# Best insults



## Jeremy Marchant

Have we had a thread on insults in music? I couldn't find one.
I suggest that we stick to remarks that have more than a grain of truth in them and we refrain from quoting mere profanity and defamation.

I like Ernest Newman's remark that, if you wanted to locate Shostakovich's seventh symphony on the musical map, it would lie 'on the seventieth degree of longitude and the last degree of platitude'.

And my father, recounting an early performance of Vaughan Williams' third symphony he had sat through, said he spent the first half of it waiting for it to start and the second half waiting for it to end.


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## Meaghan

I had a music history professor who would regularly read to the class from this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Lexicon-Musical-Invective-Composers-Beethovens/dp/039332009X
Some of it is pretty funny.


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## Polednice

Malcolm Tucker: If some #### can **** something up, then that #### will pick the worst possible time to ****ing **** it up because that ####'s a ####.

**** = obvious; #### = obscene noun of your choice.


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## clavichorder

The conductor Sir Thomas Beecham was full of snarky things to say about musicians and composers and even instruments. He might be a little too snarky for this thread sometimes, but there's something perceptive about him.

"Sir Thomas Beecham was once asked if he had played any Stockhausen. "No," he replied, "but I have trodden in some."

"In the first movement alone, I took note of six pregnancies and at least four miscarriages."
--Sir Thomas Beecham on Bruckner's Seventh Symphony


"Madam, you have between your legs an instrument capable of giving pleasure to thousands and all you can do is scratch it."
--Sir Thomas Beecham to a lady cellist.

A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it. 

The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes. 


“The sound of a harpsichord – two skeletons copulating on a tin roof in a thunderstorm. ”


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## Couchie

I posted a list a while back in the 'problematic masterpieces' thread:

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

"Take the Spanish airs and mine out of the score, and there remains nothing to Bizet's credit but the sauce that masks the fish." - Charles Gounod on Bizet's "Carmen"

"A most inferior work, the summit of banality." Stravinsky on on Bizet's "Carmen"

*"Wagner has wonderful moments, and dreadful quarters of an hour." - Gioachino Rossini*

"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

"Rossini's melodic cynicism, his contempt for dramatic expression and good 
sense, his endless repetition of a single form of cadence, his eternal puerile 
crescendo and brutal bass drum, exasperated me" - Berlioz on Rossini

"Though I had some instruction from Haydn, I never learned anything from him." - Ludwig van Beethoven

*"I have played over the music of that scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless *******!" - Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky*

"The extravagances of [Beethoven's] genius have reached the non plus ultra, and Beethoven must be quite ripe for the madhouse." - Weber

"Pretty monotonous and monotonously pretty." - Stravinsky on Boulez

*"I say, where do you buy your music paper? First rate!" - Brahms when asked by Bruch for his opinion on his 1st Violin Concerto*

*"It is a mistake to conclude each act with people going to sleep." - Stravinsky on Britten's Midsummer Night's Dream

"I liked the opera very much. Everything but the music." - Britten on Stravinsky's Rake's Progress*

"Bruckner? That is a swindle which will be forgotten a year or two after my death. Take it as you will, Bruckner owes his fame solely to me, and but for me nobody would have cared a brass farthing for him. Do you really believe that anyone in this immature crowd has the least notion what these symphonic boa-constrictors are about?. . . And Bruckner's works immortal, and 'symphonies'? It is ludicrous!" - Brahms on Bruckner

"My fingers itch to do battle, to begin to write anti-Liszt" - Brahms

*"He'd be better off shoveling snow." - Richard Strauss on Arnold Schoenberg*

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

"A book of mazurkas by Chopin and a few new pieces of his are so mannered that they are hard to stand." - Mendelssohn

"Everyone who either hears them or plays them must feel that as com- 
positions they are worthless. They contain no remarkable or striking pas- 
sages except those in sixths and octaves. And I implore my sister not to 
practise these passages too much, so that she may not spoil her quiet, 
even touch and that her hand may not lose its natural lightness, flexibility 
and smooth rapidity. . . . What he really does well are his passages in thirds; 
but he sweated over them day and night in London. Apart from this, he 
can do nothing, absolutely nothing, for he has not the slightest expression 
or taste, still less, feeling." - Mozart on Clementi's Sonatas

"La Mer is poorly orchestrated. If I had the time, I would re-orchestrate La Mer." Ravel on Debussy

