# Funny negative quotes about famous composers



## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

Post famous art critics, composers, etc., speaking very badly about your favorite composers.

This is a goldmine concerning harsh critiques to Boulez.

My favorite:

"_Boulez's only concern is with power. He lost the leadership of the avant-guard more than ten years ago to Stockhausen. Now others have moved in. With the need for power, where was he to go? So he chose to be a conductor. He is a wonderful musician, a wonderful intelligence. It's a pity there is no humanity there. Does he have sex? I think not. When men have no sex, they go after power in this big, obsessive way._" - Lukas Foss

Disclaimer: this is a lighthearted thread; if your favorite composers are insulted, don't ruin the fun by taking it seriously!

You can't invent your insults, it has to be something by famous composers, critics, interpreters, etc.


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

aleazk said:


> Post famous art critics, composers, etc., speaking very badly about your favorite composers.
> 
> This is a goldmine concerning harsh critiques to Boulez.
> 
> ...


:lol: oh, I see now, you are basically just rewording that horrible phrase _"no offence!"_


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

Beecham on Bach: "Too much counterpoint; what is worse, Protestant counterpoint."


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## DeepR (Apr 13, 2012)

I LOL'ed when I read this:

_"We consider Scriabin as our bitter musical enemy. Why? Because his music tends toward unhealthy eroticism. Also to mysticism, passivity and a flight from the reality of life."_

- Dmitri Shostakovich


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## Skilmarilion (Apr 6, 2013)

_"Handel strikes me as so fourth-rate, that he's not even interesting"._

*- Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky*

_" I like Wagner's music better than any other music. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without people hearing what one says. That is a great advantage."_

*- Oscar Wilde*


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

"_Where M. Debussy is all sensitivity, M. Ravel is all insensitivity, borrowing without hesitation not only technique but the sensitivity of other people_"

:lol:


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## Blancrocher (Jul 6, 2013)

Prokofiev referred to Stravinsky's instrumental music as "Bach with the wrong notes."


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## SeptimalTritone (Jul 7, 2014)

"Mozart died too late rather than too soon."
--Glenn Gould

''Beethoven's reputation is based entirely on gossip. The middle Beethoven represents a supreme example of a composer on an ego trip.''
--Glenn Gould

"If the reader were so rash as to purchase any of Bela Bartok's compositions, he would find that they each and all consist of unmeaning bunches of notes, apparently representing the composer promenading the keyboard in his boots. Some can be played better with the elbows, others with the flat of the hand. None require fingers to perform or ears to listen too."
--Frederick Corder


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## Skilmarilion (Apr 6, 2013)

_"Though I had some instruction from Haydn, I never learned anything from him." _

*- Ludwig van Beethoven*

_
"He [Schoenberg] would be better off shovelling snow than scribbling on manuscript paper."_

*- Richard Strauss*

_"When I think of Liszt as a creative artist, he appears before my eyes rouged, on stilts, and blowing into Jericho trumpets, fortissimo and pianissimo. _

*- Frederic Chopin*

_"I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws."_

*- Charles Baudelaire *

_
"One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend to hear it a second time." _

*- Gioachino Rossini*


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

I've always been fond of Tchaikovsky's pithy comment on Brahms: "What a talentless bastar*!"

... though a quick Google search gave me one result in which this was a comment by _Brahms_ about _Stravinsky_! :lol:


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

Deems Taylor on a performance of Mahler's 7th: "Merely because Mahler wrote a symphony one and one-half hours long, scoring it for a mammoth orchestra and had it played last night in a large hall by a first-class orchestra under a first-class conductor -- granted these facts, we still fail to see why we should devote much precious space to saying that we found the work to be emphatically the most stupid piece of music that we ever heard."


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

Nereffid said:


> Deems Taylor on a performance of Mahler's 7th: "Merely because Mahler wrote a symphony one and one-half hours long, scoring it for a mammoth orchestra and had it played last night in a large hall by a first-class orchestra under a first-class conductor -- granted these facts, we still fail to see why we should devote much precious space to saying that we found the work to be emphatically the most stupid piece of music that we ever heard."


Who is this Deems Taylor moron? Hes going to regret ever saying that about Mahler's 7th symphony! I'm going to make Deems Taylor wish to be dead after I'm done with him!


