Word: newman
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Newman can outwrite the cleverest of the sophisticates. His literary manner is a nimble and adaptable instrument, bubble-light, steel-keen. His taste is of the highest degree of nicety, his appreciations broadly tolerant He is courageously frank, never self-consciously clever. Above all, he has what is usually lacking among our native critics in Music as in the other Arts?a profound background of intelligent scholarship...
...Newman's work on Wagner lias for some time been known to the musical intelligenzia through the English edition. It is perhaps the first authoritative work to face frankly the facts of Wagner's life without malice and with a genuine admiration for both the man and his work, but with no effort to gloss the occasionally distasteful phases of the man's character...
Very few people of prominence have left as much information about themselves as Richard Wagner. Far from any display of reticence, he positively hurls his private life into the teeth of posterity, notably in the voluminous autobiography Mein Leben. So Mr. Newman feels at liberty to peer without shame into dubious corners of the Master's life. It might be supposed that, with an autobiography whose avowed intent was "unadorned veracity," the private life of the composer would not be a hard matter to probe. Unhappily, Mr. Newman finds that, far from being a frank revelation, Mein Leben falls just...
...Newman is unmerciful to the man Wagner. His object is not, however to condemn him, but to make him the more real by the contrast of his pettiness and infirmities of character with his essential greatness of achievement. There is an enormous gap, we find, between the man and the artist?"the most many-sided of musicians...
...Newman's work is well and entertainingly written, with a wealth of scholarship and a shrewd insight. He is never carried away by his theme, always preserves a just sense of proportion. And his inspection of the great musician's personal idiosyncrasies is far from devoid of a sly humor...