The very best music criticism sets out to entertain as well as
inform; and this anthology dating from roughly 1800 to 1950, is a
delight from start to finish. The reviews in this collection are
unfavourable to the point of hostility and were predominantly
written when the music was new: when what have now become accepted
classics were unfamiliar and therefore 'difficult'. Slonimsky, its
erudite compiler who died aged over 100 has been known as a scholar
and wit in the mould of Nabokov, and made his selections with a
venomous delight: 'Richard Strauss...is either a lunatic, or
rapidly approaching idiocy', crowned the New York Musical Courier
in 1899 at the premiere there of Ein Heldenleben. At the same time,
French critics were to call Debussy's La Mer 'Le Mal de Mer', while
Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps became 'Le Massacre du
Printempts.' Never was a compilation such wicked and intelligent
fun as this 'Rimsky Korsakov, what a name! It suggests fierce
whiskers stained with vodka!' Read on: I know that Jeffrey Bernard
would, if he were alive and well. (Kirkus UK)
A snakeful of critical venom aimed at the composers and the
classics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. Who wrote
advanced cat music? What commonplace theme is very much like Yankee
Doodle? Which composer is a scoundrel and a giftless bastard? What
opera would His Satanic Majesty turn out? Whose name suggests
fierce whiskers stained with vodka? And finally, what third
movement begins with a dog howling at midnight, then imitates the
regurgitations of the less-refined or lower-middle-class type of
water-closet cistern, and ends with the cello reproducing the
screech of an ungreased wheelbarrow? For the answers to these and
other questions, readers need only consult the "Invecticon" at the
back of this inspired book and then turn to the full passage, in
all its vituperation. Among the eminent reviewers are George
Bernard Shaw, Virgil Thomson, Hans von Bulow, Friedrich Nietzsche,
Eduard Hanslick, Olin Downes, Deems Taylor, Paul Rosenfeld, and
Oscar Wilde. Itself a classic, this collection of nasty barbs about
composers and their works, culled mostly from contemporaneous
newspapers and magazines, makes for hilarious reading and belongs
on the shelf of everyone who loves or hates classical music. With a
new foreword by Peter Schickele ("P.D.Q. Bach")."
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