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## Musicforawhile (Oct 10, 2014)

Saint-Saens said of Debussy's 'The afternoon of a faun,' that it "has a pretty sound, but there is not the least truly musical idea in it; it is no more a piece of music than the palette on which a painter has been working is a picture.”


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## The nose (Jan 14, 2014)

John Cage said in an interview about sound and silence.


> If you listen to Beethoven or Mozart you see it's always the same, but if you listen to traffic it's always different.


Here you can find the complete interview


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## The nose (Jan 14, 2014)

And how forget Igor Stravinsky's sentence about Vivaldi


> Vivaldi did not write 500 concertos, he wrote the same concerto 500 times.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

DeepR said:


> I LOL'ed when I read this:
> 
> _"We consider Scriabin as our bitter musical enemy. Why? Because his music tends toward unhealthy eroticism. Also to mysticism, passivity and a flight from the reality of life."_
> 
> - Dmitri Shostakovich


Is this something Shostakovich actually wrote? Or is it one of the many opinions written for him by party hacks? It sounds like the latter. And wasn't the Tchaikovsky comment on Brahms written in a private letter when he was a teenager?


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

_Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa-Lobos?_

Igor Stravinsky


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## Guest (Dec 7, 2014)

Short, bearded, nicotine-stained-fingers and blue-eyed Schumann-babe Brahms on Bruckner's orchestral output : "Symphonic boa-constrictors."


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## Guest (Dec 7, 2014)

Cosima Wagner on recalling Bruckner's boozy visit to her husband concerning approval for a dedication (because of the _pils_ they forgot whether it was to be Bruckner's 2nd or 3rd Symphony) : "What a strange little man". [I paraphrase and am depending on hazy memory.]


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## DeepR (Apr 13, 2012)

EdwardBast said:


> Is this something Shostakovich actually wrote? Or is it one of the many opinions written for him by party hacks? It sounds like the latter. And wasn't the Tchaikovsky comment on Brahms written in a private letter when he was a teenager?


I don't know for sure. But from the bits and pieces I've read on the web (and google books) opinions on Scriabin changed pretty drastically over time. Other Russian composers usually had strong opinions on him, either positive or negative, but they also changed their opinions sometimes.


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## Clairvoyance Enough (Jul 25, 2014)

I couldn't stop laughing back when I first read through some of Tchaikovsky's writings; no one insult in particular was laugh out loud funny to me, but it was hilarious how they just kept coming one after another, all at giants. Actually I think I did lol when he slaughtered Handel in the previously mentioned quote because I felt the same way back when I first read it. It's even a bit funnier now that I love Handel.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

"Brass, lots of brass, incredibly much brass! Even more brass, nothing but brass!--that was the first movement....None the less, the fourth movement is positively the last [a reference to the changed order of the inner movements], and with it Mahler's symphony ends, for all symphonies must end sometime, even if they are as endlessly long as Mahler's Sixth, entitled 'tragic'. And now, heedless of the shrieks of rage of the Mahlerites, a loud, clear, and energetic protest must be made against the corruption of healthy musical sense and taste by performances of this kind in the city where Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart, and Haydn lived and produced their most sublime works....Theater people used to maintain that Mahler was a fine symphonist. Knowledgeable music lovers can now prove that he is not a good symphonist....His melodic invention is minimal, his contrapuntal and thematic elaboration is nil, and many things which look imposing on his scores produce no effect because you don't hear them. The harps with their gissandos and the thrice-divided violas labour in vain to be heard during the assault of the gigantic army of brass, and the insistent and continuous ringing of cow and sheep bells cannot conceal the hopeless emptiness of the Sixth Symphony." - Heinrich Reinhardt


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## Albert7 (Nov 16, 2014)

"I suffered more than upon any occasion in my life apart from an incident or two connected with 'painless dentistry.' To begin with, there was Mr. Bartok's piano touch. But 'touch,' with its implication of light-fingered ease, is a misnomer, unless it be qualified in some such way as that of Ethel Smyth in discussing her dear old teacher Herzogenberg - 'He had a touch like a paving-stone.' I do not believe Mr. Bartok would resent this simile......

