From Barnes & Noble
Who says the world of classical music is sedate or even dull? Certainly not anyone who has read Nicolas Slonimsky's Lexicon of Musical Invective! This funny, irascible little book details contemporary critical attacks on virtually all of the great musical figures of the past 200 years. Beethoven is here, along with Liszt, Mahler, Schumann, Strauss, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner -- all of whom were skewered by the critics at some point in their careers. No classical music lover (or hater!) will want to live without it.
From the Publisher
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").
Publishers Weekly
``The music of a demented eunuch,'' writes one 19th-century critic of Wagner in this remarkable anthology of vitriolic reviews. (June)
Booknews
An anthology of critical assaults on well-known composers and their works written by the late Nicolas Slonimsky<-->writer, lexicographer, pianist, composer, conductor, teacher, and in his own words, "legendary...musicologist of manifold endeavors [and] failed wunderkind." It also includes his "Invecticon," an index to the nasty words and phrases found in the book. This is a reprint of the 1953 edition with a new foreword by Peter Schickele who describes the collection as "funny and instructive." Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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