota Orchestra from 1989-2009 and a faculty member at Indiana University from 2009-2020. Following her death in 2022, the editorial process was sustained by three of Fleezanis’ close friends and colleagues: Susan Feder, whose career has included positions at the Mellon Foundation, G. Schirmer (vice president), the New Grove Dictionary of American Music, and the San Francisco Symphony (program book editor); Marc Mandel, editor of the Boston Symphony’s program book 1979-2020; and Jacob Jahiel, currently a Ph.D. candidate in Historical Musicology at the University of Pennsylvania and former violin student of Fleezanis. Their effort has resulted in one of the finest collections of music criticism and certainly the most extensive since Andrew Porter’s four volumes of essays written for The New Yorker in the 1970s and early 1980s.
The 300 or so concert reviews, record reviews, essays, and “think” pieces, drawn from more than 2,000, are arranged chronologically by calendar year. The volume includes an extensive introduction to Steinberg’s life and career, footnotes cross-referencing reviews, and an index.
The Boston Symphony looms large, of course, as the city’s premier musical organization. Also covered are visiting orchestras, recitals in halls in and around Boston, out-of-town events, Tanglewood, choral concerts, opera (including Sarah Caldwell’s Boston Opera and the visiting Metropolitan Opera), new music, and living composers.
Of the last, among those for whom Steinberg waved the flag and beat the drum was Elliott Carter, about whom Steinberg wrote regularly (in fact, far more so than about any other living composer in this volume), and even planned a book, though this never came to fruition. Babbitt, Webern, Ives, and Schoenberg also enjoy considerable space.
Steinberg’s writing has been lavishly praised in numerous other publications for its eloquence, conviction, and commitment. What strikes the reader most about Steinberg’s work is his honesty and fairness. He is fearless about calling it as he hears it. In the first sentence of his first column, published Feb. 1, 1964, Steinberg calls Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony music “of such unashamed vulgarity, and it is so strongly derivative, that the hearing of it becomes as much as anything a strain on one’s credulity.” However, Steinberg does not condemn the entire symphony. Four paragraphs later, he notes that the work “is full of detail that really tells: the dense and anguished cadenza for chorus a cappella, [and] the tremendous orchestral outburst … that starts the finale. The last ten bars of ‘Amen’ are quite wonderful …”
In review after review, there is almost always something to praise and something to fault, though one usually takes precedence over the other. This approach is summarized in Fleezanis’ observation that Steinberg had “a profound moral conviction to defend music,” hence the book’s title. Steinberg’s own words are telling: Good criticism “informs, delights, clarifies, and stimulates. It makes you think. It leaves you hearing and seeing more clearly than before.”
There were no sacred cows in Steinberg’s stable. He branded Heifetz “vulgar” and Horowitz “boring” but explains exactly why. Charles Munch allowed the Boston Symphony “to go to the dogs,” and Carlo Maria Giulini brought “meretricious vulgarity” to Brahms’s Fourth. The latter jibe famously caused Boston Symphony musicians to rise up in protest (never a good idea when a capable critic is involved), demanding that Steinberg be barred from Symphony concerts until he apologized. (Their effort failed.)
The moral conviction that drove Steinberg relentlessly can be observed in his aversion to casual, routine playing; to dull, unimaginative programming; and to lack of decorum on the part of audiences. Sloppy, poorly prepared performances made his blood boil. Of the Guarneri Quartet, he wrote that “the intemperance of enthusiastic sight-reading [was] frozen into the finished performance.”
Steinberg was a true master of the carefully aimed barb. He poked fun at Orff’s Carmina burana as “musical baby-talk” and called Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony “Tristan as kitsch.” Lily Pons “sang in tune most of the time.” The Salzburg Festival attracts “expensive-smelling visitors.” The “music” to which we are subjected in elevators, supermarkets, restaurant, and the like is an “incessant rain of aural filth.” True to the mark, “applause is a function of response, though not necessarily of judgment…the bigger the bang the louder the clap.” The role of the critic is “to maintain distinctions between music and the fantasies of the public relations people.”
Steinberg was renowned for doing his homework. How many critics would have gone to the trouble of consulting linguistics scholars for their take on Bernstein’s Norton lectures at Harvard, which relied heavily on linguistics as the unifying thread? (Among others, Noam Chomsky was consulted but claimed he was “too busy” to attend.) Or discover that the Boston Symphony first played Bruckner’s Second Symphony only in 1974? Or that 1974 was the first time Callas ever sang in Boston? Or that the paint strata on the walls of Symphony Hall grew to an inch and a half thick before anything was done about the matter? Fascinating nuggets like these liberally pepper Steinberg’s writing.
The writing pulses with energy. In nearly every composition Steinberg discusses, he engages the reader to the point where he or she is stirred to investigate the matter further alone, even the most difficult music. One need not agree with the author, but it is that element of engagement that sets Steinberg apart from many of his peers. Among his most informative and fascinating essays are about William Schwann of record catalogue fame (he lived in Boston), the strong case he makes for Holst beyond The Planets, his inquiry into what makes a performance great, and his certainty of stellar futures for the young James Levine and Michael Tilson Thomas (indeed, Steinberg devotes his longest essay to the latter).
If fault need be found, it is in frequent reference to minutiae that presuppose a reader’s intimate knowledge of the score. Of the Guarneri Quartet’s performance of Beethoven’s Op. 131, Steinberg carps that “they missed the transition into the second movement by playing the octave D’s as though they had no connection with the octave C-sharps that end the fugue.” In Verdi’s Requiem, “I wish Sherman Walt [the Boston Symphony’s principal bassoonist] would learn to phrase the bassoon’s accompanying figure to ‘Quid sum miser‘ — please, not with an accent on the fourth sixteenth in each group of six.”
Another disconcerting quality found in many pieces is that in attempting to be fair — to find fault and confer praise within the same review — the end result can be confusing. Of the newly formed Guarneri Quartet, Steinberg claims that in many ways it is “unequaled today. There has been nothing like it since the great, and short-lived, New Music Quartet.” Four paragraphs later, “the Guarneri Quartet, having achieved much, has much to learn.” Messiaen’s Chronochromie is both “simple” and “difficult,” depending on which paragraph you’re reading.
Despite these quibbles, Defending the Music stands as a sterling model of what has pretty much become a lost art — the trenchant voice of a deeply committed, highly informed, immensely knowledgeable music critic reporting two or three times a week on the musical life of an American cultural hub in the mid-20th century.
