Sparks fly and verbal venom is spat, as John Evans explores the great names who simply loved to take potshots at each other
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Take a look at social media and you may come away thinking our age is the most poisonous and vindictive of all time. Think again.
History is full of those who were masters of the withering put-down, not least the great composers. What’s more, rather than hide behind a pen name as today’s trolls do, they were only too happy to claim authorship.
Take this little gem by Tchaikovsky: ‘Brahms is just some chaotic and utterly empty wasteland.’ How do you come back from that? Perhaps composers’ enthusiasm for verbal blows flowed from the fact that they cared so much about music; enough to slug it out publicly, like boxers in a ring.
And the abuse didn’t stop at the occasional one-liner. It could go on for years, drawing in friends and associates so that both camps were soon dug in like armies facing each other across no-man’s land. Here, then, are 15 fine examples of composers willingly indulging in a war of words...
The fiercest composer rivalries
1. Brahms v Tchaikovsky
Tchaikovsky (pictured) didn’t rate Brahms—calling him a “giftless bastard” and “conceited mediocrity.” Harsh words, possibly provoked by Brahms nodding off during a rehearsal of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth. Musically, they were worlds apart, yet strangely, they got on well in person—despite Brahms’s beer-fuelled bluntness clashing with Tchaikovsky’s more polished sensibilities. Music divided them; manners, oddly, did not.
2. Brahms v Liszt
Brahms and Liszt’s names may be forever joined as the rhyming slang term for having had a beer or two too many but, in reality, these two giants of 19th-century music couldn’t stand one another. Once again, Brahms let himself down by nodding off during a premiere, this time of Liszt’s B minor Sonata – given the demonic energy of the piece, an act of deliberate sabotage, surely. But Liszt (pictured) wasn’t blameless. He once called Brahms’s music ‘hygienic but unexciting’.
3. Beethoven v Haydn
Misunderstandings and imagined sleights, perhaps caused by a clash of egos, seem to have been the root of these two composers’ undoing at various times. For example, in an effort to bolster Beethoven’s credibility, Haydn (pictured) suggested adding the phrase, ‘pupil of Haydn’ to the young composer’s Piano Trios Op. 1. Beethoven bristled at that, telling a friend he had ‘never learned anything from Haydn’.
- 4. Beethoven v Hummel
Is anything more likely to get your goat than a customer criticising your work within earshot of an amused rival? That’s what happened to Beethoven when Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy collared him after a performance of his Mass in C. With Johann Nepomuk Hummel, fellow composer and the Prince’s music master, looking on, his boss made a cutting remark to Beethoven about the performance, causing the obsequious Hummel to laugh out loud. Beethoven stormed off, and his grudge would only grow with the passing years.
5. Beethoven v Italy
Given his willingness to lob insults at all and sundry, it’s no great surprise to see Beethoven make a third appearance on our list. One of his most damning shots was directed specifically at Rossini but, for good measure, took in an entire nationality within its scope. ‘Opera is ill-suited to the Italians,’ he said. ‘You do not know how to deal with real drama.’
6. Mozart v Clementi
‘I do not make acquaintances among other composers,’ Mozart (pictured) once wrote sniffily to his father. ‘I know my job and they know theirs, and that’s good enough.’ However, that didn’t mean he was averse to sticking the knife in. In another letter he wrote, ‘Everyone who plays or hears [Clementi’s] compositions will sense their insignificance. Clementi is a charlatan, like all Italians. He has nothing to offer.’
7. Mendelssohn v Berlioz
Affable in person, Mendelssohn’s letters and diaries reveal that he also possessed a poison pen overflowing with ink, with some scathing remarks directed at audiences in Munich, Rome and Paris. He saved his most toxic text for Berlioz, however, writing that ‘with all his efforts to go stark mad he never once succeeds’. Here, meanwhile, is his vivid description of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique.
'How utterly loathsome this is to me, I don’t have to tell you. To see one’s most cherished ideas debased and expressed in perverted caricatures would enrage anyone. And yet this is only the program. The execution is still more miserable: nowhere a spark, no warmth, utter foolishness, contrived passion represented through every possible exaggerated orchestral means (....) all these means used to express nothing but indifferent drivel, mere grunting, shouting, screaming back and forth.”
Yeah, but what did you really think, Felix?
8. Clara Schumann v Liszt
As Lisztomania swept Europe in the mid-19th century, it left a few damaged egos in its wake, among them those of Robert Schumann and his composer wife, Clara. Concerned for her husband’s legacy, she recruited Brahms and the violinist Joseph Joachim to keep Robert’s flame alive. As they went to war in the salons and concert halls of Europe, Clara would launch the occasional rocket in Liszt’s direction, such as this: ‘[His music] is just meaningless noise. Not a single healthy idea anymore. Everything is confused. A clear harmonic progression is not to be found here any longer.’
9. Verdi v Puccini
For composers at war, faint praise is akin to a pistol fitted with a silencer. Verdi (pictured) deployed it to damning effect when he wrote, ‘I have heard the composer Puccini well spoken of. He follows the new tendencies, which is only natural, but he keeps strictly to melody, and that is neither new nor old. He is predominantly a symphonist; no harm in that.’
10. Debussy v Ravel
Like all the fiercest enemies, Ravel and Debussy (pictured) had once been friends, of a sort. ‘For Debussy, the musician and the man, I have had profound admiration,’ said Ravel. Note the past tense, though. At some point in the early 1900s, the two fell out, at first over Ravel choosing to follow Fauré’s advice over Debussy’s with regards to changes to his String Quartet. Things escalated when Ravel helped to support Debussy’s estranged wife, Lilly. ‘It’s probably better for us to be on frigid terms for illogical reasons,’ concluded Ravel.
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