"How to read this book of delightful venom and snark, which Nicholas Slominsky has so thoughtfully compiled, distilled really, from classical music criticism?
Begin on the first page or any page, or start with the index. Look up the canonical composer you love the most, or alternately, the one you hate the most. There are gems of invective on each page that could only have been written by humans in the deepest grip of sincere loathing and visceral rage.
First and most importantly, it's hilarious.
As a bonus, it's also a potent reminder of the variability and wild vicissitudes of taste, the risk-averse reaction of the human mind to novelty, and how all criticism, professional or otherwise, can be sprinkled with large doses of salt. (Because salt makes everything more delicious. Imma just sayin'.)
It also has the only index, 'The Invecticon,' p. 253, that I've ever wanted to read aloud from beginning to end."
Publisher W. W. Norton & Company
Publication Date 2000-08-28
Section Music / All Staff Suggestions / Nonfiction Suggestions / Jen C.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9780393320091
"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").
