Terry Teachout Gets It Right — Mostly

Although hardly a critic to look to when the subject is classical music except it be a biographical matter, The Wall Street Journal's drama critic, Terry Teachout, got it right on the Rosenberg-Cleveland Plain Dealer affair — mostly. His suggestion that the awkward business should have been resolved not by The Plain Dealer effectively firing Mr. Rosenberg from his long-held position as the paper's classical music critic and sidelining him to the Siberia of its general arts and entertainment beat to cover everything except the city's premier arts organization, the world-famous Cleveland Orchestra, and replacing him in that position with a younger and not nearly as experienced and qualified staff member, they instead should have...

...ordered the two men to split the assignment of covering the [Cleveland Orchestra's] concerts right down the middle. Criticism is not an exact science, and the paper would have done its readers a service by regularly publishing contrasting points of view on the city's No. 1 cultural venture.

What Mr. Teachout got wrong — astonishingly and perversely wrong considering his profession — is this:

When the critic of a one-paper town decides that (in Mr. Rosenberg's words) "mediocrity takes up residence . . . when Mr. Welser-Möst is on the podium," and when his reviews of the orchestra's concerts consist in large part of variations on that grim theme, the editors of his paper have to ask themselves a tough question: At what point does so oft- repeated an opinion become predictable and redundant?

Excuse us? Is Mr. Teachout here suggesting that Mr. Rosenberg should have varied his opinion of Mr. Welser-Möst's on-podium performance as the orchestra's music director simply to keep that opinion from becoming "predictable and redundant"? The very idea is patently absurd. The question that should have been asked by the paper's editors is not what should be done about Mr. Rosenberg, but what should be done about Mr. Welser-Möst, for unless the editors had hard-evidence cause to suspect that Mr. Rosenberg harbored some sort of personal animus toward Mr. Welser-Möst that was contaminating his critical assessment, the editors should have adopted the position that their expert's opinion on the matter should be taken with the utmost seriousness as rendering such expert opinion is precisely what expert critics like Mr. Rosenberg are hired for and paid to do. Instead, The Plain Dealer and its editor, Susan Goldberg, did what they did, and came out looking like perfect asses — or worse, craven capitulators to the will of vested business and political interests.