Henry Edward Krehbiel

• 1. Introduction

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  Henry Edward Krehbiel spent more than forty years as the chief music critic of The New York Tribune, and in all that time he never stopped picking fights. His pen drew blood against Debussy, against Mahler, against entire national schools of composition he found beneath serious attention. When he died in March 1923, still at his post, a colleague wrote that he had been "the leading musical critic of America" who raised the profession to heights it had never before reached in this country. That tribute came from Richard Aldrich, who had spent years working alongside Krehbiel, and who had also spent years helping him wage a deliberate campaign against the music he despised. So who was this man? How did a Methodist minister's son from Ann Arbor become the most powerful voice in American musical life? And what happens when a critic's convictions outlast the music they were aimed at?

• 2. A Critic's Formation

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  Krehbiel was born on the 10th of March 1854, the son of a German clergyman of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Growing up bilingual in German and English, he later added French, Italian, Russian, and Latin to his reading languages. In 1864 his family moved to Cincinnati, and there he became conductor of his father's church choir while still a youth. His first professional writing had nothing to do with music. In June 1874 he joined the Cincinnati Gazette, reporting on baseball games and murders. Music coverage came quickly after that, and he stayed at the paper through November 1880. When he arrived in New York and joined the Tribune, the pattern repeated itself: he started at the city desk, writing occasional editorials, then moved rapidly to musical editor. The empirical habits he brought to crime reporting he simply carried over to concert halls. When he wrote about Wagner's Die Meistersinger, he traveled to Nuremberg. When he wrote about cantorial chant, he attended synagogues. For Krehbiel, the critic's desk was not where the work ended; it was where it began.

• 3. The Old Guard's Mission

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  Krehbiel belonged to a circle that shaped how educated Americans heard music. Together with Richard Aldrich, Henry Theophilus Finck, W.J. Henderson, and James Huneker, he formed what became known as the "Old Guard" of New York music criticism, a group credited with establishing a distinctly American school of the craft. What set Krehbiel apart within that company was his theory of what criticism was actually for. He was a meliorist: he believed music should uplift the human spirit and intellect, and that the critic's job was partly to educate the public toward that music. His book How to Listen to Music, first published in 1896, stayed in print until 1924 and served as a practical guide for concertgoers across the country during the early decades of the twentieth century. He wrote for Scribner's Monthly and other journals alongside his Tribune columns, and he also served as annotator for New York Philharmonic concert programs, including many of Paderewski's recitals.

• 4. Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner

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  Anton Seidl, the conductor, was among the most important figures in Krehbiel's professional life. Seidl deepened his appreciation for Wagner's music and theories, and Krehbiel repaid the debt by giving Seidl's work his most complimentary reviews. His admiration extended to Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, and Schumann. He was also an early advocate for Tchaikovsky at a time when none of these composers were yet well established in America. The Beethoven commitment was not merely critical enthusiasm: Krehbiel translated the three-volume German-language biography written by Alexander Wheelock Thayer, published for the first time in English in 1921. Thayer had planned a fourth volume but died in 1897 before completing it. Krehbiel wrote that volume himself, running to 1,137 pages, and it appeared posthumously in the 1925 republication of his English translation. That volume, written in his final years, represented the fullest expression of a devotion he had carried across four decades of criticism.

• 5. Folk Music and Dvořak

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  Antonín Dvořák's appointment as head of the National Conservatory of Music of America in New York City in 1892 gave Krehbiel a concrete hope: that an authentically American school of music might finally take shape. He had already developed an interest in folk music before that moment, but Dvořák's work as a folk song collector and composer sharpened his focus. Krehbiel spent years gathering folk songs from Americans and immigrants, collecting material from Magyars, Scandinavians, Russians, Native Americans, and African Americans. His interest in Black musical traditions traced back to the World's Columbian Exposition, where he was moved by performances he heard at the Midway Plaisance. That encounter eventually led to the publication of Afro-American Folksongs: A Study in Racial and National Music in 1914, which stands as the first music history book devoted to African-American spirituals. He also translated opera libretti into English, including Mozart's Der Schauspieldirektor in 1916, and when Così fan tutte received its first American performance in 1922, the English text used was his.

• 6. The Debussy Reversal

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  After Debussy's La mer was introduced in the United States in 1907, Krehbiel published a review that became one of the most-quoted pieces of critical overreach in American musical history. He wrote that the concert had begun "with a lot of impressionistic daubs of colour smeared higgledy-piggledy on a tonal palette, with never a thought of form or purpose except to create new combinations of sounds." He went further: "the composer's ocean was a frog-pond, and some of its denizens had got into the throat of every one of the brass instruments." By 1922 La mer had become a staple of the orchestral repertoire, and Krehbiel felt obliged to return to it in print, now describing the work as "a poetic work in which Debussy has so wondrously caught the rhythms and colors of the seas." The music critic Peter Gammond later held up these two reviews side by side as evidence of the profession's vulnerability to retrospective judgment. His point was not that Krehbiel was incompetent, but that critics who commit opinions to print can find those opinions outlasting everything else they wrote. Krehbiel's broader and continuing hostility to French impressionism, which he pursued alongside Aldrich as a deliberate campaign, gives the reversal on La mer an added dimension of irony.