# Composers you used to dislike, but now like



## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

There's quite a lot of talk about people tiring of composers whose work has been overplayed, or was interesting when a person was just discovering classical music, but what about the ones you initially rejected, but now enjoy?

For me: *Liszt*. I couldn't abide his work at one time, but I've grown to like it more and more. It's odd because I'm not the greatest fan of romantic period music. There's also the fact that his music has some passing resemblances to Wagner's music (or vice-versa I suppose) and that might contradict my position toward Wagner.

Another is *Bartok* who, in my youth, represented mere noise. The same with regard to *Schoenberg*. I listen to both of these composers quite regularly now.


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## Bettina (Sep 29, 2016)

It took me quite a while to get into 20th-century music, even the milder stuff like Debussy and Ravel. I grew up listening to a lot of common-practice classical (mostly 18th and 19th centuries) and it was hard for me to expand my horizons beyond my beloved tonic-dominant cadences! In college, I gradually started pushing myself outside my comfort zone...I took some classes on 20th-century music history and theory, and that helped me to connect with musical styles that had previously been alien to me. Nowadays, I love many 20th-century works, though I'm still struggling with the atonal and avant-garde composers!


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## Jacred (Jan 14, 2017)

Händel. I don't know, I sort of glossed over him when I was younger. My parents had recordings of some of his works, like the Water Music suite or the Music for the Royal Fireworks.... my piano teacher made me read short bios about him.... other than that, though, he was just another musical figure to me.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

My path was very similar to Bettina's. I seemed to love almost all pre-1900 composers but stumbled somewhat with Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Debussy, and Ravel. It didn't take long to come to love those composers, and looking back, it's hard for me to really remember what it was like to not enjoy, say, much of Prokofiev or Ravel. 

There were a large number of post 1900 composers whose works I didn't enjoy, but after years of patient, and maybe proper, listening I gradually began to enjoy quite a few such composers. Rather than list dozens of composers I've come to like, I'll give a few specific examples.

I had listened on and off to Schnittke without much success. My first introduction was his Violin Concerto #4. Those who are familiar with that work will know that the violin enters with an amazingly "awful" sound. I couldn't really get past how repulsive that sounded and never ventured further. I occasionally listened to other works but had little success. Somewhat recently the TC Top Post-1950 thread started, and many Schnittke works were nominated. As I listened, I was surprised that suddenly I seemed to like all of them. Now Schnittke is a favorite of mine. 

I had a similar experience with Boulez. First, second, third, etc. listenings went nowhere. The music was bizarre. It made no sense and gave no pleasure. At some point I "learned" to listen for different aspects of the music and soon found much of his music was enjoyable. It's hard to hear his works the way I did before since they seem so interesting and fun.


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## Blancrocher (Jul 6, 2013)

Vivaldi. Loved him as a kid, decided later that he was "superficial," and now can't get enough of him. A big part of the blame should probably go to Giuliano Carmignola and Andrea Marcon.


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## Captainnumber36 (Jan 19, 2017)

I have a feeling the more accustomed I become to Liszt, the more I will grow to like him and will fit into this category for me.


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## brianvds (May 1, 2013)

Just about all of them. Funny thing is, I grew up with classical music. But we mostly listened to Beethoven. Just about all the rest were an acquired taste. I distinctly remembered a time when I thought Rachmaninoff and Schubert are completely tuneless (!!).

In my teens I made an effort to discover and appreciate a wider range of classical music. It now seems strange to me that there was a time when it took great effort. But I suppose that is one of the things with classical music: it demands some input by the listener, and mostly doesn't come naturally. That would explain why it isn't the most popular of styles.


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## Captainnumber36 (Jan 19, 2017)

brianvds said:


> Just about all of them. Funny thing is, I grew up with classical music. But we mostly listened to Beethoven. Just about all the rest were an acquired taste. I distinctly remembered a time when I thought Rachmaninoff and Schubert are completely tuneless (!!).
> 
> In my teens I made an effort to discover and appreciate a wider range of classical music. It now seems strange to me that there was a time when it took great effort. But I suppose that is one of the things with classical music: it demands some input by the listener, and mostly doesn't come naturally. That would explain why it isn't the most popular of styles.


I'm not sure about the "requires input" part. My mother for instance does not spend countless hours listening to Classical, she just finds it very pleasant to her, and if she doesn't like it, she says it. Her favorite piece is the Blue Danube, and she is very fond of Mozart, and the more pleasant sounding classical. I don't think she would appreciate Atonal or works like the Rite of Spring. Lots of dissonance isn't pleasant, and she probably wouldn't like it.

