A Selection of Musical Insults Quiz

Answer: Ludwig van Beethoven

Beethoven's music shocked and alienated many among its first audiences, as each new work of his brought new and unexpected breaks with tradition. "Some at least of Beethoven's listeners," remarks the music critic Nicholas Cook, "went on to draw the...disconsolate conclusion...that they were listening to the music of a madman, or at least of a great composer whose regrettable deafness had distorted his musical imagination and, perhaps, unbalanced his mind."

As Beethoven began to win more admirers, a kind of insulting silence on the part of some fellow-musicians seems to have taken the place of outright hostility, if one can believe Hector Berlioz. In his "Memoirs", the French firebrand Romantic composer recalls "the silent opposition, ill-concealed dislike, and ironical reserve of the French and Italian composers...to a German, whose work they deemed monstrosities...like Cherubini, who dissembled his bile, not daring to vent it on the master whose success exasperated him".

Guiseppe Cambini himself, the author of my original quotation, sounds an interesting chap: his biographical details are scanty, but the rumours about him which have come down to us (some of them, wikipedia suggests, invented by himself) would make an exciting subject for a speculative historical novel. I particularly like the story about the young Cambini and his fiancee being kidnapped by Barbary pirates, and eventually ransomed by a consortium of music lovers.

Answer: He is not a man but a disease.

Chopin's notorious tubercular cough might perhaps have led someone to say this about him, but in fact the remark was not directed at him but at Richard Wagner, later on in the nineteenth century - the phrase may first have been used by the very quotable conductor Hans von Bülow, whose wife left him for Wagner, although he is usually credited merely with saying that "a tenor is not a man but a disease". (Not known for his gentleness of manner towards his fellow-musicians, von Bulow once informed an unfortunate trombonist that his tone sounded "like roast-beef gravy running through a sewer". That would sound pretty insulting in the original German, I imagine.)

To return to Chopin: the "oyster" gibe, referring to a certain affectation in the composer's manner which some people found repellent, was made by the French socialite and writer Countess Marie d'Agoult; the "floundering" accusation by the now quite obscure Edinburgh-based musicologist Frederick Niecks; and the hostile reaction to the piano sonata by the not at all obscure, but deeply conservative, Felix Mendelssohn. (In refreshing contrast to all this grouching and whining is Robert Schumann's joyful cry on first hearing a Chopin piece being played: "Hats off, gentlemen. A genius!")

Answer: Franz Liszt

Liszt, who was consciously composing the "Music of the Future", received for this his fair share of brickbats, which continued to be hurled at him long after his death - Tovey was not living far enough into the future to appreciate the peculiar felicities of Liszt's music, perhaps.

Unfortunately, the composer's put-upon and rather saintly nature had to withstand worse than this in his own lifetime - not only musical insults but personal ones too. The German poet Heinrich Heine, for instance - well known in the European musical world and an intimate acquaintance of Berlioz, among others - lampooned the Hungarian composer (whose first name, of course, was really Ferencz) for not going out like a true nationalist to help man the barricades during the ill-fated Hungarian uprising against Austrian rule in 1849:

The last redoubt of freedom fell
And Hungary bleeds to death, but Franz
Remained unharmed, his sword as well -
In the chest of drawers, under the underpants.
(English translation by Alistair Elliot)

Answer: Johannes Brahms

During his extravagant diatribe against Brahms, Tchaikovsky delivered himself of a number of choice epithets - not all of them repeatable on a family website - of which "self-inflated mediocrity" is perhaps the most polite. I believe this was his idiosyncratic way of drawing attention to certain perceived defects in Brahms's powers of orchestration.

But there was certainly a nationalistic tinge to Tchaikovsky's extravagant vituperation, as well as a musical one. German culture, and German habits of thinking and feeling, were never the flavour of the month in nineteenth-century Russia, even at times of political and military alliance - as anyone who has taken the trouble to read Tolstoy's "War and Peace" will know very well. Tolstoy's views on the great German composers were, on the whole, not exactly flattering either.

Answer: Edvard Hanslick

This is the man who, not content with winding up over-excitable Russians, so terrified his own compatriot, the unworldly provincial genius Anton Bruckner, that the poor man repeatedly begged leading conductors not to perform his symphonies in Vienna, for fear of the killer reviews which he knew they would inevitably elicit from the critic's pen. And yet Hanslick is still held up by some respected authorities as a colossus of Viennese music criticism. There is a mystery here which I have not yet been able to unravel.

Another prominent "bête noire" of Hanslick's, Richard Wagner, detested the critic so much that he put him, in caricatured form as the pedantic "Beckmesser", into his only comic opera, "The Mastersingers of Nuremberg". Hanslick could at best only abuse people in words, but Wagner (like Richard Strauss two generations later) could do it in musical notes too.

Answer: Sir Thomas Beecham

Many British conductors have been blessed with a lively sense of fun, but none of them has ever been wittier than Beecham. Among the countless extant examples of his epigrammatic repartee, one of the best-known is his reply to a question about Karlheinz Stockhausen's avant-garde music: "Sir Thomas, have you ever conducted any Stockhausen?" "No, but I once trod in some."

Beecham deserves everyone's gratitude for his tireless promotion of the work of that blind and paralysed musical prodigy, Frederick Delius. Not even Delius, however, always escaped the sharp edge of his distinguished admirer's tongue: once, during Beecham's rehearsal of a Delius orchestral piece in London with the composer present, it became painfully apparent - according to the late Sir Neville Cardus's first-hand account - that Beecham's detailed knowledge of the score was much more accurate than the composer's own. "I say, Delius," thundered the indignant maestro, "I wish to God you would take the trouble to learn your own music!"

Answer: I particularly enjoyed the bit at 11.15.

Some might say that this is not such a malevolent gibe - little more than a pleasant witticism, in fact - but my understanding is that Satie regarded Debussy as rather pompous and over-serious in his attitude to his art, and wanted to take him down a few pegs. He used a rapier for his purposes, not a bludgeon.

Answer: Ralph Vaughan Williams

This epigrammatic judgment on VW's Third Symphony has been alternatively attributed to the critic Philip Heseltine (aka the prolific composer of songs Peter Warlock), at the work's London premiere in 1922. Another humorous friend of the composer's suggested that the music evoked nothing so much as a picture of "VW rolling over and over in a ploughed field on a wet day".

Insults aside, however, none of this gives any indication of the tragic beauty of this stunning work, begun during the First World War, with its three slow movements and final evocation of the healing power of "nature". Michael Kennedy describes the symphony as the composer's "war requiem" - and, concurring with this, the critic Andrew Burn calls it "a meditation on the destruction of the unfulfilled promise of a generation...the 'lads', who in A. E. Housman's verse, 'will never grow old'".

Answer: a large bottle of ink

Definitely below the belt, this one, especially when one considers how respectfully Messiaen - whose ornithological expertise and use of birdsong in his compositions I personally find fascinating - always praised what he called the individual "colour" of Stravinsky's works.

Answer: Tosca

Benjamin Britten also once declared that he was "sickened by the cheapness and emptiness" of "Tosca"'s score. In spite of all its supposed cheapness, emptiness and shabbiness, however, the opera continues to pull in the audiences.

Professor Kerman was an intellectual maverick with a mission to revolutionise thinking about music and musicology. One often needs to read his intemperate attacks on people in their proper context, but it can be fun sometimes to pick them out like plums from his various books. He wrote of Arnold Schoenberg, for instance, that the leader of the Second Viennese School "came to the crisis of modernism...not with his finger in the dyke but with his whole frame spreadeagled on a board swept along by the surf of history".