Lewis Rosenthal, in "The Critics at the Play" (The Theatre, 1887), gives a rundown of New York's music critics:
What's on the boards at the Metropolitan Opera House this Saturday afternoon? Never mind what: let's go to have a glimpse of the critics. There is Frederick A. Schwab, of the Times, short, compact, alert, curling his tawny mustache. A little to the left sits tall, courteous, military-looking John P. Jackson, of the World, chatting with bluff, genial, broad-shouldered Leopold Lindau, of the Figaro and the Dramatic News. To the right I see athletic Henry E. Krehbiel, of the Tribune, whispering to blondish Henry T. Finck, of the Evening Post....
Schwab ... has written spicy letters and sent lengthy dispatches from Bayreuth. I hear he is preparing some "memoirs." They are sure to be interesting. An accomplished linguist, a violinist in his hours of leisure, a man of wide general reading, Schwab is as caustic, suggestive, boulevardier in his talk as he is in his printed work....
Finck ... a graduate of Harvard and a student at Berlin and Heidelberg, is a perfect monomaniac on the subject of Wagner, and endeavors to put his readers into the same condition of mind. Jackson and Lindau, even Kobbe, of the Mail and Express, are lukewarm compared with him. He seems to date his articles Bayreuth. He dreams nightly of Siegfried and Tristan. He rides daily with the Walküre, and plays cards with the Nibelungen. I hear that he is getting ready a book on types of female beauty. Ten to one, Brünnhilde is his ideal....
Krehbiel writes learnedly, with his eye ever to the land of Wagner and Liszt. Schwab dashes off his column in a breezy, piquant style, with a marked predilection for Verdi and Gounod. Krehbiel comes out with professional elaborateness — quotes, gives dates, cites precedents. Schwab politely suggests, pithily opines, ingeniously infers.
One of the most clever, if one of the youngest, musical and dramatic critics in town is William T. Henderson ... Henderson has written verses, grave and gay; librettos, and translations of librettos; articles for magazines; letters from watering places. His column in the Times of Sunday, captioned "The Orchestra at Work," demonstrates his knowledge of the technique of the stage and of music, and his power of gentle irony and stinging sarcasm.
Little Steinberg, of the Herald, pert, saucy, snappy, always seems to be in a minority. He writes an interesting criticism, but one in which there is always a note of insincerity, a striving after effect. But who can please all the critics? ...