I think the main reason people are turned off from Classical is because of the snobbery associated with it.

I used to believe that some music requires a "getting it" phase. I don't put it quite like that, I think music can grow on you, but you should naturally want to keep coming back to it, not force yourself to listen to something you really didn't like at all on the first listen, unless you feel a desire to give it another chance because you were in a bad mood at the time, or some other extraneous factor.

I don't believe there is such thing as intelligent music and non-intelligent music, but I do believe Classical appeals to a more sophisticated and intellectual crowd because it is certainly more refined and sophisticated.


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## mathisdermaler (Mar 29, 2017)

Beethoven. I liked him when I first started listening to CM but then for a while, when all I knew were the big symphonies, I thought his music was overwrought and too conservative. Then I found the chamber music... :angel: I fell in love with the symphonies again also.


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

As a kid, I couldn't stand Bach. I wasn't ready for him.

Now, he's my favorite composer!


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## Captainnumber36 (Jan 19, 2017)

hpowders said:


> As a kid, I couldn't stand Bach. I wasn't ready for him.
> 
> Now, he's my favorite composer!


Same, I wrote off the entire Baroque era as being too unemotional. Not saying Bach is now my favorite, I don't really have a favorite.


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## bioluminescentsquid (Jul 22, 2016)

MOZART.

I used to not believe. I used to jeer with contempt and disbelief when I'd see him top those lists with click-baity titles on Classic FM. I thought that he died too late rather than too early, and that the music he churned out was but a pile of repetitive alberti-basses and superficial, singy-songy melodies, bovine in intellect, pulled straight out of his rear end. I refused to listen to anything he wrote but the Requiem. I would have none of that galant trash!

Thankfully, that changed. :lol:

Two recordings eased my transition: one featuring Andreas Staier/Christine Schornsheim playing on a monstrous harpsichord-piano hybrid, the vis-a-vis, built by J.A. Stein in 1777. I guess it was the soundscape of fortepiani and harpsichords, familiar to a HIP fanatic like me, that appealed to me, and the playing was too good to miss -- it was brilliant, riveting, and in some ways, exotic. It helped me appreciate the music and realize that Mozart wasn't all Alberti basses after all, and actually composed some very complex, even radical pieces, like the fugue to K. 394.
Sample: Deusche Tanze from the recording 




Then, I found Wim Winters, whose Bach recordings I already liked quite a lot, playing Mozart on the Clavichord. Although I still have my reservations about the recordings, I guess the relaxed way he plays makes Mozart sound more like a continuation or a logical result, rather than an antithesis, of the Baroque and Galant, while also looking forward to the Romantic.
KV 281:


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## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

Still not that big a fan of Bartok and still don't like / get the even more "modern "composers.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

In my teens, when I was gorging on Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and Wagner, Brahms struck me as a rather drab imitation of a Romantic composer, constantly reining himself in with his structural severity and sober orchestral dress. My change of heart was gradual, but eventually he became one of my few indispensable favorites. His orchestral works have lost some their charm for me now (except when Furtwangler reveals in him troubled depths and a desperate intensity we didn't suspect), but his chamber music is for me a glory of the repertoire.

As for "modern" music (you know, dissonant stuff), it took a little time to get used to some of it, but my basic responses haven't changed much. The main difference is that now I don't have that juvenile compulsion to judge as "bad" what I don't enjoy.


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## bioluminescentsquid (Jul 22, 2016)

Captainnumber36 said:


> Same, I wrote off the entire Baroque era as being too unemotional. Not saying Bach is now my favorite, I don't really have a favorite.


That was baby me. I was free to roam across my parents' collection of classical music played by large philharmonic orchestras, and liked all the flashy, boomy, romantic stuff most. I swear that my favorite composer then was Paganini or some bloke like that! 
It was Il Giardino Armonico's Vivaldi Concerto da camera that made me fall in love with Baroque, and all this HIP nonsense! (Although, funnily, I don't like Vivaldi as much anymore) But it was a while before I could appreciate more sober stuff, like Gustav Leonhardt.

Might as well post the entire album. I remember the one I first owned was vol. 2, with La Folia on it


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## Casebearer (Jan 19, 2016)

Good and positive topic for a thread!

I've enjoyed Bartók myself from the first note I heard when I was 15 or so. I had many reservations on Liszt for a long time but recently I've discovered his later piano works and I love them immensely. Earlier the same thing happened with Beethoven who's late string quartets I also enjoy.


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## StDior (May 28, 2015)

I did not like their music earlier but I like them now: Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Haydn, Schumann, Mahler, Stockhausen, Boulez, Lachenmann.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

I used to think Mozart was just tediously pretty.

