Real (or not?) quotes from Famous Musicians in History

[Paolo]

I thought of Dave when I saw this and had to share it.

“Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.” - Igor Stravinsky

“I am sure my music has a taste of codfish in it.” - Edvard Grieg

“Never look at the trombones. It only encourages them.” - Richard Strauss

“He’d be better off shovelling snow than scribbling on manuscript paper.” - Richard Strauss on Schoenberg

“I liked your opera. I think I will set it to music.” - Ludvig van Beethoven

“I have written a chorale both sober and suitable. In it I have put everything I know about boredom. I dedicate this to those who do not like me.” - Erik Satie

“ Mr. Wagner has beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour.” - Gioacchino Rossini

“What a good thing this isn’t music.” - Gioacchino Rossini on Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique

“Oh how wonderful, really wonderful opera would be if there were no singers!” - Gioacchino Rossini

“In opera there is always too much singing.” - Claude Debussy

“Bring me coffee before I turn into a goat!” - Johann Sebastian Bach

“Listening to the 5th Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.” - Aaron Copland

“The audience expected something big, something colossal, but they were served instead with some agitated water in a saucer.” - Louis Schnieder on Debussy’s La Mer

“He gives me the impression of being a spoilt child.” - Clara Schumann on Liszt

“What a giftless bastard!” - Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky on Brahms

“Handel is only fourth rate. He is not even interesting.” - Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

“Bach on the wrong notes” - Sergei Prokofiev on Stravinsky

And, saving the best for last

“Lick my ass up and down” -Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

[Arab Nights (imported)]

Politicians could up their game by studying the insults of musicians.

[Dave (imported)]

"The Sea of Debussy does not call for many words of comment. The three parts of which it is composed are entitled From Dawn till Noon, Play of the Waves, and Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea, but as far as any pictorial suggestiveness is concerned, they might as well have been entitled On the Flatiron Building, Slumming in the Bowery, and A Glimpse of Chinatown During a Raid. Debussy's music is the dreariest kind of rubbish. Does anybody for a moment doubt that Debussy would not write such chaotic, meaningless, cacophonous, ungrammatical stuff, if he could invent a melody?"

La Mer; Nocturnes; Jeux; Rhapsodie pour clarinette et orchestre (1995)

Cleveland Orchestra / Pierre Boulez

In the Lexicon of Musical Invective, (1907 review of La Mer, p. 94)

[Dave (imported)]

On Richard Wagner:

"Heartless sterility, obliteration of all melody, all tonal charm, all music... This revelling in the destruction of all tonal essence, raging satanic fury in the orchestra, this demoniacal, lewd caterwauling, scandal-mongering, gun-toting music, with an orchestral accompaniment slapping you in the face... Hence, the secret fascination that makes it the darling of feeble-minded royalty...of the court monkeys covered with reptilian slime, and of the blasé hysterical female court parasites who need this galvanic stimulation by massive instrumental treatment to throw their pleasure-weary frog-legs into violent convulsion...the diabolical din of this pig-headed 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!"

(from J.L. Klein's 1871 Geschichte des Dramas, p. 237)

From: The Lexicon of Musical Invective

[Paolo]

​Wild jackalopes are said to sing Wagner, the males that is, during mating season.

[Dave (imported)]

"The Honks have it. Four automobile horns, vociferously assisted by three saxophones, two tom-toms, rattle, xylophone, wire brush, wood blocks, and an ensemble not otherwise innocent of brass and percussion blew or thumped the lid off Carnegie Hall (New York City) when "An American in Paris" by George Gershwin had its first appearance."

Oscar Thompson, New York Evening Post, December 21, 1928

[Dave (imported)]

"Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto, like the first pancake, is a flop."

Nicolai Solokiev, Novoye Vremya, St. Petersburgh, November 14, 1875

[Dave (imported)]

"The Russian Composer Tchaikovsky is surely not an ordinary talent, but rather an inflated one, with a genius-obsession without discrimination or taste. Such is his latest, long and pretentious Violin Concerto. For a while it moves soberly, musically, and not without spirit. But soon vulgarity gains the upper hand, and asserts itself to the end of the first movement. The violin is no longer played; it is pulled apart, drubbed. The Adagio is again own its best behavior, to pacify us, and to win us. But it soon breaks off to make way for a finale that transfers us to a brutal and wretched jollity of a Russian holiday. We see plainly the savage vulgar faces, we hear curses, we smell vodka. Friedrich Vischer once observed, speaking of obscene pictures, that they stink to the eye. Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto gives us for the first time the hideous notion that there can be music that stinks to the ear."

Eduard Hanslick, Neue Freie Presse, Vienna, December 5, 1881.

(This review is world famous for the bolded section of a beloved and stunningly composition.)

[Hopeful1 (imported)]

On climate change and polution. Young people need to step it up to insure the earth lasts. Otherwise how will Keith Richards and me survive when everybody's gone. Willie Nelson

[Arab Nights (imported)]

Looking at their faces makes me feel young again.