If Bartok's piano compositions should ever become popular in this country, there will have to be established a special Anti-Matthay School to train performers for them, and I believe that it will be found that piano manufacturers will refuse to hire out pianos for the recitals of its alumni, insisting that these shall always be bought outright, and the remains destroyed on conclusion..."

review in The Observer in London dated May, 13th 1923 by Percy A. Scholes

Ouch, compared to a dentist is a tough lot.


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## Albert7 (Nov 16, 2014)

"Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches - he has made music sick. I postulate this viewpoint: Wagner's art is diseased. The problems which he brings to the stage - all of them, problems of hysterics - the convulsiveness of his emotions, his overwrought sensibility, his taste that always demands sharper spices, his instability, and, not the least, the choice of his heroes and heroines, considered as psychological types (a clinical exhibit), all this presents a picture of disease that leaves no doubt. Wagner est une nevrose...

Our physicians and physiologists have in Wagner the most interesting, or at least the most complete case. And just because there is nothing more modern than this collective illness, this sluggishness and oversensitivity of the nervous machinery, Wagner is a modern artist par excellence, the Cagliostro of modernity. In his art, he mixes in the most tempting manner all that the world today needs most, the three great stimulants of the exhausted, the brutal, the artificial, and the innocent (idiotic). Wagner is a great corrupter of music. He has discovered in it a means to charm tired nerves - he has thereby made music sick."

Gotta love Nietzsche eh?


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## Albert7 (Nov 16, 2014)

For a book of composer insults, here you guys go:


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

Just woke up from my beauty sleep and noticed this thread. Too lazy to backtrack if this was already posted:

"I'm told that Wagner's music is not as bad as it sounds". Gustav Mahler to Bruno Walter.
Probably is a lot worse in German. Ouch!!!


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## clavichorder (May 2, 2011)

J.S. Bach said something not so nice about his son Carl Philip's music. It was something like this:

"It fades, like Prussian blue."

CPE Bach worked for Frederick the great, king of Prussia, to add some weight to that.

Mozart on Clementi:

"Clementi is a charlatan, like all Italians."

He had some more to say about the way he played piano, "not a kreutzer's worth of feeling" or something like that.

Emperor Joseph had some quote about Haydn bringing bad taste to contemporary music with his 'country sounds.'


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## Guest (Dec 7, 2014)

Mahlerian said:


> "[...] and the thrice-divided violas labour in vain to be heard during the assault of the gigantic army of brass [...]" - Heinrich Reinhardt


Have to say, Mahlerian (in my own meagre experience), that multi-divided strings can be ineffective. Depends very much on ambient volume, of course. And proximity to the score (if not the conductor's podium!).


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

TalkingHead said:


> Have to say, Mahlerian (in my own meagre experience), that multi-divided strings can be ineffective. Depends very much on ambient volume, of course. And proximity to the score (if not the conductor's podium!).


The Sixth does have some things that come out of the texture only with difficulty, particularly the celesta in the first movement, although it's nowhere near as bad as in Bruckner, whose internal figures are nearly always swamped during tuttis.


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

TalkingHead said:


> Have to say, Mahlerian (in my own meagre experience), that multi-divided strings can be ineffective. Depends very much on ambient volume, of course. And proximity to the score (if not the conductor's podium!).


_Monsieur Head_!, s'il vous plaît, lire l'avertissement!! :tiphat:


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## violadude (May 2, 2011)

Mahlerian said:


> - Heinrich Reinhardt


Who?  ....................


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

violadude said:


> Who?  ....................


I think he was a newspaper critic of the time...? I copied down the quote from La Grange's bio, which unfortunately I don't own a copy of, so I can't easily check for more details.


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

Newspaper of the time on Mahler's Third Symphony:

"_Anyone who has committed such a deed deserves a couple of years in prison._"


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

Some memorable quotes from the M.Babbitt documentary:

-"_Do I necessarily hear the things that Milton would like me to hear? No._"

-"_I got lost at 1/3 of the piece and so I was not able to 'attend' the remaining 2/3_"


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## clavichorder (May 2, 2011)

Beecham had many creatively mean quotes, and I can think of one off hand:

When asked if he had heard Stockhausen, he said, "No, but I have trodden in some."


