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I do not believe that a single composition of Wagner will survive him.

- Moritz Hauptmann

The Rite of Spring

Who wrote this fiendish Rite of Spring,
What right had he to write the thing,
Against our helpless ears to fling
It's crash, clash, cling, clang, bing, bang, bing?

And then to call it Rite of Spring,
The season when on joyous wing
The birds melodious carols sing
And harmony's in everything!

He who could write the Rite of Spring,
If I be right, by right should swing!

It is not every family which has double fugues for breakfast, but this Strauss family is a peculiar one. If sinfonia domestica were a true autobiographical sketch, we fancy that the wife would be portrayed on trombones and tubas while the husband would be pictured on the second violin.

Wow! Try saying that about Will Smith's wife, buddy! 😬

20 pages of Schoenberg related invective feels like an awfully toxic thing to read before bed but, alas, that's what I've done. With regard to dedicated pages he gets over the line, by a tight margin, against the likes of Debussy and Strauss and is "defeated" only by the man we all love to hate, Herr Richard Wagner!

[Rachmaninoff] writes pieces full of the old astounding musical dislocation...
There was a day, perhaps, when such work served. But another day has succeeded to it. And so, Rachmaninoff comes amongst us like a very charming and amiable ghost.
- Paul Rosenfield on the 2nd piano concerto

You can't win with these critics. You're either too ahead of your time or you're a dusty old fossil. No in-between.

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