# Does anyone know of an archive where one can read music reviews from the past?



## chu42 (Aug 14, 2018)

I read Slominsky's _Lexicon of musical invective _ and I'm wondering where one can find more of this kind of information concerning the contemporaneous reception of classical works.


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## Amadea (Apr 15, 2021)

No I don't know an archive, but I know a book I am reading now with the thoughts of those critics contemporary to Mozart, Beethoven, etc., it's quite old though: Composer and critic: two hundred years of musical criticism by Max Graf, 1946. You can borrow it on Internet Archive.


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Fanfare has their entire archive of reviews available to subscribers to the online magazine.


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## Dorsetmike (Sep 26, 2018)

A few possibles here :-

https://web.archive.org/web/*/music%20%20reviews


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## fbjim (Mar 8, 2021)

If you can deal with machine-translated French, the Hector Berlioz website has a large number of his journal works as a critic.

http://www.hberlioz.com/feuilletons/debatsindex.htm


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## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

Do a search for books by Sir Donald Tovey. Although a composer or distinctly mediocre talent, he was a powerhouse as a critic and quite influential. He wrote about long dead composers but also on his contemporaries. There are quite a few books of his. Some are more analytical than others.


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## Portamento (Dec 8, 2016)

If you're looking to do a really deep dive, here's a list of old German music journals that have been digitized. There's the famous ones, like AMZ, but tons of others as well. Contemporaneous reception is fascinating - often polemic, but those guys didn't pull any punches.


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## fbjim (Mar 8, 2021)

I remember a paper listing a bunch of contemporary reviews of Beethoven's Op. 111, where one was published as a semi-fictional dialogue between the editor and his young student. The student was brought to tears, the editor thought it was unlistenable! Really fun reading.


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

The Gramophone has an archive online. You probably need to pay to access it properly. I haven't tried but I do occasionally Google for reviews of a given recording and a Gramophone review often comes up among the choices.


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## wkasimer (Jun 5, 2017)

The Metropolitan Opera Archives often include reviews of performances.

You might also read George Bernard Shaw.


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