Gautier the Music Critic: A Successful Failure

Gautier, although untrained and perhaps disinterested in the art, wrote many articles on music during his journalistic career. Judged inferior to his literary or art criticism, these articles have value, for they reveal Gautier's æsthetic view: his defense of Romanticism, belief in Art for Art's Sake, and fondness for les transpositions d'art. Gautier criticized music as inarticulate but acknowledged that its imprecision permitted greater suggestiveness and universality than literature. He praised ballet as the ideal art, for it synthesized all others. He defended Berlioz as a musical Victor Hugo, an artistic revolutionary but overlooked the value of Wagner as an aesthetic innovator. Gautier's music criticism, somewhat like Baudelaire's, is an example of the sensitive response of one creator to another. It is the transformation of inarticulate beauty into language, the re-creation of sound into word-pictures. Despite his limitations and errors of judgment, Gautier the music critic achieves ultimate success. (EH)