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## JACE (Jul 18, 2014)

Here's Mendelssohn's reaction to hearing Berlioz's _Symphonie fantastique_:

_"How utterly loathsome this is to me, I don't have to tell you. To see one's most cherished ideas debased and expressed in perverted caricatures would enrage anyone. And yet this is only the program. The execution is still more miserable: nowhere a spark, no warmth, utter foolishness, contrived passion represented through every possible exaggerated orchestral means: four tympani, two pianos for four hands, which are supposed to imitate bells, two harps, many big drums, violins divided into eight parts, two parts for the double basses which play solo passages, and all these means (to which I would not object if they were being properly employed) used to express nothing but indifferent drivel, mere grunting, shouting, screaming back and forth."_

I think he didn't like it.


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## Clairvoyance Enough (Jul 25, 2014)

JACE said:


> Here's Mendelssohn's reaction to hearing Berlioz's _Symphonie fantastique_:
> 
> _"How utterly loathsome this is to me, I don't have to tell you. To see one's most cherished ideas debased and expressed in perverted caricatures would enrage anyone. And yet this is only the program. The execution is still more miserable: nowhere a spark, no warmth, utter foolishness, contrived passion represented through every possible exaggerated orchestral means: four tympani, two pianos for four hands, which are supposed to imitate bells, two harps, many big drums, violins divided into eight parts, two parts for the double basses which play solo passages, and all these means (to which I would not object if they were being properly employed) used to express nothing but indifferent drivel, mere grunting, shouting, screaming back and forth."_
> 
> I think he didn't like it.


:lol: The formality of the language is what makes these for me. I love it when you're in the middle of a scathing stream of modifiers and you suspect that it must end soon, but here comes another one and another behind him with an extra "utter" for good measure!


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## Kibbles Croquettes (Dec 2, 2014)

"Well, why not one could see things this way. But terrible torment it is to one's ears", said Sibelius about Schönberg's 1st chamber symphony.

Maybe not so funny but amusing is a comment about Webern's symphony: "A high note, a low note, a note in the middle - like the music of a madman!". The amusingness of the comment is due to the fact that the commenter is Webern himself! It appears that he was not pleased with Klemperer's conducting.


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

Kibbles Croquettes said:


> Maybe not so funny but amusing is a comment about Webern's symphony: "A high note, a low note, a note in the middle - like the music of a madman!". The amusingness of the comment is due to the fact that the commenter is Webern himself! It appears that he was not pleased with Klemperer's conducting.


"... because, of course, _I am not_ a madman..."















You decide!


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## Kibbles Croquettes (Dec 2, 2014)

aleazk said:


> "... because, of course, _I am not_ a madman..."
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Well, I'm told that only a lunatic would be on the grass, so I guess that settles the question.


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

Kibbles Croquettes said:


> Well, I'm told that only a lunatic would be on the grass, so I guess that settles the question.


That, and his vague resemblance to another viennese madman:


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## SeptimalTritone (Jul 7, 2014)

^ That guy is my hero.

"When two systems, of which we know the states by their respective representatives, enter into temporary physical interaction due to known forces between them, and when after a time of mutual influence the systems separate again, then they can no longer be described in the same way as before, viz. by endowing each of them with a representative of its own. I would not call that one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought."


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

SeptimalTritone said:


> ^ That guy is my hero.


Webern or Erwin? Actually, I'm starting to think that they are just two different eigenstates of the same observable!: viennese guy with dark hair and glasses.


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## SeptimalTritone (Jul 7, 2014)

aleazk said:


> Webern or Erwin? Actually, I'm starting to think that they are just two different eigenstates of the same observable!: viennese guy with dark hair and glasses.


They are also eigenstates of the observable: f--king genius who revolutionized the world.


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## trazom (Apr 13, 2009)

"Most of Mozart's music is dull."--Maria Callas

Sure, when _you_ attempt to sing it.

Schubert's so good, not one negative quote about him to be found.


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## Cosmos (Jun 28, 2013)

From a "prominent French musician" (probably Boulez) after 21 repetitions of an A-major chord towards the end of Gorecki's Symphony 3:

"Merde!"


