Should a music critic be honest about his or her failings and blind spots, or should he attempt to teach his audience to have the “correct” view, pretending to hold a truth that he himself does not feel?
“The Knight of the Rose,” or The Rose Cavalier, as the Metropolitan Opera program so drolly translates it, was the operatic fare of the last evening. The audience adored it and the singers seemed to be having a good time. The performance all through was remarkably even and smooth. I am sure it is a personal shortcoming that I did not find myself taking much interest in the affair.
If I may be permitted the confession, I have never been able to keep my mind on Der Rosenkavalier. I can take a cat nap here and there without seeming to miss anything, because when I wake up the music is always doing exactly what it was when I dropped off. It is full of waltzes that all sound alike and that have nothing to do with the play, which is about mid-eighteenth-century Vienna. It is full of broken-up vocal lines that have no musical necessity, because the orchestra always has the tune anyway, and that always have to be sung loud because the orchestration is thick and pushing, owing to Strauss’s constant overwriting for the horns. I think it is really an acting opera, because the vocal line is not very interesting and the orchestral writing, though elaborate, is to my ear wholly inconsequential. I make exception vocally for the final trio, which is as pretty as can be, and instrumentally for the well-known passage where the celesta comments in another key.
— Virgil Thomson, The New York Herald Tribune, March 14, 1942
Classical Life 
Of course a critic should both be honest about personal preferences and also about the public’s common wisdom — without going on too long about either. And if a critic is not “taking much interesting in the affair” maybe it’s time for a vacation from the concert hall.
(Personally, I’ve always thought the final trio in Rosenkavalier is one of the biggest anti-climaxes ever. Until then, the opera is pretty much all brilliant.)
Good graphic!
Typo corrected. Thanks, Mr. Ocker.
Everyone has preferences and I suspect that professional critics deal with them all the time in reviews without disclosing them, and I think that’s fine. On the other hand, when a critic has an actual bias, I always appreciate it when a critic ‘fesses up to it — it makes him/her more credible overall.
Of course, Alan Rich famously never failed to mention his disdain for Brahms and Sibelius, which made the occasional glowing review of a performance of one of their pieces all the more notable.
Mark Swed once wrote of performance of Barber’s Symphony No. 1 with Leonard Slatkin conducting the LA Phil: “The score and its composer both have considerable currency these days, but there are those who understand the Barber revival better than I do. To these ears it is music that turns its back on the 20th century and on the progressive spirit of American music.” He then went on to praise that evening’s performance. I appreciated both the disclosure and the review, and from that point on I always remembered to always take with ample doses of skepticism one of Mr. Swed’s reviews of a Barber performance.
In college I once wrote a piece — I didn’t really think of it as a review, but my professor did, unfortunately — in which I admitted to falling asleep during a performance. I was lambasted like nobody’s business before the entire class.
That Thomson admits to napping during performances I think is rather outlandish, and besmirches his credibility. It is honest, though. He was famous for napping during performances in fact.
I once made a full frontal attack on Mahler’s Second Symphony in print. Readers did not appreciate it. But then I live in O.C.