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

This nook is an anthology of critical assaults on well-known composers and their works. Here the reader will find biased, unfair, ill-tempered, and singularly unprophetic judgements by musicians and reviewers. Also included is the author's "Invecticon", an index to the nasty words and phrases found in the book.

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 Bülow, 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").

CONTENIDO:

Foreword by Peter Schickele
Prelude: Non-Acceptance of the Unfamiliar
Lexicon of musical invective
Bartók
Beethoven
Berg
Berlioz
Bizet
Bloch
Brahms
Bruckner
Chopin
Copland
Cowell
Debussy
Franck
Gershwin
Gounod
Harris
D'Indy
Krenek
Liszt
Mahler
Milhaud
Moussorgsky
Prokofiev
Puccini
Rachmaninoff
Ravel
Reger
Riegger
Rimsky-Korsakov
Ruggles
Saint-Saëns
Schoenberg
Schumann
Scribain
Shostakovitch
Sibelius
Strauss
Stravinsky
Tchaikovsky
Varèse
Verdi
Wagner
Webern
Invecticon
Index of names and titles
Supplement