Nicolas Slonimsky is a Boston composer and musicologist who long ago reached a firm conclusion about music critics: they have always had trouble getting used to new music. Scholar Slonimsky’s further conclusion: modern critics are not nearly so vituperative about their dislikes as the oldtimers used to be.
For years, Slonimsky has amused himself by collecting the world’s most angry comments about music since the days of Beethoven. This week he published nearly 300 pages of them in his Lexicon of Musical Invective (Coleman-Ross; $6).
Richard Wagner rates the fattest dossier in Slonimsky’s book—27 pages. He was called, among other things, a Communist (in 1855), a madman and a eunuch. Slonimsky himself believes that, for pure vehemence, criticism of Wagner has seldom surpassed that of the German historian, J. L. Klein, who wrote in 1871 of “the diabolical din of this pigheaded man, stuffed with brass and sawdust, inflated, in an insanely destructive self-aggrandizement, by Mephistopheles’ mephitic and most venomous hellish miasma, into Beelzebub’s Court Composer and General Director of Hell’s Music—Wagner!”
Virtually every great composer has given up some blood to the critics’ gantlet. John Ruskin (whose true critical specialty was art) described Beethoven’s music as sounding like “the upsetting of bags of nails.” Chopin’s music was damned in its entirety by London’s Musical World as “ranting hyperbole and excruciating cacophony.” Tchaikovsky was assured by the Boston Evening Transcript that his new Fifth Symphony was “pandemonium, delerium tremens, raving, and above all, noise worse confounded.” And Tchaikovsky himself was not above recording a terse opinion about Brahms: “That scoundrel . . . What a giftless bastard!”
As an aid to fellow students, Musicologist Slonimsky has catalogued his findings in a 30-page “Invecticon,” listing the strongest and most piquant critical epithets alphabetically, with composers to whom they have been applied. Samples: advanced cat music (Wagner), belly-rumbling (Bela Bartok), bestial outcries (Alban Berg), bleary-eyed paresis (Tchaikovsky), chaos (Bartok, Berg, Berlioz, Brahms, Liszt, Mussorgsky, Prokofiev, Scriabin, Strauss, Wagner), intoxicated woodpecker (Edgar Varèse), lewd caterwauling (Wagner), mass-snoring (Bartok), nasty little noise (Debussy), spring fever in a zoo (Stravinsky).
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