Crash Around a Critic

As editor of Musical America and critic for the New Republic, friendly Cecil Smith, 44, has earned a reputation for bland but exacting reviews, has seldom stirred up any storms. In London last week, after a month of guest-reviewing for the Daily Express (circ. 4,240,000), he had thunder & lightning crashing all around him.

In his first week on the job, Critic Smith took after the star of a Covent Garden performance of Madame Butterfly. For him, Soprano (and onetime Australian golf champ) Joan Hammond was "not equipped by physique or temperament to portray the fragile, trusting heroine. There was about her a heartiness . . . suggesting she had left her riding crop just outside the door." With that, the storm broke.

"How dare you, how dare you ... insult our leading prima donna!" sputtered one irate reader. "You Americans are obsessed with film star glamour." Flared another: "Perhaps in America they enliven Butterfly with troupes of performing dogs." From still another: "You silly little man . . . my advice to you is to take the next plane back."

Instead, staunch Critic Smith laid about the field with renewed energy. He had kind words for some--Composer Benjamin Britten, Conductor Sir Malcolm Sargent. But he found the acoustics of the new hall built for the Festival of Britain "harsh" and "unlovely. One felt like rushing out to seek the relative quiet of Waterloo Station." Last week, while Britons raged, he wound up his four-week critical series with a sermon:

"The British public, musically speaking, still lives in the 19th Century . . . The general complacency of British taste not only keeps people away from stimulating new musical experiences, but it also leads audiences to accept second-rate performances." Smith's judgment of his critical cousins was just as severe. "Criticism here tends to be either routine or intellectualized. For one thing, there are laws of libel which would hamstring any American critic . . . You can't say a particular person gives a perfunctory performance--period. You have to say he or she, in your opinion, didn't give it the necessary vigor and feeling, or in some other way get around a flat verdict on a matter which in Britain is taken as reflection on character."

The Daily Express, delighted with the fuss, invited him to come again some time.

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