Music Critics

One of the best music critics was Neville Cardus (who also wrote well about cricket). I am reading a book called "Conversations with Cardus", a fascinating read in which he covers his own work with The Manchester Guardian (as it then was) and The Sunday Times and other newspapers and journals, as well as mention other music critics of whom he was fond or whom he admired: Shaw, Ernest Newman, Beerbohm and particularly Samuel Langford (of whom I had never heard). What struck me most about these music critics (and others I have read) is that they all seem to have aversions, "blind spots", over one or a few composers. Ernest Newman for example did not much like Mozart; Cardus is quite amazed at Newman's tendency to boost the reputations of quite ordinary composers - Bantock for example. Newman once wrote that Bantock's "Omar Khayyam" could be "mentioned in the same breath as the B Minor Mass of Bach". Cardus just couldn't believe that his usually discerning friend could be so blinkered.
Cardus himself hated "progressive" music. He thought it an artistic reflection of a materialistic society. "Some aspects of this 'progress' are destructive to the human spirit and many avante garde composers are expressing these aspects in their music..... within 50 years there will be a series of reactions against the more ridiculous concepts of life today."
Bernard Shaw disliked Brahms, certainly despising his first symphony and saying about a mass he wrote that there are certain experiences in life one does not want to repeat and that applies to listening again to Brahms's mass - or words to that effect.
I can't get close to liking Mahler. I admire him but I can't enjoy him. He doesn't seem to have any of the joy of..... wait fior it..... Mozart.
I don't know how Ernest Newman felt about Mahler but he was very enthusiastic about "the greatest English songwriter" Frederick Nichols.
Who's he for heaven's sake? Not even Cardus had heard of him.