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

Cosmos said:


> From a "prominent French musician" (probably Boulez) after 21 repetitions of an A-major chord towards the end of Gorecki's Symphony 3:
> 
> "Merde!"


lol, yes, Boulez would probably say something like that in that situation. But, what I don't see is why he would accept to conduct it in the first place... or hear it! :lol: I don't think it was Boulez, but I could be wrong.


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## Lunasong (Mar 15, 2011)

"Rossini would have been a great composer if his teacher had spanked him enough on his backside." 
Ludwig van Beethoven

"Art is long and life is short; here is evidently the explanation of a Brahms symphony."
Edward Lorne

"Anton Bruckner wrote the same symphony nine times, trying to get it just right. He failed." 
Edward Abbey

"If he'd been making shell-cases during the war it might have been better for music."
Maurice Ravel on Camille Saint-Saens

"It says much for (Thomas) Beecham and little for (Frederick) Delius that only in Tommy’s recordings does the Yorkshireman sound like a composer of substance."
Norman Lebrecht


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## Cosmos (Jun 28, 2013)

aleazk said:


> lol, yes, Boulez would probably say something like that in that situation. But, what I don't see is why he would accept to conduct it in the first place... or hear it! :lol: I don't think it was Boulez, but I could be wrong.


Supposedly this was an audience member at the premiere, so if it was Boulez, he wasn't' expecting it and probably never came back to it


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## Kibbles Croquettes (Dec 2, 2014)

aleazk said:


> lol, yes, Boulez would probably say something like that in that situation. But, what I don't see is why he would accept to conduct it in the first place... or hear it! :lol: I don't think it was Boulez, but I could be wrong.


Boulez (allegedly) on various composers:

Alban Berg. "Bad taste."
Brahms. "A bore."
John Cage. "A performing monkey."
Olivier Messiaen. "Brothel music."
Schoenberg. "Ostentatious and obsolete romanticism."
Karlheinz Stockhausen. "A hippie."
Tchaikovsky. "Abominable."
Verdi. "Stupid, stupid, stupid!"


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

Cosmos said:


> Supposedly this was an audience member at the premiere, so if it was Boulez, he wasn't' expecting it and probably never came back to it


Ah, that makes more sense. Perhaps it was him. haha, I can imagine it.


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

Kibbles Croquettes said:


> Boulez (allegedly) on various composers:
> 
> Alban Berg. "Bad taste."
> Brahms. "A bore."
> ...


My favorite is: (on John Adams) "_Well, I wouldn't say I would spit on his music, but..._"

Translation: "I would spit on his music!"


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## Kibbles Croquettes (Dec 2, 2014)

aleazk said:


> My favorite is: (on John Adams) "_Well, I wouldn't say I would spite on his music, but..._"
> 
> Translation: "I would spit on his music!"


Haha. Do you happen to remember what he said about Webern? I recall reading a short, mean comment about Webern by Boulez but it seems that I haven't written it down...


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

John Ruskin on Die Meistersinger: "Of all the bête, clumsy, blundering, boggling, baboon-blooded stuff I ever saw on a human stage, ... and of all the affected, sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless, topsiturviest, tongs and boniest doggerel of sounds I ever endured the deadliness of, that eternity of nothing was the deadliest, so far as the sound went. I never was so relieved, so far as I can remember in my life, by the stopping of any sound - not excepting railway whistles - as I was by the cessation of the cobbler's bellowing."


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## Marschallin Blair (Jan 23, 2014)

KenOC said:


> John Ruskin on Die Meistersinger: "Of all the bête, clumsy, blundering, boggling, baboon-blooded stuff I ever saw on a human stage, ... and of all the affected, sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless, topsiturviest, tongs and boniest doggerel of sounds I ever endured the deadliness of, that eternity of nothing was the deadliest, so far as the sound went. I never was so relieved, so far as I can remember in my life, by the stopping of any sound - not excepting railway whistles - as I was by the cessation of the cobbler's bellowing."


But then, who the hell was 'John Ruskin'?-- besides being Cecil Rhodes' mentor and the gravedigger of British freedom and prosperity.


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

Kibbles Croquettes said:


> Haha. Do you happen to remember what he said about Webern? I recall reading a short, mean comment about Webern by Boulez but it seems that I haven't written it down...


