Musical insults, you have to take them with a pinch of salt, or you would never carry on! (Perhaps that is the point!)
Here are some more choice ones, courtesy of Classic FM
Also see Nicolas Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective for some real critical stinkers !
Some examples…
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Alban BergWozzeck (Wiener Philharmoniker/Claudio Abbado) (1989)“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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Anton Bruckner“We recoil in horror before this rotting odor which rushes into our nostrils from the disharmonies of this putrefactive counterpoint. His imagination is so incurably sick and warped that anything like regularity in chord progressions and period structure simply do not exist for him. Bruckner composes like a drunkard!”(1886 article, pp. 80-81) | |
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Claude DebussyLa Mer; Nocturnes; Jeux; Rhapsodie pour clarinette et orchestre (The Cleveland Orchestra/Pierre Boulez) (1995)“The Sea of Debussy does not call for many words of comment. The three parts of which it is composed are entitled From Dawn till Noon, Play of the Waves, and Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea, but as far as any pictorial suggestiveness is concerned, they might as well have been entitled On the Flatiron Building, Slumming in the Bowery, and A Glimpse of Chinatown During a Raid. Debussy’s music is the dreariest kind of rubbish. Does anybody for a moment doubt that Debussy would not write such chaotic, meaningless, cacophonous, ungrammatical stuff, if he could invent a melody?” (1907 review of La Mer, p. 94) |
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Roy Harris / William SchumanRoy Harris: Symphony No. 3 / William Schuman: Symphony No. 3 (New York Philharmonic/Leonard Bernstein) (1987)“How blessed are they who are born deaf, and are spared the agony of listening to the hideous sounds of Symphony No. 3 by Roy Harris, just performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Roy Harris should have stuck to truck driving instead of insulting music-lovers with his senseless noise.” (Letter to the Editor of Radio Times, 1942, p. 107) |
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Darius Milhaud“We went to the Opera to hear music of the vanguard, Maximilian by Darius Milhaud. We clutched our chair. But we were hurled out of it by such a hurricane of wrong notes that we found ourselves, half dead, on the stairway, without knowing how we could fall down quite so far. The composer knows the grammar, the spelling and the language; but he can speak only Esperanto and Volapuk. It is a work of a Communist traveling salesman.”(1932 review, p. 126) | |
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?????? ????????? [Sergei Prokofiev]“Mr. Prokofiev’s pieces have been contributions not to the art of music, but to national pathology and pharmacopoeia…. We do not refer particularly to the pianoforte solos composed and played by Mr. Prokofiev, for they, we are sure, invite their own damnation, because there is nothing in them to hold attention… They pursue no esthetic purpose, strive for no recognizable ideal, proclaim no means for increasing the expressive potency of music. They are simply perverse. They die the death of abortions.”(1918 review, p. 132) | |
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Max Reger“This Reger is a sarcastic, churlish fellow, bitter and pedantic and rude. He is a sort of musical Cyclops, a strong, ugly creature bulging with knotty and unshapely muscles, an ogre of composition. In listening to these works…one is perforce reminded of the photograph of Reger which his publishers place on the cover of their catalogue of his works, the photograph that shows something that is like a swollen, myopic beetle with thick lips and sullen expression, crouching on an organ bench.”(1920 article in Musical Portraits, p. 141) | |
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Arnold Schoenberg“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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Richard Wagner“Heartless sterility, obliteration of all melody, all tonal charm, all music… This revelling in the destruction of all tonal essence, raging satanic fury in the orchestra, this demoniacal, lewd caterwauling, scandal-mongering, gun-toting music, with an orchestral accompaniment slapping you in the face… Hence, the secret fascination that makes it the darling of feeble-minded royalty…of the court monkeys covered with reptilian slime, and of the blasé hysterical female court parasites who need this galvanic stimulation by massive instrumental treatment to throw their pleasure-weary frog-legs into violent convulsion…the diabolical din of this pig-headed man, stuffed with brass and sawdust, inflated, in an insanely destructive self-aggrandizement, by Mephistopheles’ mephitic and most venomous hellish miasma, into Beelzebub’s Court Composer and General Director of Hell’s Music — Wagner!”(from J.L. Klein’s 1871 Geschichte des Dramas, p. 237) |
More invective
“Oh, what can you do with it? It’s like a lot of yaks jumping around!” – Sir Thomas Beecham on Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony
“Beethoven to me sounds like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there a dropped hammer.” – John Ruskin
“Mozart died too soon rather than too late.” – Glenn Gould
“He can conduct anything, as long as it’s Bach, Beethoven, or Wagner. He once tried conducting Debussy’s ‘La Mer.’ It came out ‘Das Merde.'” – An orchestra member on conductor George Sznell.
“Claude Debussy played the piano with the lid down.” – Robert Bresson
“One cannot judge Wagner’s opera, ‘Lohengrin,’ after a first hearing, and I certainly don’t intend to listen to it a second time.” – Gioacchino Rossini
“Jack Benny played Mendelssohn last night. Mendelssohn lost.” – Fred Allen
“Exit in case of Brahms” – Sign over the exit of the Boston Symphony Hall, posted by symphony director Philip Hale.
“Already too loud!” – Conductor Bruno Walter, on seeing his orchestra members reach for their instruments.