What do we want from a great music critic? Knowledge, eloquence, independence, a gift for taking us into the experience of music through a distinguished mind–and perhaps some wit. One of the best exponents of this combination of qualities was the late Michael Steinberg (1928-2009), whose newspaper work has now been gathered by Susan Feder, Marc Mandel, and Jacob Jahiel in a magnificent 648-page volume called “Defending the Music: Michael Steinberg at the Boston Globe, 1964–1976.”(Oxford University Press) 

During his days at the Globe, Steinberg was considered something of a flamethrower, to the extent that the then-President of the Boston Symphony, Henry B. Cabot wrote a public letter to the newspaper complaining about his work. Steinberg wrote an equally public reply in which he referred to comments Cabot had made about the current state of the orchestra at a dinner earlier the preceding year:  

“You made a speech in which you said something to the effect that since you did not wish to brag by claiming that the Boston Symphony was the best orchestra in the country, you would limit yourself to saying that there was none better.

Now any musician would like to live in a city that has the best orchestra in the country, and I am no exception. But I do not believe we can have the best orchestra in the country simply by saying that we do. In fact, such complacency, such an unexamined taking-for-granted of superiority, is a sure way to let standards slip.”   

He went on to name the orchestras in Cleveland, Chicago and Philadelphia as better orchestras than the one in Boston.

The thought that what had become Boston’s great newspaper (the Boston Evening Transcript had folded after more than 100 years of primacy in 1941) should publish such a reasoned rebuke to one of the city’s grandest movers and shakers was stunning. It is to the eternal credit of its new editor, Thomas Winship, that the paper backed Steinberg.

He may have gone a little far now and then, as with this review, after the Metropolitan Opera’s gala concert when its original house was set to be torn down and before its move to Lincoln Center: 

“The dominant impression left by the evening was that here was a stage full of people who did not really know how to sing. I am not referring now to artistry, to taste and musicianship, but simply to the ability to produce sounds of pure and steady tone, evenly, on pitch, smoothly connected when appropriate, at whatever volume the singer decided, and with clearly audible words.” (Hmm — perhaps there is a reason that this sentimental evening has never been released to the public!)

Or this review of a now-venerated conductor in his favorite music:

“If Danny Kaye or Victor Borge were to conduct a performance of the Brahms Fourth just like the one Carlo Maria Giulini conducted Friday afternoon in Symphony Hall, one so raging and overwrought, one with its upbeats so stretched, with such crazed dislocation of tempo and accompanied by a similar visual production with such prodigality in expressions of tragic suffering and deep knee-bends, the audience would have been in stitches.  In the solemn context of a Friday-afternoon Boston Symphony concert, the audience instead took it seriously.”  This time, a group of players in the orchestra tried to ban him from the auditorium.

Yet he prevailed – to the point where the BSO hired him to write its liner notes once he had stepped away from his position at the Globe. His successor at the paper, Richard Dyer (no slouch himself and a writer who should be anthologized in a similar manner) ended up calling him, “the musical conscience of Boston” and “beyond question the most distinguished music critic of his generation.” Steinberg ended up publishing books designed to introduce audiences to the symphony, the concerto and to choral music, and they are models of their kind. 

It is quite possible to disagree with Steinberg here and there. He was more interested in Schoenberg and Stravinsky than he was in Strauss and Sibelius, which was partly generational. But disagreement can be fun. I have quoted some of Steinberg’s negative reviews because many people read criticism for vicarious amusement, as though it were a blood sport. But Steinberg, when he loves something, is also revelatory: 

“If you enjoy discovering after a while that the blinker on the car in front of you at the stoplight is almost but not quite in phase with yours, if you like listening to the way the frogs and the crickets get it together and then drift apart again, Steve Reich’s music is for you. It is about phasing, the pleasures of almost-monotony and of tiny changes. It is for the patient and the playful.”   He went on to describe Reich’s  “Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ,” still, for me, the composer’s most perfect masterpiece, “a wonderful sensuous indulgence.”In short, this is an essential book for anybody interested in classical music. Put it on the shelf with Tovey, Shaw, Huneker, Virgil Thomson — and your favorite living critics.