I think it was something in the lines of "_Webern? trivial..._"


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## Kibbles Croquettes (Dec 2, 2014)

aleazk said:


> I think it was something in the lines of "_Webern? trivial..._"


Oh, right, that does sound familiar!


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## Richannes Wrahms (Jan 6, 2014)

Mahlerian said:


> The Sixth does have some things that come out of the texture only with difficulty, particularly the celesta in the first movement.


I think it should really be played on a keyboard glockenspiel, which can really give you a fortissimo while celestas rarely can.


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## MaxB (Jan 3, 2013)

Just came across Einstein's thoughts on some famous composers
Handel had "a certain shallowness"
Mendelssohn had "considerable talent but an indefinable lack of depth that often leads to banality"
Wagner had "lack of architectural structure I see as decadence"
Strauss was "gifted but without inner truth."


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

You can see more of Einstein's musical thoughts here.

https://sites.google.com/site/kenocstuff/albert-einstein-on-music


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## Avey (Mar 5, 2013)

_It used to come over me . . . that music had been, and still was, too much an emasculated art. Too much of what was easy and usual to play and to hear what was called beautiful, etc. -- the same old even-vibration, Sybartitic apron-strings, keeping music too much tied to the old ladies. The string quartet music got more and more trite, weak, and effeminate. After one of those Kneisel Quartet concerts . . . I started a string quartet score, half mad, half in fun, and half to try, practice, and have some fun making those men fiddlers get up and do something like men._

-- Charles Ives, on why he wrote his Second Quartet and the problem with the prevailing music scene

_Too hard to play--so it just can't be good music, Rollo._
_Cut it out, Rollo! Beat time, Rollo!_
_Join in again, Professor, all in the key of C. You can do that nice and pretty._

-- Charles Ives, addressing Rollo, the second violin in his Second Quartet

_If [a] work perhaps had 150 valuable ideas, the 150 men [in an orchestra] might be justifiable, but as [the work] probably contains not more than a dozen, the composer may be unconsciously ashamed of them, and glad to cover them up under a 150 men._

-- Charles Ives, on conventional music relying upon repetition

_Such lilies . . . whose ears and brains are somewhat emasculated from disuse . . . [T]hese commercial pansies are either stupid or they are liars . . . . . . [they were] either musically unintelligent or deliberately unfair. To say it quickly, he is either a fool or a crook._

-- Charles Ives, on critics who ridiculed his work

_They say I rub the fur the wrong way. I say, let the cats turn around._

-- Charles Ives, on critics

_...and from this subconscious viewpoint, [the listener] inclines perhaps more to the thinking *about* than thinking *in* music._

-- Charles Ives, on the critic and listener that hears hundreds of concerts a year, with the same tones, cadences, progression, that the ear no longer listens _to_ music, but _around_ it


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## GreenMamba (Oct 14, 2012)

_One thing only was certain, and that was that the composer's ocean was a frog pond, and that some of its denizens had got into the throat of every one of the brass instruments.
_
H. Krehbiel's on his initial review of Debussy's La Mer. He famously changed his mind years later and praised the piece. Still a great line.


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## GraemeG (Jun 30, 2009)

It's posted elsewhere already (probably by me) but I still think it's so pointed. Critic J F Runciman in 1896:
"It is one's duty to hate with all possible fervor the empty and ugly in art; and I hate Saint-Saëns the composer with a hatred that is perfect".
cheers,
GG


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Louis Schneider on La Mer: "The audience seemed rather disappointed: they expected the ocean, something big, something colossal, but they were served instead with some agitated water in a saucer."

Erik Satie on La Mer's movement titled 'Dawn to Noon on the Sea': "I liked the bit about quarter to eleven."


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## Kibbles Croquettes (Dec 2, 2014)

I guess, for balance, this threads needs the classic reply by Reger: "I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me."


