Take a quick browse at social media at present, and also you would possibly consider we dwell in an unrivalled age for sharp tongues and poison pens.
Suppose once more. Historical past is stuffed with those that had been masters of the withering put-down, not least the nice composers. What’s extra, fairly than cover behind a pen title as at present’s trolls do, they had been solely too completely happy to say authorship.
Take this little gem by Tchaikovsky: ‘Brahms is just a few chaotic and completely empty wasteland.’ How do you come again from that? Maybe composers’ enthusiasm for verbal blows flowed from the truth that they cared a lot about music; sufficient to slug it out publicly, like boxers in a hoop.
And the abuse didn’t cease on the occasional one-liner. It might go on for years, drawing in mates and associates in order that each camps had been quickly dug in like armies going through one another throughout no-man’s land. Right here, then, are 15 tremendous examples of composers willingly indulging in a confrontation…
15 composer feuds
Brahms vs Tchaikovsky
You’ll have already gathered that Tchaikovsky didn’t fee Brahms. After enjoying over the German’s music, Tchaikovsky wrote in his diary, ‘What a giftless bastard!’ Robust stuff, however there was extra: ‘It angers me that this immodest mediocrity is thought to be a genius. I can’t stand him.’
What had Brahms carried out to impress such hostility? Effectively, he did go to sleep throughout a rehearsal of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony and, musically, the pair had been polar opposites. Unusually, on the few events they met, they obtained alongside famously, even when Brahms’s beery Viennese methods had been at odds with Tchaikovsky’s extra refined manners.
Extra like this
Brahms vs Liszt
Brahms and Liszt’s names could also be without end joined because the rhyming slang time period for having had a beer or two too many however, in actuality, these two giants of Nineteenth-century music couldn’t stand each other. As soon as once more, Brahms let himself down by nodding off throughout a premiere, this time of Liszt’s B minor Sonata – given the demonic power of the piece, an act of deliberate sabotage, certainly. However Liszt wasn’t innocent. He as soon as known as Brahms’s music ‘hygienic however unexciting’.
Beethoven vs Haydn
Misunderstandings and imagined sleights, maybe brought on by a conflict of egos, appear to have been the basis of those two composers’ undoing at varied instances. For instance, in an effort to bolster Beethoven’s credibility, Haydn urged including the phrase, ‘pupil of Haydn’ to the younger composer’s Piano Trios Op. 1. Beethoven bristled at that, telling a buddy he had ‘by no means realized something from Haydn’.
Beethoven vs Hummel
Is something extra prone to get your goat than a buyer criticising your work inside earshot of a rival who finds the entire thing hilarious? That’s what occurred to Beethoven when Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy collared him after a efficiency of his Mass in C. As Hummel, the Prince’s music grasp, appeared on, his boss made a slicing comment to Beethoven in regards to the efficiency, inflicting the obsequious Hummel to chuckle out loud. Beethoven stormed off, and his grudge would develop with the passing years.
Beethoven vs Italy
Given his willingness to lob insults at one and all, it’s no nice shock to see Beethoven make a 3rd look on our listing. Considered one of his most damning pictures was directed particularly at Rossini however, for good measure, took in a complete nationality inside its scope. ‘Opera is ill-suited to the Italians,’ he stated. ‘You have no idea how you can take care of actual drama.’
Mozart vs Clementi
‘I don’t make acquaintances amongst different composers,’ Mozart as soon as wrote sniffily to his father. ‘I do know my job and so they know theirs, and that’s adequate.’ Nevertheless, that didn’t imply he was averse to sticking the knife in. In one other letter he wrote, ‘Everybody who performs or hears [Clementi’s] compositions will sense their insignificance. Clementi is a charlatan, like all Italians. He has nothing to supply.’
Mendelssohn vs Berlioz
Affable in particular person, Mendelssohn’s letters and diaries reveal that he additionally possessed a poison pen overflowing with ink, with some scathing remarks directed at audiences in Munich, Rome and Paris. He saved his most poisonous textual content for Berlioz, nonetheless, writing that ‘with all his efforts to go stark mad he by no means as soon as succeeds’ and describing the Symphonie fantastique as ‘completely loathsome’.
