Sibelius famously remarked to his fellow composer Bengt von Törne: "Never pay any attention to what critics say. Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!" Not quite true. Commenters at Felsenmusick point out that the Canadian artist Joe Fafard made a statue of Clement Greenberg, and that there is a statue to the literary critic Charles Augustin Saint-Beuve in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. Also, I seem to remember seeing a statue of the Russian critic Vladimir Stasov — dedicatee of Pictures at an Exhibition, subject of several extraordinary portraits by Ilya Repin — in St. Petersburg. These, however, are obviously the exceptions that prove the rule. The way I see it, critics can play a useful cultural role, but composers should ignore what they say, even when it's positive. Praise can be as unnerving as criticism, as Sibelius learned after paying too much attention to Olin Downes.
