James Huneker

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

James Gibbons Huneker (1860-1921) was an American music writer and critic, born at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania He studied music in Europe under Alfredo Barili and others. He returned to New York City in 1885 and remained there until his death. His level at the piano was such that Liszt's student, Rafael Joseffy, had Huneker serve as as an assistant teacher to his piano students.

Huneker wrote the analysis and commentary on the complete works of Chopin for Schirmer's music publishing company. His analysis of all the piano solo works of Brahms, written shortly after the complete works of Brahms were published after Brahms' death, is highly regarded.

He was the music editor of the New York Sun, and a frequent contributor to the leading magazines and reviews. His books include:

Mezzotints in Modern Music (1899)
Chopin: The Man and His Music (1900)
Melomaniacs (1902)
Overtones (1904)
Iconoclasts (1905)
Visionaries (1905)
Egoists: A Book of Supermen (1909)
Franz Liszt (1911)
The Pathos of Distance (1913)
Ivory, Apes, and Peacocks (New York, 1915)
Steeplejack (1921)
Painted Veils (1930)

Huneker is mostly remembered now for his music criticism. He was a music critic who familiarized Americans with then modern European artistic movements and wrote in a highly subjective style, full of metaphorical descriptions.

Huneker was equally proficient in his knowledge of art and literature, and was one of the first to write of Gauguin, Ibsen, Wagner, Nietzsche, France, Faguet, Van Gogh, and George Moore.

See Huneker's early contributions to M'lle New York, a magazine of American Decadence founded jointly with Vance Thompson. While this was a remarkable magazine in many ways, its written content and its illustrations express the casual anti-Semitism of the period. See American Decadence, an arts project at the University of Alberta, for facsimile pages from this early publication, especially page 13. "Rubenstein was a man of talent...but, like every Jew, without genius or originality." [1]