Clara Schumann vs Liszt
As Lisztomania swept Europe within the mid-Nineteenth century, it left a couple of broken egos in its wake, amongst them these of Schumann and his spouse, Clara. Involved for her husband’s legacy, she recruited Brahms and the violinist Joseph Joachim to maintain Robert’s flame alive. As they went to battle within the salons and live performance halls of Europe, Clara would launch the occasional rocket in Liszt’s course, corresponding to this: ‘[His music] is simply meaningless noise. Not a single wholesome thought anymore. Every little thing is confused. A transparent harmonic development is to not be discovered right here any longer.’
Verdi vs Puccini
For composers at battle, faint reward is akin to a pistol fitted with a silencer. Verdi deployed it to damning impact when he wrote, ‘I’ve heard the composer Puccini properly spoken of. He follows the brand new tendencies, which is simply pure, however he retains strictly to melody, and that’s neither new nor outdated. He’s predominantly a symphonist; no hurt in that.’
Debussy vs Ravel
Like all of the fiercest enemies, Ravel and Debussy had as soon as been mates, of a form. ‘For Debussy, the musician and the person, I’ve had profound admiration,’ stated Ravel. ‘Have had’ – be aware the tense. Sooner or later within the early 1900s, the 2 fell out, at first over Ravel selecting to comply with Fauré’s recommendation over Debussy’s with reference to modifications to his String Quartet. Issues escalated when Ravel helped to assist Debussy’s estranged spouse, Lilly. ‘It’s most likely higher for us to be on frigid phrases for illogical causes,’ concluded Ravel.
Prokofiev vs Stravinsky
These two Russians first hit a rocky patch when Prokofiev instructed Stravinsky there was ‘no music’ in The Firebird. Harsh, however issues actually kicked off over Prokofiev’s new opera The Love for Three Oranges. There had been no love misplaced at its world premiere when one wag wrote, ‘It pokes enjoyable at those that paid cash for it.’
But when, after enjoying the rating to Stravinsky, Prokofiev was anticipating some phrases of assist, he was to be upset. ‘You’re losing time composing operas,’ Stravinsky instructed him. ‘You’re not proof against error your self,’ replied Prokofiev. Stravinsky blew his high. ‘Our relationships turned strained and for a number of years Stravinsky’s angle in direction of me was essential,’ stated Prokofiev.
Vaughan Williams vs himself
Vaughan Williams detested what he noticed as Mahler’s tortured outpourings, describing the Austrian as a ‘very tolerable imitation of a composer’. Nevertheless, he was equally harsh on his personal skills, describing his music as ‘lumpy and stodgy’ in 1907. A few years later, he was nonetheless down on himself. ‘I’ve struggled all my life to overcome amateurish approach,’ he wrote in 1948, ‘and now that maybe I’ve mastered it, it appears too late to make use of it.’
Lutyens et al vs Vaughan Williams
Vaughan Williams was additionally on the receiving finish of insults from others, most famously when his music was labelled the ‘cow pat college’ by Elizabeth Lutyens. The outline actually owes its origins to Peter Warlock likening Vaughan Williams’s A Pastoral Symphony to a cow staring over a fence. Aaron Copland borrowed it to explain listening to RVW’s Symphony
No. 5 as like observing a cow for 45 minutes. Not such candy moo-sic.
Britten vs everybody
Benjamin Britten famous in his diary that he might pay attention to 2 minutes of Elgar’s Second Symphony ‘however might stand no extra’. He laid into conductors, too, dismissing Adrian Boult as ‘horrible, execrable’. Considered one of his tutors on the Royal School of Music was Vaughan Williams (once more), whose conducting made Britten ‘depressed for English music’ and he as soon as spent a contented afternoon laughing over the older composer’s music within the firm of Lennox Berkeley. He additionally stated listening to Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier ‘makes me nearly bodily sick’. Woe betide anybody who replied in like fashion, nonetheless – they shortly joined the ranks of ‘Ben’s corpses’: former mates and colleagues now cold-shouldered for all times.
Salieri vs Mozart
Let’s finish with a feud that was nothing of the kind. Because of Amadeus, the play by Peter Shaffer which sees Salieri confessing to poisoning the composer, and Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri, a brief drama about envy, the 2 have turn into lumbered with probably the most misrepresented musical relationship of all time. The reality is that early in his profession Mozart complained that Salieri had gained instructing positions over him, and that he and a bunch of Italians had been obstructing his profession. However in a while, a mutual respect developed between them that noticed Salieri instructing one among Mozart’s youngsters, and the pair collaborating on a cantata and attending operas collectively.
