Words to Live By: ‘The Critic Is No Gentleman’ : Negative Review of an Artist or Performance Can Arouse the Beast in Readers

“Do We Really Need the Critics?”

That was the title of the first in Opera Pacific’s new series of lectures, and it drew a couple of dozen local opera aficionados to the Westin South Coast Plaza hotel smack dab in the middle of Super Bowl Sunday.

The question posed by the title was meant to be more than rhetorical. Still, they might just as well have gathered a bunch of 9-year-olds and asked, “Do We Really Need Teachers?”

Or, given the day, a roomful of Cincinnati Bengals fans for a forum on “Do We Really Need Joe Montana?”

People get sooooooo worked up over a negative review of a favorite artist. You get the feeling that in the evolutionary hierarchy, they would place critics about one notch ahead of the first amphibians.

Besides, it is so easy to make fun of critics. All you have to do is mention the writers who savaged Beethoven’s symphonies as drivel, dismissed Wagner’s orchestral works as raucous noise or laughed off the Beatles as a fad.

Musicologist Nicholas Slonimsky, in town last week for a talk at UC Irvine, compiled hundreds of similar critical boners in his book entitled “The Lexicon of Musical Invective.”

Slonimsky found a Boston critic who wrote of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, “Will one ever learn to love such music?” Another described Tchaikovsky as “a modern composer who could not be listened to with any kind of pleasure.”

All of which proves, among other things, that you can ignore a lot of the critics a lot of the time.

Nevertheless, Opera Pacific asked music critics Dan Cariaga of The Times, James Chute of the Orange County Register and Alan Rich of the Herald Examiner to defend themselves and their profession before people who, often as not, would like to see them volunteered for genetic experiments.

Surprisingly, the session turned out to be polite and respectful, with none of the fireworks you might expect when critics step out from their fortresses of newsprint.

All three panelists admitted that they essentially fell into their jobs, coming to criticism not out of any grand design but because it sounded better than having to find real work. (I know that was my reasoning.)

Cariaga offered the view that a critic should, first of all, know “how to tell a story and make it true, and allow the reader who had attended a concert to recognize that they were both in the same place.” That’s no easy task, judging by the volume of hate mail that begins “I wonder if you saw the same performance I did last night. . . . “

Chute argued that criticism is not a matter of analytically filling out a score card with points and demerits but of “rationalizing your instincts”--starting from the gut reaction of whether you liked it or not, and then being able to explain and defend that reaction.

True enough, but you won’t catch me at a concert without my trusty calculator. Fog machine on stage? Instant 10 points off. Drum solo longer than 30 seconds? Another 15 demerits.

As a pop music critic for the past 12 years, I still keep a quote from venerable drama critic George Jean Nathan pinned up at my desk to keep me in the proper frame of mind:

“The critic is no gentleman, and the gentleman is no critic.”

What Nathan forgot to mention is how often the reader is no gentle-person either. I’ve run into my share of vindictive responses to nasty reviews. Want to go Evel Knievel one better in taunting death? Just pan the Beach Boys in print.

Actually, a review doesn’t even have to be that surly to enrage the beast in readers. I once praised country singer Charlie Daniels for finally recording a song that approached an issue as complex as the Vietnam War in a thoughtful way, rather than perpetuating the black-and-white view of the world that he usually espouses.

Daniels himself wrote back: “I am not trying to address issues in black and white or any other colors. I am in the business of entertaining people. I am not a social worker.

“As to being jingoistic, I plead guilty. I just happen to be a blue-collar-type person, living down on the street level. You should try it sometime, it would probably do wonders for your column.”

This, from his horse ranch in the mountains of Tennessee.

The spookiest response I ever got was to a scathing review of a show called “Legends in Concert” that featured actors posing as Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon, etc. It slithered into Knott’s Berry Farm from Las Vegas one summer, and I described it as less the “tribute to a select few of the superstars of yesterday”--as the press kit hyped it--than “sort of a wax museum that moves.”

Well, a woman--a self-described 50-year-old grandmother who was friends with one of the performers--took exception to the review and, after signing her name, which was Oswald, she closed:

“No, I’m not related to Lee Harvey, aren’t you lucky!!”

Of course, I didn’t take it seriously. It was just out of curiosity that I scanned my company insurance plan to see whether on-the-job-as-sassination-by-incensed-grandma qualified my family for double indemnity payments.

So what good are critics, those scalawags who get paid to take good seats at all the big events just so they can sit back and think up rude things to say?

Well, somebody’s got to do it.