Who Killed Cleveland's Critic?

An eye-popping story happened across my computer screen earlier today - longtime Cleveland music critic Don Rosenberg has apparently been told by his bosses at the Plain Dealer that he will no longer be assigned to review Cleveland Orchestra concerts, a duty he has had for 16 years. Rosenberg isn't being fired, though - just "reassigned" and banned from covering arguably the best orchestra in the US, and Cleveland's most prominent cultural group.

So what's really going on here? Well, Rosenberg, though widely respected as a writer and critic, has had something of a bee in his bonnet ever since the Cleveland Orchestra's current music director, Franz Welser-Möst, took up his post in 2002. As Tim Smith, another respected critic, put it on his blog, "Don has judged that Welser-Möst is lacking in certain abilities in certain repertoire, that he doesn't necessarily get the best out of music or the eminent ensemble." As a result of this conclusion, Rosenberg has been handing out more unfavorable notices than one would normally expect to read about an orchestra as august as Cleveland's.

But so what, right? Critics have their opinions, orchestras feel wronged, this happens all the time and no one loses their job over it. (Relations do get frosty at times: at one of America's most prominent orchestras, which I won't name for obvious reasons, newly arriving musicians are told specifically by their management to never, ever speak with or return calls from the local paper's lead critic.) And as Smith points out, correctly, Rosenberg was hardly on a crusade against Welser-Möst, and gave him good reviews nearly as often as bad ones. So why exactly would the Plain Dealer have so nakedly allowed itself to be manipulated into pulling the writer off the beat?

The answer is almost certainly that someone in the chain of command at the paper has an involvement with the orchestra, either as a fan, a donor, or even a board member, and s/he got tired of reading Rosenberg's swipes at the man on the podium, especially with Welser-Möst having recently signed an extension which will keep him in Cleveland through 2018. (A glance at the orchestra's annual report shows that retired Plain Dealer publisher Alex Machaskee is part of the board's executive leadership. Did he make a phone call or two over the Rosenberg issue, perhaps?)

However it happened, it strikes me that orchestras do not serve themselves well when they demand (and are granted) a wholly compliant press. Yes, critics who are scared of losing whatever "access" we deign to give them (which, frankly, isn't much under the best of circumstances) are more likely to write the latest puff piece the way we want them to, and run it on the date we think will maximize ticket sales. But looking at the long term picture, this type of servile critic quickly loses credibility with his/her readership, which is what leads to people not really caring whether there are people writing about orchestras.

Today's public is more media-savvy than at any time in history, and they can tell the difference between promotion and analysis. And while the relationship between those who perform and those who write about performers will probably never be anything but uneasy, it crosses a dangerous line for those on the performance side to exercise backroom power to remove a writer they find inconvenient.

Late addendum, 09/23/08: I don't really know whether a traditional journalistic "full disclosure" is necessary on a blog, but since the CEO of the Cleveland Orchestra has seen fit to respond to this post in the comments, I might as well add one. For what it's worth, I spent several years in college studying orchestral viola with Lynne Ramsey, the First Assistant Principal Violist of the Cleveland Orchestra. I did not contact her, or any other member of the orchestra, before writing this post.