LETTERS

I trust Peter Williams will forgive my oversight if I reply that the case for Chopin's or Mendelssohn's musical superiority is not quite as starkly Obvious' as he would like to presume (Spring MT). Or rather, I take it as fairly obvious that, to put it in the crude terms masquerading as established 'fact' Williams adopts, Mendelssohn was a considerably (and incontestably) greater composer than Chopin, without in any way wishing to belittle the latter.

Neither has such a view been unusual: I recall Hans Keller writing in this same publication that Mendelssohn is 'the most significant figure between Schubert and Brahms' (MT vol.ii3 (1972), p.868, echoing John Horton).

While it might seem rather childish to write claiming the 'superiority' of one composer, the nature of Williams's claims rather leads one to counter in a similar vein. Such value judgements inescapably rely on the aesthetic premises chosen. The 'exploration' of musical language is hardly an adequate (let alone 'absolute') criterion. (This seems comparable to suggesting that Lewis Carroll is a greater writer than George Eliot.) A list could easily (and probably unfairly) be made accusing Chopin of a failure to engage with large-scale form, inability to write outside one specific medium, emotional shallowness, and a host of other cliches. The bald statement of such a contentious opinion is simply inadequate. Williams totally misses the complications of the issue, and in comparison with Lawrence Kramer's intelligent consideration merely comes across as reactionary and insular.

Further in connection to Mendelssohn, let me offer a few observations on Chris Walton's interesting article on Klemperer's revision of the Third Symphony. Klemperer was presumably drawn to naming the dedication as to 'Queen Victoria of England' [sic] as this is how Mendelssohn's dedication is presented on the title page of the published score (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hartel, 1843). The cyclic integration and thematic affinity between movements of the work is not remotely an exaggerated claim by Schumann; the symphony is in fact as thematically unified as any ever written. Walton surely knows Rey Longyear's article on this aspect ('Cyclic form and tonal relationships in Mendelssohn's "Scottish" Symphony', In Theory Only, vol.4 (1979)). And it is a distortion to suggest that nearly all critics have, since Mendelssohn's day, found a problem with the A major coda; opinion is far more evenly spread. It is noteworthy here that Walton cuts the last sentence of Schumann's review, where Schumann voices his approval of Mendelssohn's formal innovation: 'we simply find this conclusion poetic; it is like the evening to [the first movement's] beautiful morning'.

Benedict Taylor

Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge

Turning turtle

Wilfrid Meilers (Spring MT) might like to know that the meaning of the poem by Shakespeare that has come to be known as 'The phoenix and the turtle' seems to have been uncovered by John Finnis & Patrick Martin in their article 'Another turn for the turtle ' (TLS, 18 April 2003, pp.iz-14). In passing, they seem to have established for the first time a link between Shakespeare and Byrd.

Richard Turbet,

Music Librarian, University of Aberdeen

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