Musical Invective

Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven's Time.

I found it in the library the other day. I'm quoting some of my favorites.

"We were afflicted by Preludes, poeme symphonique by the miserable Liszt."

(George Templeton Strong's Diary, May 4, 1867)

"I can compare Le Carneval Romain by Berlioz to nothing but the caperings and gibberings of a big baboon, over-excited by a dose of alcoholic stimulus."

(George Templeton Strong's Diary, December 15, 1866)

"To one critic, the music of Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces suggested feeding-time at the zoo; also 'a farmyard in great activity while pigs are being ringed and geese strangled.' On another the identical section of the work produced the impression of 'a village fair with possibly a blind clarinetist playing at random.' The same listener heard sounds as of 'sawing steel' and the 'distant noise of an approaching train alternately with the musical sobs of a dynamo.'"
(London Daily Telegraph, January 24, 1914)

And my personal favorite:

"Poor Debussy, sandwiched in between Brahms and Beethoven, seemed weaker than usual. We cannot feel that all this extreme ecstasy is natural; it seems forced and hysterical; it is musical absinthe; there are moments when the suffering Faun in Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun seems to need a veterinary surgeon.

(Louis Elson, Boston Daily Advertiser, January 2, 1905)

I want to be a music critic just so I can be paid to describe pieces as "musical absinthe."

(I picked some particularly cruel ones, but the whole book is delightfully mean-spirited.)