"The Rhapsody [in Blue] is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together--with a thin paste of flour and water. " - Bernstein on Gershwin

*"Bonbons stuffed with snow." - Debussy on Grieg's compositions*

"Why do you compose like that? You don't need to--you have talent." Richard Strauss on Hindemith

*"I'm rather indifferent to Prokofiev's music now and listen to his compo- 
sitions without any particular pleasure." - Shostakovich on Prokofiev

"Prokofiev was the contrary of a musical thinker. He was, in fact, startlingly 
naive in matters of musical construction." - Stravinsky on Prokofiev

"He is a talented but somehow "unprincipled" composer and . . . bereft of 
melodic invention." - Prokofiev on Shostakovich

"The style of Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtzensk is extremely dis- 
turbing, and the score is a work of lamentable provincialism in which the 
music simply serves as illustration. . . . The music plays a miserable role 
of illustration, and in an embarrassingly miserable style. Formless, mo- 
notonous music. . . . This is not the work of a musician but the product of 
a total indifference to music in the country of the Soviets." - Stravinsky on Shostakovich*

"This is disgusting, Sir. No Sir, it is not permissible to write such nonsense until one is sixty." -Rimsky-Korskakov to young Stravinsky

*"[Derisive laughter]" - Mahler throughout watching Puccini's "La Boheme"*

"Construction was not his strong side. And as far as orchestration is concerned there is a certain degree of helplessness." - Sibelius on Schumann

"As if I'd been beaten unmercifully with sticks." - Taneyev's opinion after listening to Scriabin

"Every phrase, line, and chord, and beat went over and over the way you'd exactly expect it would--trite, tiresome awnings of platitudes, all a nice mixture of Grieg, Wagner and Tchaikovsky" - Ives on Sibelius

"I found [the Second Symphony] vulgar, self-indulgent, and provincial beyond all description. I realize that there are sincere Sibelius-lovers in the world, though I must say I've never met one among educated professional musicians." - Virgil Thomson on Sibelius

*"Such an astounding lack of talent has never before been united to such pretentiousness." - Tchaikovsky on R. Strauss*

"I don't know myself what to make of Strauss. How is one to explain his unequalness and jumbling together of good and bad?" - Mahler on R. Strauss

"Verdi is a man of great talent who lacks the essential quality that makes great masters" - Bizet on Verdi

*"The most repugnant thing I have ever seen or heard in all my life" - Clara Schumann on Wagner's Tristan und Isolde*


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## clavichorder

@ the Taneyev quote. 

Interestingly enough, Taneyev praised Scriabin later in life and attended his funeral(from which he subsequently caught a cold and died)


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## graaf

"There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem". 
George Bernard Shaw


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## Meaghan

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

"Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for forty-five minutes." - Aaron Copland


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## jalex

Another Ernest Newman, this time on Stravinsky: 'His music used to be original. Now it's aboriginal'.

And Stravinsky himself on music in general: 'Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end'. :lol:


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## Chris

'All you need to write _Turangalila_ is enough manuscript paper' - Stravinsky I think...I'm not sure


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## graaf

jalex said:


> And Stravinsky himself on music in general: 'Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end'. :lol:


How did I forget that one - one of my favourites! Now that I think of it, it never crossed my mind that someone would take offence with it - when I saw that quote it was just funny and true!


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## Fsharpmajor

Some classical music limericks:

There once was a cycle, _The Ring_
With music, and plenty to sing.
There's not a note wrong,
But it was so long
That nobody's heard the whole thing.

There was a composer named Liszt
Who loved to carouse and get pissed.
There's a wine bar in Paris
With an outdoor beer terrace
Where his presence will greatly be missed.

Beethoven, the great Ludwig van
Was one very handicapped man,
'Cause if you're a chef
You don't mind if you're deaf,
But composers should hear, if they can.


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## Vaneyes

I'm not sure that any insult is better than another.


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## StlukesguildOhio

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

I'm not certain this was intended as an insult to Wagner. Baudelaire deeply loved the music of Wagner... to the point that his essay _Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris_ in which he spoke of the composer as a fellow translator of the soul, was Baudelaire's only attempt at music criticism. He was far more prolific in his criticism of art and literature. Other comments from this essay include: The "music engulfs (possesses) me like the sea" and "I had a feeling of pride and joy in understanding, in being possessed, in being overwhelmed, a truly sensual pleasure like that of rising in the air".Baudelaire's writings contributed to the elevation of Wagner and to the cult of Wagnerism that swept Europe in the following decades.


