I like Wagner's music better than any other music. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without people hearing what one says. That is a great advantage.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) on Richard Wagner |
I liked the bit about quarter to eleven.
Erik Satie (1866-1925), composer, on 'From Dawn to Noon on the Sea' from La Mer by Claude Debussy |
I liked your opera. I think I will set it to music.
Ludwig van Beethoven to a fellow composer |
I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.
Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) on Richard Wagner |
If Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is not by some means abridged, it will soon fall into disuse.
Philip Hale, Boston music critic, in 1837 on Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) |
If he'd been making shell cases during the war it might have been better for music.
Camille Saint-Saens on Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) |
Is Wagner actually a man? Is he not rather a disease? Everything he touches falls ill: he has made music sick.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) on Richard Wagner |
It is gaudy musical harlotry, savage and incoherent bellowings.
Boston Gazette on Franz Liszt |
It's bad when they don't perform your operas - but when they do, it's far worse.
Camille Saint-Saens (1835-1921) on Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944), composer |
Jazz: Music invented for the torture of imbeciles.
Henry van Dyke (1852-1933) |
Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for forty-five minutes.
Aaron Copland on Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) |
Liszt's bombast is bad; it is very bad; in fact there is only one thing worse in his music, and that is his affected and false simplicity. It was said of George Sand that she had a habit of speaking and writing concerning chastity in such terms that the very word became impure; so it is with the simplicity of Liszt.
Philip Hale, Boston music critic, on Franz Liszt |
Of all the bete, clumsy, blundering, boggling, baboon-blooded stuff that I ever saw on a human stage, that last night beat - as far as the story and acting went - all the affected, sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless, topsiturviest, tuneless, scrabble-pipiest-tongs and boniest-doggerel of sounds I ever endured the deadliness of, that eternity of nothing was deadliest, as far as its sound went.
John Ruskin (1819-1900) on Richard Wagner |
Of all the bulls that live, this hath the greatest ass's ears.
Elizabeth I (1533-1603) on John Bull (c.1563-1628), musician |
Oh you arch-ass - you double-barrelled ass!
Ludwig van Beethoven on Gottfried Weber, music critic |
Perhaps it was because Nero played the fiddle, they burned Rome.
Oliver Herford (1863-1935) |
Rachmaninov's immortalising totality was his scowl. He was a six and a half foot scowl.
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), Russian composer, on Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943), Russian composer |
She would be like Richard Wagner if only she looked a bit more feminine.
Osbert Sitwell (1892-1969), poet and writer, on Dame Ethel Smyth |
Shostakovich is without doubt the foremost composer of pornographic music in the history of art.
W. J. Henderson, music critic, on Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-75) |
Splitting the convulsively inflated larynx of the Muse, Berg utters tortured mistuned cackling, a pandemonium of chopped-up orchestral sounds, mishandled men's throats, bestial outcries, bellowing, rattling, and all other evil noises... Berg is the poisoner of the well of German music.
German/a on Alban Berg (1885-1935), Austrian composer |
