Music: Outline of Musicians

Manhattan’s smart publishing team Simon & Schuster have a profitable system. Instead of waiting around for authors with ideas, they furnish the idea themselves and hire a likely author to do the job. Since they first tried out their system with Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy, they have successfully sold a volume apiece on religion, art, mathematics, history, science, adventure and astronomy. Last week they got around to music.

No exception to the Simon & Schuster rule, Wallace Brockway and Herbert Weinstock’s Men of Music, was deliberately modeled on a previous success,Thomas Craven’s Men of Art. To write it, the publishers hired no established bigwig of professional music criticism, but a couple of relative unknowns, one a member of their own editorial staff. Result: Men of Music avoids the pious saws and muddy technical jargon of conventional musical biography, describes racily and well the flights and foibles of those posey, neurotic, childlike, hardheaded geniuses who wrote the world’s great symphonies and operas.

Authors Brockway & Weinstock’s fluently expressed prejudices will give a jolt or two to dyed-in-tradition music-lovers. For them Chopin is “the most truly original of all composers”; bob-haired, ecclesiastic Liszt “the most tremendous musical failure of the 19th Century.” Biggest jolt: a cool reference to sentimental Melodist Tschaikowsky as “the greatest symphonist of the 19th Century—after Beethoven.” Of such critical jabs, close-collaborating Authors Brockway & Weinstock say simply: “If they start a controversy . . . so much the better. We think the future will bear them out.”