Handel was only on my radar as the one who wrote the inexplicably boring Water Music and Fireworks Music; Bach's non-keyboard music felt into that category too. Fortunately I discovered HIPP and my perspective changed.

On a less singificant scale perhaps, I was listening to several pieces by Golijov last night and found that he was suddenly a long way from "meh" for me.


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

Appreciating Schoenberg and beyond took some time for me way back in the late 80s when I started exploring classical music. Now I like a lot of 20th and 21st century works.


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

Max Reger - I used to diss him as ultra-stodgy ersatz Brahms until the dam broke and I gradually realised what he was striving for.


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## Kjetil Heggelund (Jan 4, 2016)

My dad took me to a concert of Brahms Deutsche Requiem when I was 11 or something. It might have been a bad performance (in Kenya), but it took maybe 15 years before I listened to him again. A funny note: I took my wife and her dad to a performance of the same piece, and they almost burst out laughing at the same spot, where the timpani plays..."It wasn't me" is what they said the player looked like.


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## Brahmsian Colors (Sep 16, 2016)

Haydn and Mozart. In fact, Haydn has become a very special favorite for me.


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## Lenny (Jul 19, 2016)

There was a time I seriously disliked late 19th century pompously heroic german music, but I can hardly remember that any more. Now it's more like my cup of tea


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## Blancrocher (Jul 6, 2013)

Puccini--at first I thought his music was filled with gibberish, but eventually I realized it was just Italian.


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## isorhythm (Jan 2, 2015)

Haydn. I used to think he was basically just a worse version of Mozart.


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## wkasimer (Jun 5, 2017)

Mozart, Bach, and Brahms. 

For Mozart and Bach, I thought that most of their music was boring. As it turned out, I was just listening to the wrong recordings. But I still prefer Haydn over Mozart.

For Brahms, when I was younger, I thought that it all sounded a little too "manufactured" and lacked real inspiration - but as I reached middle age, I think that I developed a little more perspective and patience, and a little more understanding of musical forms and structure. And singing in a performance of the German Requiem helped.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

elgars ghost said:


> Max Reger - I used to diss him as ultra-stodgy ersatz Brahms until the dam broke and I gradually realised what he was striving for.


I still haven't figured that out. What _was_ he striving for? I find him interesting, but sometimes he seems bent on cramming the maximum number of modulations into the smallest possible space just to prove he can.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

wkasimer said:


> Mozart, Bach, and Brahms.
> 
> For Mozart and Bach, I thought that most of their music was boring. As it turned out, I was just listening to the wrong recordings. But I still prefer Haydn over Mozart.
> 
> For Brahms, when I was younger, I thought that it all sounded a little too "manufactured" and lacked real inspiration - but as I reached middle age, I think that I developed a little more perspective and patience, and a little more understanding of musical forms and structure. And singing in a performance of the German Requiem helped.


Heh heh. My experiences with Mozart and Brahms were similar (and I also still prefer Haydn to Mozart). The _Requiem_ was my gateway to Brahms. I sang "How lovely is they dwelling place" with the NJ All-State Chorus and loved it, and later performed the whole work with the Braintree, MA Choral Society while listening to the splendid old Klemperer recording. I rather suddenly found myself hearing his other works differently.


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## norman bates (Aug 18, 2010)

Delius and Webern.


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

Woodduck said:


> I still haven't figured that out. What _was_ he striving for? I find him interesting, but sometimes he seems bent on cramming the maximum number of modulations into the smallest possible space just to prove he can.


In a way that was pretty much it - in a broader sense I was of the opinion that he was taking accepted forms to their absolute limit but maybe running the risking tying himself in knots while doing it, and I found myself sympathetic with what must have been for him an increasingly anachronistic blind alley the more he pursued it. Reger's death in 1916 at the age of 43 presents a great 'what if?' for me - what might he have done had he survived into the 1920s? Ostrich-like entrenchment like a man born before his time or responding favourably to new certain post-WWI aesthetics (i.e. Hindemith's take on neoclassicism) while he was still young enough to adapt?


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## Sloe (May 9, 2014)

I once wrote that I did not like Ravel but I changed my mind shortly afterwards.


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

I guess the biggest turn around for me was Schoenberg. I still don't really really "get" all of it but I kept listening to him in headphones as background music at work. Suddenly it dawned on me one day I was enjoying it (his Op. 29 suite for winds) feeling that the instruments were having a conversation and I was picking out little phrases that were repeating. It started making a lot more -- sense? A lot more something anyway.