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## Ludric (Oct 29, 2014)

_"[J.S. Bach] would be the admiration of whole nations if he had more amiability, if he did not take away the natural element in his pieces by giving them a turgid and confused style, and if he did not darken their beauty by an excess of art."_

-*Johann Adolph Scheibe*, 1737


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## Albert7 (Nov 16, 2014)

On Richard Strauss’ Salome:

“A reviewer…should be an embodied conscience stung into righteous fury by the moral stench with which Salome fills the nostrils of humanity, but, though it makes him retch, he should be sufficiently judicial in his temperament to calmly look at the drama in all its aspects and determine whether or not as a whole it is an instructive note on the life and culture of the times and whether or not this exudation from the diseased and polluted will and imagination of the authors marks a real advance in artistic expression.”
—H.E. Krehbiel, New York Tribune, January 23,1907

At least Gramophone critics haven't mentioned barf as one of the symptoms of John Cage yet.


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## Albert7 (Nov 16, 2014)

albertfallickwang said:


> For a book of composer insults, here you guys go:
> 
> View attachment 58001


Okay here is the paperback version of the same book... a much better cover version I think.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Of Wagner and his 'disciples', from London in 1855: "...madmen, enemies of music to the knife, who, not born for music, and conscious of their impotence... their being is to prey on the ailing trunk, until it becomes putrid and rotten."


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

GB Shaw on Brahms' German Requiem: "I do not deny that the Requiem is a solid piece of musical manufacture. You feel at once that it could only have come from the establishment of a first-class undertaker."


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## QuietGuy (Mar 1, 2014)

Aaron Copland: “Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.”


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## Avey (Mar 5, 2013)

QuietGuy said:


> Aaron Copland: "Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes."


In the least, the comment is humorous.

And true? Consider that the expressive content, or profound purpose, in RVW's Fifth, could very much stem from the very simple, very mundane, yet very organic, palpable, and undeniable reality that may reveal itself when one stares at a cow, or another lifeform, or a tree, or a rock, or the sky. So, was Copland making an insult, or a compliment?!


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## Avey (Mar 5, 2013)

_Elgar Second Symphony. Dreadful nobilmente semplice. I came out after 3rd movement -- so bored. . . . I listen to one minute of Elgar 2 but can stand no more._

-- Benjamin Britten (allegedly from his diary)


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## SuperTonic (Jun 3, 2010)

JACE said:


> Here's Mendelssohn's reaction to hearing Berlioz's _Symphonie fantastique_:
> 
> _"How utterly loathsome this is to me, I don't have to tell you. To see one's most cherished ideas debased and expressed in perverted caricatures would enrage anyone. And yet this is only the program. The execution is still more miserable: nowhere a spark, no warmth, utter foolishness, contrived passion represented through every possible exaggerated orchestral means: four tympani, two pianos for four hands, which are supposed to imitate bells, two harps, many big drums, violins divided into eight parts, two parts for the double basses which play solo passages, and all these means (to which I would not object if they were being properly employed) used to express nothing but indifferent drivel, mere grunting, shouting, screaming back and forth."_
> 
> I think he didn't like it.


There was another quote from Mendelssohn regarding Berlioz. I don't remember it exactly, but it was something to the effect that he felt the need to wash his hands after handling one of Berlioz's scores.


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## brianvds (May 1, 2013)

Marschallin Blair said:


> But then, who the hell was 'John Ruskin'?-- besides being Cecil Rhodes' mentor and the gravedigger of British freedom and prosperity.


As far as I know, he is highly regarded as art critic. A skilled artist himself, he did much to promote the work of the pre-Raphaelites. I didn't know he dabbled in music criticism too.


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## Skilmarilion (Apr 6, 2013)

Hitler on Cage's 4'33".

*[Apologies for the few profanities]*


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## HaydnBearstheClock (Jul 6, 2013)

Skilmarilion said:


> Hitler on Cage's 4'33".
> 
> *[Apologies for the few profanities]*


Haha, that's a good one.


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## SeptimalTritone (Jul 7, 2014)

HaydnBearstheClock said:


> Haha, that's a good one.


I know, and it's probably even more fun for someone from Germany like you!


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## Headphone Hermit (Jan 8, 2014)

“All of Bach’s last movements are like the running of a sewing machine.” –Arnold Bax (Boo for Bax!!! )

reminds me of Beecham's (unfair) dismissal of harpsichord music as sing similar to the sound of two skeletons copulating on a tin roof


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## Chris (Jun 1, 2010)

Benjamin Britten on Brahms: 'I play all his music through once a year to remind myself why I don't like it'.


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