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## Meaghan

StlukesguildOhio said:


> "I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window, trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws." - Charles Baudelaire
> 
> I'm not certain this was intended as an insult to Wagner. Baudelaire deeply loved the music of Wagner... to the point that his essay _Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris_ in which he spoke of the composer as a fellow translator of the soul, was Baudelaire's only attempt at music criticism. He was far more prolific in his criticism of art and literature. Other comments from this essay include: The "music engulfs (possesses) me like the sea" and "I had a feeling of pride and joy in understanding, in being possessed, in being overwhelmed, a truly sensual pleasure like that of rising in the air".Baudelaire's writings contributed to the elevation of Wagner and to the cult of Wagnerism that swept Europe in the following decades.


Interesting! I didn't know any of this; I just saw that quote without context and thought it was funny. Now I'm trying to figure out how it could be anything other than an insult... Maybe Baudelaire really, _really_ liked the sound of yowling, window-scratching cats? Or maybe the quote is misattributed?


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## StlukesguildOhio

Baudelaire was certainly enamored of cats. He was also enamored of all the ugly, dark sides of urban living. His masterwork was the _Flowers of Evil_, after all which included poems of murder, vampires, a poem comparing his love to the rotting, bloated, dead carcass along the roadside. The goal of much of his art lay is uncovering the "beauty" in that which others might see as banal... or even ugly or horrific. He quite certainly might have wanted you to think that he found the sound of a screeching cat to be music to his ears.


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## Aksel

From another thread. Translation (by yours truly) of a review of Eugen d'Albert's Tiefland, written by Arne Nordheim:



> The central motif is familiar. A poor woman is torn between two men, the first one fair, naïve and kind - the other dark and cunning. The fair one is a tenor and poor, but with a heart of gold. The dark one is a baritone estate owner with black, evil boots. […] The music […] reminds the listener of something or other at any given time. A little Verdi, then Bizet, but in no way forgetting Weber, Mascagni and Leoncavallo along the way. Lacking taste and individuality, Eugen d'Albert's music looks backwards to Wagner, but at the same time, it looks forward to what will be Franz Léhar. This meeting with Tiefland gives the listener a strange archeological pleasure. It is the pleasure of having found the perfect missing link between Parsifal and the Merry Widow.


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## GraemeG

Yeah, Meghan, the Slonimsky book is quite a treasure trove.
I particularly enjoyed this, quoted from J Runciman, in the Saturday Review, London 1896:
"It is one's duty to hate with all possible fervour the empty and ugly in art; and I hate Saint-Saens the composer with a hate that is perfect.

Somewhere, I read a quote that said to the effect of "Saint-Saens was the greatest composer who wasn't a genius"; it's an interesting mixed insult/observation.
He was professional, that you've got to say...
cheers,
GG


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## norman bates

_If a man tells me he likes Mozart, I know in advance that he is a bad musician_

Delius


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## clavichorder

Meaghan said:


> I had a music history professor who would regularly read to the class from this book:
> http://www.amazon.com/Lexicon-Musical-Invective-Composers-Beethovens/dp/039332009X
> Some of it is pretty funny.


I just happened upon a book very similar to this one. I'm really enjoying it, I'll have to post some quotes from it.


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## waldvogel

Max Reger, on reading a critique of his music in the newspaper.

"I am sitting in the smallest room in my house. Your review is in front of me. It will soon be behind me."


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## GoneBaroque

From the great pianist and raconteur Oscar Levant "If Leonard Bernstein had not been born, He would have created himself".


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## myaskovsky2002

indeed, Beaudelaire loved Wagner's music...Many things are said out of any context and sound insulting..Of course in order to mention funny things, it is ok though

Martin, smiling


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## clavichorder

I read a quote from someone from the 19th century, an English reviewer who said "Why can't Tchaikovsky write melodies like the Rubinstein fellow".

That to me is very funny. No dirt on Rubinstein, just saying, Tchaikovsky is the greatest melodist in history probably. But it is worth examining that Tchaikovsky's tunes were less conventional and perhaps less hummable.


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## Aramis

Stendhal on Donizetti: 

"Donizetti is tall, handsome, cold man, totally devoided of any talent". 

Is this silly quote the reason for which I can't move on with reading his stuff?


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## joen_cph

Brahms 4th Symphony, the opening: "a most severe case of seasickness" (Shaw)


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