I think the biggest problem aside from it being a different musical language, and on the surface a really unpleasant ugly one, is that well meaning folks were trying to ease me into Schoenberg by way of his "Verklärte Nacht," which is supposed to be more accessible. I just wasn't getting that work. I still don't. Maybe someone can nudge me in the right direction to understand what I'm supposed to appreciate in this piece. But for whatever reason I finally started enjoying the above mentioned suite for chamber winds, and both his violin and piano concertos, the amazing string quartets and several other difficult pieces. They are just beyond my grasp, and maybe that makes them all the more intriguing for me.


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## arpeggio (Oct 4, 2012)

I started to try to answer this question and gave up after I had a list of a few dozen composers.

Generally speaking atonal music (Schoenberg, Webern, Carter, etc.)

There are still a few modern composers I do not get like Xenakis, Boulez and Stockhausen.

As a result of the anti-Cage venom I have discovered a few Cage works I enjoy.


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## Clairvoyance Enough (Jul 25, 2014)

The biggest turnarounds for me were probably Xenakis and select pieces by Stockhausen, as well as some other composers of electronic/electroacoustic music. 

I think technology allows us to experience a hyper-concentrated version of the impulse that slowly drove new composers to different styles over the eras. It took learning to love a fair amount of the major composers, almost in chronological order, up to someone like Xenakis for me to have even an inkling of understanding as to how someone could enjoy him.

By the time I gave him a second chance it was out of necessity (and I found him very accessible, actually); I had blown out my receptors for almost everything from Palestrina to the modern era and I just wanted to feel moved in some way by music again. 

I'm always curious about the listening habits of people who seem content to remain within the same period for years and years at a time. Part of me feels this is only possible if you listen to music more sparingly, which is to say not 2+ hours a day like I was doing for awhile. 

As for Stockhausen, I honestly think a big part of my fascination with electronic stuff is just my brain's craving for the sound of new instruments - something that drove me back to popular and progressive contemporary stuff as well. There are many songs and bands I'm certain I'd like much less if they performed their music on classical instruments, not just for the obvious reason that music sounds better played on what it was written for (I'm not picky about that stuff anyway), but because I think an inherent attraction to the timbre of a piece plays a bigger part in my taste than I realized before. 

My aesthetic appreciation for some of the bands I like now doesn't approach that I have for Wagner, and yet my visceral reaction to them is usually greater and easier to achieve for the affinity I have with the sound of, say, the electric guitar. 

My intention has been to listen out this affinity until it shifts back toward classical instruments; after all, I don't see any reason it should exist for one instrument and not another except by oversaturation, and furthermore, am I really enjoying classical music to the fullest extent if the inherent beauty of the instruments is not there, lost by overlistening, to assist the beauty of the compositions? 

I've only succeeded for one week at a time, though. I failed just recently starting a new thread asking for more classical music...


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## arpeggio (Oct 4, 2012)

Clairvoyance Enough said:


> The biggest turnarounds for me were probably Xenakis and select pieces by Stockhausen, as well as some other composers of electronic/electroacoustic music.


This is related to a point that many of us have tried to make. If one keeps an open mind one day they may be listening to some tuneless noise and eureka, it starts to make sense. Some day I may even get Xenakis of Stockhausen.


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## stejo (Dec 8, 2016)

Brahms was boring for me until I recently heard his Violin Sonatas, now I listen to him more and more.


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## Heliogabo (Dec 29, 2014)

Mozart above all.
When I started to listen to classical my first loves were Bach, Chopin, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Brahms. I never felt atracted to Mozart's music, which I used to find "too happy".
Then (I don't know how) I began to enjoy his music. He's joyous, funny, energetic, and doesn't lack drama and melancholy.
Maybe it's a matter of age.


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## brianvds (May 1, 2013)

Weston said:


> I think the biggest problem aside from it being a different musical language, and on the surface a really unpleasant ugly one, is that well meaning folks were trying to ease me into Schoenberg by way of his "Verklärte Nacht," which is supposed to be more accessible. I just wasn't getting that work. I still don't.


Same here: it grates on me much worse than any of his later works.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

brianvds said:


> Same here: it grates on me much worse than any of his later works.


As a momentary aside, I think _Verklaerte Nacht_ is really a movie score without a movie. In its vocabulary it's a footnote to Wagner, full of dramatic rhetoric and sequential buildups but, though much shorter than _Tristan und Isolde,_ less concise. Contrary to the theme of this thread, I used to like it more than I do now, having come to find its programmatic gestures melodramatic and its sequential passages (which Schoenberg learned to avoid) tiresome. It has lovely moments, though.


