RedScharlach wrote:The point is precisely the relationship between judgment and taste, which you rightly speak of. The problem is: must our judgment be mediated by something objective? And should this something objective be history? (But even here I would like to open another parenthesis to ask myself if it wouldn't be better to replace "judgment" with "listening").
The three quotes – perfect (or imperfect) examples of "historical judgment" in which "the objective" turns into its opposite – only serve to consolidate my convictions.
I think that every one of our judgments is always mediated by something objective
History is not that which gives grades, in this case to composers, but that which tells us how music has evolved over the centuries.
The three quotes I provided do not aim to diminish the composer in question because they all stem from an absolutely shared observation: Mendelssohn was a great composer of the early nineteenth century, and this is because one can be great within the scope of an art, whether working in a revolutionary manner or in a conservative manner, and on this there is no doubt, I would say.
The objective point is therefore not History but what we consider most important to evaluate when judging a composer: the type of music composed, how it was composed, whether one was revolutionary or conservative. But also life, the man, the thought. None of us are immune to this when giving a judgment. It remains that everyone has their own priorities and bases everything on them.