Status Updates From Invettive musicali

Leonid Sabanayev wrote a scathing review of Prokofiev's Scythian Suite in 'News of the Season', Moscow, December 25, 1916 only to find, all too late, that the performance was actually cancelled and Prokofiev's Suite was never performed.... Awkward! 😆

I played over the music of that scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless bastard! It annoys me that this self-inflated mediocrity is hailed as a genius. Why, in comparison with him, Raff is a giant, not to speak of Rubinstein, who is after all a live and important human being, while Brahms is chaotic and absolutely empty dried-up stuff.
Tchaikovsky's Diary, 1886

😲 Pyotr, you slimy devil!! 😁

Berlioz, musically speaking, is a lunatic; a classical composer only in Paris, the great city of quacks. His music is simply and undisguisedly nonsense. He is a kind of Orchestral Liszt, than which I could name nothing more intensely disagreeable.

Shots fired! A few innocents caught in the cross-fire too! :D

"... Bestial cries are heard: neighing horses, the squeal of a brass pig, crying jackasses, amorous quacks of a monstrous toad... Listening to this screaming music (a jazz band concert) for a minute or two, one conjures up an orchestra of madmen, sexual maniacs, led by a man-stallion beating time with an enormous phallos"
- Maxim Gorky

I wasn't intending to read this right away and I'll probably still just dip my toes for a bit while I finish some other books but this from the sample excerpts was just too good to ignore:

"The Finale of [of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony] is to me for the most part dull and ugly.... Oh, the pages of stupid and hopelessly vulgar music! The unspeakable cheapness of the chief tune, 'Freude, Freude'!"

:D :D