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## Melvin (Mar 25, 2011)

Shostakovich. I used to honestly think most of his music was just very stupid and crappy! But he was one of the first 20th century composers I'd ever attempted at the time.

And when I was younger I usually used to skip the middle movements, but now I like them more!


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## Xaltotun (Sep 3, 2010)

Oh, most of them I think! In particular I remember thinking that Sibelius sounded monochromatic, naturalistic and neutral, sort of cosmic space-music, devoid of human passions. Funny thing is, some bits of that still sound true to me, but for long these things have made his music all the more enjoyable for me. 

Reminds me of another recent thread where someone who didn't like Bruckner gave a wonderful, detailed expression of how his music sounds like Egyptian slaves bringing the stones from the ships to the pyramids... I thought it was a completely perfect expression of how his music sounds to me, and he's my favourite composer!


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## Animal the Drummer (Nov 14, 2015)

Brahms has been mentioned once or twice here and he kinda qualifies for a post from me. I never disliked all his stuff - on the contrary, though primarily a Mozart nut I've loved the Brahms Violin Concerto longer than just about any other piece in the classical repertoire, and the 3rd Symphony's also a long time enthusiasm of mine - but there were individual examples of his work (the 1st Piano Concerto for example, or the 2nd Symphony) which I found pretty heavy going at first. Persistence paid off in a big way and he's now one of my absolute favourites.


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## helenora (Sep 13, 2015)

Bruckner. I didn't understand him before but now I like his music very much. I think it's more or less typical story when it goes about his music.


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## JAS (Mar 6, 2013)

Offhand, I cannot think of a single composer that fits this category for me. There are composers I don't yet know, or know of only by reputation, or only know by a few works, and composers of whom I have grown more fond as I hear more music or better performances of their music. There are certainly individual works that did not necessarily "sing" to me upon first hearing, but, again often due to encountering a better performance, or perhaps listening under better circumstances or in a more congenial mood, have reached me in unexpected ways. I was for a very long time wary of approaching the music of Mahler, mostly because his symphonies are so big and demand a considerable investment of time. (Most recordings of merit were also very expensive at a time when I had to watch my pennies with greater care.) In any case, overall I prefer to think of compositions individually, although if there are a notable number of compositions that I like by a given composer, it is certainly reasonable to say that I like the composer (as a general statement).


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## Tchaikov6 (Mar 30, 2016)

Melvin said:


> Shostakovich. I used to honestly think most of his music was just very stupid and crappy! But he was one of the first 20th century composers I'd ever attempted at the time.
> 
> And when I was younger I usually used to skip the middle movements, but now I like them more!


Yep, Shostakovich for me as well.

Also, Mahler, who happened to eventually get me into Shostakovich.

And Berg, particularly his violin concerto, which I now love, I used to hate.


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

I use to dislike Prokofiev and Shostakovich, no lie. I heard things by them I wasn't sure I wanted to hear more of. But then I found my avenues, and worked my way in from there. Now they're among my favorite composers of all time, go figure!


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## DeepR (Apr 13, 2012)

Bach, slowly but surely.


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## bioluminescentsquid (Jul 22, 2016)

Lord help me, I caught myself liking D. Scarlatti while listening to Kenneth Weiss play them! I've in the past avoided his works just because I needed none of that superficiality and indiscriminate joie de vivre. But there's a sense of French sensibility to Weiss' recording that I'm enjoying.

What shall follow? I will resist on all accounts. Widerstehe doch der sünde! :lol:


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

bioluminescentsquid said:


> Lord help me, I caught myself liking D. Scarlatti while listening to Kenneth Weiss play them!


A whole CD or just 15 minutes?


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## bioluminescentsquid (Jul 22, 2016)

Mandryka said:


> A whole CD or just 15 minutes?


15 minutes. The novelty fell out after that.


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

You can get about 4 Scarlatti sonatas into 15 minutes. That's enough to bait the trap.


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## Tallisman (May 7, 2017)

Took me a while to appreciate Beethoven. I found (and in a way still am finding) his string quartets a struggle, though I constantly come back to them now and am beginning to see their endless complexity and genius. I also struggled with his symphonies, believe it or not, which to me didn't seem to reach the soaring heights people say they do. I'm reformed now, of course.

But I had to knock him off his high pedestal to take a good look at him, face to face.


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## keymasher (Nov 10, 2016)

I don't think I'd say I actively disliked this composer, but it did take some time for me to cultivate a passion for JS Bach. Listening to a number of different performers play his works helped immensely, and carefully listening to the Goldberg Variations. While so seemingly simple, I think there are few more magical moments in music than the opening aria to Goldberg.


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