# Critics' Clangers



## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

FROM the clouded crystal ball of 1954 comes this estimate of the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff and his prospects:

''His music is well constructed and effective, but monotonous in texture, which consists in essence mainly of artificial and gushing tunes accompanied by a variety of figures derived from arpeggios.
''The enormous popular success some few of Rachmaninov's works had in his lifetime is not likely to last, and musicians never regarded it with much favor. The Third Pianoforte Concerto was on the whole liked by the public only because of its close resemblance to the Second, while the Fourth, which attempted something like a new departure, was a failure from the start. The only later work that has attracted large concert audiences was the Rhapsody (variations) on a Theme by Paganini for pianoforte and orchestra.''
So wrote the distinguished English critic Eric Blom in the fifth edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, expressing the prevailing musicological wisdom of the time: surely history would sweep aside this pop star of the concert hall.
A half-century later, it hardly needs saying that Blom was breathtakingly wrong. Rachmaninoff is everywhere. That maligned ''Rach 3'' even played a starring role in the Oscar-winning movie ''Shine,'' propelling the real-life protagonist of the story, the Australian pianist David Helfgott, on a world tour that was panned by critics but mobbed by the curious.

Can you think of other stances where critcs have dropped spectacular Clangers?


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

"Beethoven's Mass [in C] is unbearably ridiculous and detestable, and I am not convinced that it can ever be performed properly. I am angry and mortified." --Prince Nikolaus Esterházy II, who commissioned the work


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## LHB (Nov 1, 2015)

There's an entire book on this. http://www.amazon.com/Lexicon-Musical-Invective-Composers-Beethovens/dp/039332009X


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## Dawood (Oct 11, 2015)

This is a really interesting subject. I think there is a general feeling, real or not, that the really creative types, throughout the ages, have not been appreciated by their contemporaries - they were 'ahead of their time.'

'Too many notes, Mozart.'

“One can’t judge Wagner’s opera ‘Lohengrin’ after a first hearing, and I certainly don’t intend hearing it a second time.” -Gioacchino Rossini

“Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches – he has made music sick.” -Friedrich Nietzsche

I don't think Freddy ever forgave Dick for talking to his doctor 

'As early as 1600 Giovanni Maria Artusi, a well-known theorist, criticized Monteverdi for some harsh "modernisms."'

But we've all had someone criticize our modernisms at some point have we not?


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

The morals are: a) Music writers need to avoid generalizations; and b) There's little accounting for taste. (I was thinking of that this afternoon when I turned on the radio and briefly onto a Met production of Die Fledermaus -- which I loved when I attended a production of it in seventh grade, and haven't been able to sit through since.)


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Dawood said:


> This is a really interesting subject. I think there is a general feeling, real or not, that the really creative types, throughout the ages, have not been appreciated by their contemporaries - they were 'ahead of their time.'


That "general feeling" is largely a fabrication, kept alive by frustrated proponents of modern art and the popular romantic myth of the misunderstood genius. Of course there's some truth in it: innovations always take time to be widely understood. But we can't necessarily take these harshly critical quotations as representative of a general feeling, and the cleverer and more memorable the quote, the more likely it is to represent the author's attempt to appear clever at the expense of something not yet widely known - a safe, easy, and gratifying ego trip for a critic. Moreover, everything will be criticized by someone, and if critical remarks were preserved in writing or published, it can be too easy to dig them up and give them disproportionate weight.

A better indicator of contemporary appraisals of music is audience reaction and performance history: in any case where a work had a reasonable chance to be heard in competent performances, did people seem to enjoy it - and if they didn't at first hearing, how long did it take before they did? If we approach the matter this way, we might be surprised at how rapidly even highly innovative works became popular successes and acknowledged masterworks.


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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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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> That "general feeling" is largely a fabrication, kept alive by frustrated proponents of modern art and the popular romantic myth of the misunderstood genius. Of course there's some truth in it: innovations always take time to be widely understood. But we can't necessarily take these harshly critical quotations as representative of a general feeling, and the cleverer and more memorable the quote, the more likely it is to represent the author's attempt to appear clever at the expense of something not yet widely known - a safe, easy, and gratifying ego trip for a critic. Moreover, everything will be criticized by someone, and if critical remarks were preserved in writing or published, it can be too easy to dig them up and give them disproportionate weight.
> 
> A better indicator of contemporary appraisals of music is audience reaction and performance history: in any case where a work had a reasonable chance to be heard in competent performances, did people seem to enjoy it - and if they didn't at first hearing, how long did it take before they did? If we approach the matter this way, we might be surprised at how rapidly even highly innovative works became popular successes and acknowledged masterworks.


I got the impression from Berlioz's memoirs that pretty much every teacher in conservatories there was very conservative about music. The general atmosphere was that everything after Haydn and Mozart was decline, and everything before them not worth knowing about. Berlioz took one of his conservative teachers to a concert of Beethoven's 5th. What's weird was that the teacher was first enthusiastic about what he had heard, but later changed his mind and apparently went to his grave with believing that the symphony was outrageously avant-garde and not acceptable music.

Of course, in today's world a conservatively minded listener doesn't have to fight against the temptations of avant-garde music like the seductions of succubi, but it would also be wrong to claim that aesthetic conservatism is a phenomenon of the 20th century or that it has never been obviously absurd or in conflict with later historical judgement.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Berlioz was in France, or course. In Italy, the Eroica wasn't even played until 60 years after it's Vienna premier (Sgambati conducting). I found this an astonishing fact!


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

In Claude Samuel's biography of Prokofiev, he quotes an unnamed New York critic, who, having heard Prokofiev play his Piano Concerto No. 1, opined "If that is music, I really believe I prefer agriculture!"


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## Cosmos (Jun 28, 2013)

"Someday, some real friends of Mahler's will ... take a pruning knife and reduce his works to the length that they would have been if the composer had not stretched them out of shape; and then the great Mahler war will be over ... The Ninth Symphony would last about twenty minutes." - Deems Taylor on Mahler's 9th

yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

"I freely admit I have not been able to relish the last works of Beethoven." (Louis Spohr)


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## DavidA (Dec 14, 2012)

“Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” (attrib Mark Twain)

Mark Twain didn't actually make this remark. In his autobiography he quoted this as coming from the younger humorist Edger Wilson a.k.a Bill Nye. Over the years people became confused and attributed it to Twain himself.


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## Steatopygous (Jul 5, 2015)

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."


Of course Ruskin was famous for his generous spirit and his calm appraisals of works about which he was less than approbatory.


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## Steatopygous (Jul 5, 2015)

Anyone who knows Slonimsky's book will know most of the insults likely to be posted here. But I do like this quote from Whistler criticising the composer of the harmony of the spheres: 
James Whistler, asked whether he thought the stars particularly beautiful one night replied "Well, not bad, but there are decidedly too many of them, and they are not very well arranged. I would have done it differently."


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## Steatopygous (Jul 5, 2015)

Swans sing before they die – ‘twere no bad thing
Should certain persons die before they sing.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Epigram on a volunteer Singer


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## Steatopygous (Jul 5, 2015)

The Irish gave the bagpipes to the Scots as a joke, but the Scots haven't got the joke yet. ~Oliver Herford


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