# Spirit of Beckmesser



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

I posted this quotes on another thread but it occurred to me it might be fun to share examples of musical criticism that has backfired over the years. To start I'll repost these I found:

"It is probable that much, if not most, of Stravinsky's music will enjoy brief existence." - New York Sun, Jan. 16, 1937

"Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto, like the first pancake, is a flop." - Nicolai Soloviev, Novoye Vremya, St. Petersburg, Nov. 13, 1875

"Rigoletto is the weakest work of Verdi. It lacks melody." - Gazette Musicale de Paris, May 22, 1853

"Sure-fire rubbish." - New York Herald Tribune on Porgy and Bess, Oct. 11, 1935

Even better are these excerpts from the reviews of James William Davison, music editor of the London Times from 1846 to 1878:

"Perhaps a more overrated man never existed than this same Schubert."
"[Schumann is] the very opposite of good."
"We should rather be inclined to class [Berlioz] a daring lunatic than as a sound, healthy musician."
"Never was a writer of operas so destitute of real invention, so destitute in power or so wanting in the musician's skill [as Verdi]."
"The entire works of Chopin present a motley surface of ranting hyperbole and excruciating cacophony."
"[Wagner] is such queer stuff that criticism would be thrown away upon it."
"He who imagines that, at any time within the last half century Franz Liszt was a musical composer must entertain either very odd notions of art or must be, qua music, an absolute ignoramus."

But he also said : "[William Sterndale Bennett] lives with us in his works. The music he created conquered, in some sense, the power of death."

Anyone know any other examples?


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

"There are only three things wrong with 'Nixon in China,' " he said. "One, the libretto; two, the music; three, the direction. Outside of that, it's perfect." - Marvin Kitman

"[a] concatenation of meaninglessly ugly sounds and distorted rhythms" - Warren Storey Smith, on Copland's Piano Concerto

"Theatre 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." - Heinrich Reinhardt, on the premiere of Mahler's Sixth Symphony, which was such a disaster that it cost him his position at the Vienna Philharmonic


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

Another Mahler one, this from Deems Taylor on a 1923 performance by Mengelberg of the 7th Symphony:

"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."

Or this about the 9th, 9 years later:

"Prune it down until nothing is left save Mahler's musical ideas and the amount of development that they are worth, and the Ninth Symphony would last about twenty minutes."


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

The Rite of Spring is "the expression of one who is fundamentally a barbarian and a primitive, tinctured with, and educated in, the utmost sophistications and satieties of a worn-out civilization."

-- Olin Downes, who may (arguably) be speaking the truth, though for me this calls forth the image of Conan the Barbarian in a tuxedo.


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## GGluek (Dec 11, 2011)

Nicholas Slonimsky wrote the definitive compilation: "A Lexicon of Musical Invective," still available at a bookstore near you.


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

On Arnold Schoenberg's violin concerto

"A regular Friday audience, 90 percent feminine and 100 percent well-bred, sat stoically yesterday through thirty minutes of the most cacophonous world premiere ever heard here -- the first performance anywhere of a new Violin Concerto by Arnold Schoenberg....Yesterday's piece combines the best sound effects of a hen yard at feeding time, a brisk morning in Chinatown and practice hour at a busy music conservatory. The effect on the vast majority of hearers is that of a lecture on the fourth dimension delivered in Chinese." 

(1940 review in the Philadelphia Record, p. 163)


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

GGluek said:


> Nicholas Slonimsky wrote the definitive compilation: "A Lexicon of Musical Invective," still available at a bookstore near you.


Slonimsky realized that musical invective was an art worthy of standing on its own. From his book re 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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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

GGluek said:


> Nicholas Slonimsky wrote the definitive compilation: "A Lexicon of Musical Invective," still available at a bookstore near you.


Another from his collection: Alban Berg's Wozzeck

"As I left the State Opera last night I had a sensation not of coming out of a public institution, but out of an insane asylum....

"I regard Alban Berg as a musical swindler and a musician dangerous to the community. One should go even further. Unprecedented events demand new methods. We must seriously pose the question as to what extent musical profession can be criminal. We deal here, in the realm of music, with a capital offense."

(1925 review of Wozzeck, p. 54)


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## superhorn (Mar 23, 2010)

Of all the affected , sapless, soulless, beginningless , endless , topless , bottomless ,
topsiturviest , scrannel-pipiest , tongs and boniest doggerel of sounds I have 
ever endured the deadliest of, that eternity of nothing was the deadliest ."

John Ruskin on Wagner's Die Meistersinger , from a letter to a friend .


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