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

"A supermarket tabloid of classical music criticism."―From the new foreword by Peter Schickele.

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").

• Slonimsky's Book of Musical Anecdotes
• Thesaurus Of Scales And Melodic Patterns
• Book of Musical Anecdotes
• Secret Lives of Great Composers: What Your Teachers Never Told You about the World's Musical Masters
• Book of Musical Anecdotes
• Perfect Pitch: A Life Story
• Evenings with the Orchestra
• The Berlin Recital
• Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns: Spiral-bound Book
• Theory of Harmony: 100TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION