Redskin Bites the Dust

Musicians, like other artists, occasionally regard themselves as pioneers whose wagon train to the mountains of truth and beauty is encircled by whooping savages : the critics. Last week New York Philharmonic Wagon Master Leonard Bernstein, whose hide has been punctured by as many arrows as any, leveled his Winchester at a particular pesky redskin. Asked what he thought of music critics by Reporter Martin Agronsky on NBC-TV's Look Here show, Bernstein replied: "I have come to take them not very seriously any more. When you do get mad at a critic is when he is a self-advertised authority and at the same rime proceeds to display ignorance, making mistakes, showing he doesn't have ears to hear with."

Then, without mentioning his name. Bernstein singed the war bonnet of New York Herald Tribune Critic Paul Henry Lang, 56, professor of musicology at Columbia University, who had scolded Maria Meneghini Callas and Tenor Daniele Barioni for singing flat in their first-act duet in La Traviata (TIME, Feb. 17). The pitch was dropping so fast at one point, Critic Lang had written, that it seemed as if the singers were about to land in the conductor's lap. Bernstein's complaint about this display of "great authority and chilling wit": Barioni was indeed off key, but he was sharping, not flatting. "Here is a critic who heard a man singing too low when 3,000 people were ... in the Metropolitan Opera House hearing him singing too high . . . Now the first thing you would expect from a critic who draws pay on a newspaper is that he can tell the difference between up and down, because this is kind of germane to music."

Said Lang: "I rely on my own ears, and I am perfectly satisfied with them . . . Well, 3,000 people can't be wrong. Why don't they fire me?"

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