Old Fogy: His Musical Opinions and Grotesques — Key Ideas to Explore

Anecdote as Argument

The catalog labels this 'Music -- Anecdotes,' but the excerpts reveal that anecdotes are not mere entertainment; they serve as rhetorical weapons. Old Fogy recounts playing for Liszt, describing how he performed Thalberg's tremolo study and was dismissed with a single remark: 'I expected Thalberg's tremolo study.' The story is less about the event than about Fogy's self-deprecation and his larger point about Liszt's kindness to mediocrity. Similarly, his tale of a pupil playing the Dante Sonata becomes a springboard to argue that Chopin's preludes 'mirror the cosmos in twenty bars,' justifying Liszt's programmatic ambition. These narratives are never neutral; they are crafted to support or undermine a musical position.

The Piano as Battleground

Though the catalog includes 'Piano music,' the excerpts show the piano as a site of ideological conflict. Old Fogy contrasts Liszt and Thalberg, calling Thalberg a 'pianist pure and simple' while granting Liszt a 'wealth of piano-music' that transcends mere virtuosity. He praises Liszt's Au bord d'une Source and the Transcendental Studies, claiming 'keyboard limitations [are] compassed.' Yet he admits he never attempted the revised studies, content with the 'first sketches.' This tension—between admiration and inability, between the piano as instrument and as orchestra—runs through the text. Fogy's opinions are less about the music itself than about what the piano should be: a vehicle for poetry, not mere display.

Contradiction as Character

The introduction states that Old Fogy 'seldom allowed us more than a peep at his personality,' and the excerpts bear this out. He attacks Wagner 'with inappeasable fury' yet admits being 'secretly much impressed.' He calls Liszt's B-minor sonata 'one of the great works of piano-literature' while noting its 'unheavenly length.' He mocks modern music but reads Huysmans. These contradictions are not flaws; they are the point. Huneker uses Fogy to embody the mosaic of musical taste, where a conservative can admire the avant-garde. Readers should watch for these reversals—they reveal more about the character than any consistent doctrine could.

These excerpts offer only fragments of Old Fogy's letters, but they establish a distinctive voice: hyperbolic, learned, and deliberately inconsistent. The catalog subjects hint at anecdote and piano music, but the work's real subject is the performance of opinion itself. As you read, note how Fogy's stories and judgments often undermine his stated positions, and how Huneker's framing—through an introduction that both vouches for and distances itself from the character—complicates any simple reading. The pleasure lies not in agreement but in watching a mind at play.

Reading Old Fogy’s ranting, I remembered my grandfather muttering over Chopin, loving and hating him in the same breath. There is a tenderness in that stubbornness. I felt it again, strangely, with Musical Myths and Facts, Volume 1 (of 2) — Background and Themes, which untangles old beliefs without mocking them. Both books let the past argue quietly, leaving me to sit with the dissonance.