A critic’s enemies - as I discovered when I was music critic of The Scotsman - are mostly his readers. Some of mine wrote angry letters. Others phoned me, accosted me in the street, visited The Scotsman, came to my house to tell me what they thought of me.
Though I worked too far away to offend the Pest of Poole, as my London-based colleagues nicknamed their most persistent adversary, who wrote to them in different colours of ink, he was a man who certainly had his equivalents here in Scotland.
I never quite understood how I could arouse the wrath I did.The very first letter I received denounced my “daily lucubrations.” Another compared me with a pebble rattling inside a tin can. Complaints were almost always worded in terms I would not have dreamt of employing myself about a performer.
When, after long and careful thought, I decided to change The Scotsman’s spelling of Tchaikovsky to Chaikovsky, the verbal abuse I received astounded me. Yet it was at a time - the 1970s - when other publications were likewise beginning to make the change. The music faculty of Edinburgh University, under Michael Tilmouth’s professorship, had already done so. Peter Diamand, the Edinburgh Festival’s director at the time, gave me permission to do so in my role as programme editor, though his successor John Drummond changed it back, as also did The Scotsman after my retirement.
Yet when Tchekhov became Chekhov, nobody, so far as I remember, erupted in rage. My Tchaikovsky campaign eventually bit the dust - not least, I always thought, as a result of the complaints of readers resistant to change. The New Grove, as Grove’s Dictionary came to be called, had already felt forced to retreat from its plan to change the spelling of Tchaikovsky when libraries all over Britain and America advised the editor, Stanley Sadie, to back off - he would be opening, they said, a very nasty can of worms if The New Grove started spelling Tchaikovsky with a “C.”
Maybe, in the end, it did not matter too much that the decision failed, and I myself now accept that Tchaikovsky remains the prevailing British spellng. Readers did worse things than crumple their copies of The Scotsman when I offended them. Members of choirs were partucular culprits when they received what they regarded as rebuking reviews.
A correspondent who signed himself B.Cook responded vigorously whenever I wrote about the Edinburgh Bach Choir. A would-be assassin in the Edinburgh Royal Choral Union said that he frequently saw me walking across Queen Street and vowed one day to run me over. A member of the Edinburgh Nurses Choir expressed the hope that she would find me in front of her on an operating table, and another contrived to get British Airways to send me a one-way ticket to Bahrain ( BA, discovering what had been done, telephoned me and asked me to destroy the ticket).
Yes, critics make enemies. At least I was never punched, though two members of the Scottish National Orchestra’s Friday audience once got me up against a wall in Lothian Road to ask why I hadn’t reviewed the previous week’s concert. “Whaur was your crit?” they shouted in my face. I replied that I had reviewed the same programme in Dundee on a different day, but they had obviously failed to see my report. They were not amused, but at least it showed that my reviews mattered to them.
28 April 2015
Though I worked too far away to offend the Pest of Poole, as my London-based colleagues nicknamed their most persistent adversary, who wrote to them in different colours of ink, he was a man who certainly had his equivalents here in Scotland.
I never quite understood how I could arouse the wrath I did.The very first letter I received denounced my “daily lucubrations.” Another compared me with a pebble rattling inside a tin can. Complaints were almost always worded in terms I would not have dreamt of employing myself about a performer.
When, after long and careful thought, I decided to change The Scotsman’s spelling of Tchaikovsky to Chaikovsky, the verbal abuse I received astounded me. Yet it was at a time - the 1970s - when other publications were likewise beginning to make the change. The music faculty of Edinburgh University, under Michael Tilmouth’s professorship, had already done so. Peter Diamand, the Edinburgh Festival’s director at the time, gave me permission to do so in my role as programme editor, though his successor John Drummond changed it back, as also did The Scotsman after my retirement.
Yet when Tchekhov became Chekhov, nobody, so far as I remember, erupted in rage. My Tchaikovsky campaign eventually bit the dust - not least, I always thought, as a result of the complaints of readers resistant to change. The New Grove, as Grove’s Dictionary came to be called, had already felt forced to retreat from its plan to change the spelling of Tchaikovsky when libraries all over Britain and America advised the editor, Stanley Sadie, to back off - he would be opening, they said, a very nasty can of worms if The New Grove started spelling Tchaikovsky with a “C.”
Maybe, in the end, it did not matter too much that the decision failed, and I myself now accept that Tchaikovsky remains the prevailing British spellng. Readers did worse things than crumple their copies of The Scotsman when I offended them. Members of choirs were partucular culprits when they received what they regarded as rebuking reviews.
A correspondent who signed himself B.Cook responded vigorously whenever I wrote about the Edinburgh Bach Choir. A would-be assassin in the Edinburgh Royal Choral Union said that he frequently saw me walking across Queen Street and vowed one day to run me over. A member of the Edinburgh Nurses Choir expressed the hope that she would find me in front of her on an operating table, and another contrived to get British Airways to send me a one-way ticket to Bahrain ( BA, discovering what had been done, telephoned me and asked me to destroy the ticket).
Yes, critics make enemies. At least I was never punched, though two members of the Scottish National Orchestra’s Friday audience once got me up against a wall in Lothian Road to ask why I hadn’t reviewed the previous week’s concert. “Whaur was your crit?” they shouted in my face. I replied that I had reviewed the same programme in Dundee on a different day, but they had obviously failed to see my report. They were not amused, but at least it showed that my reviews mattered to them.
28 April 2015
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