Extracts From A Schimpflexikon: One Of A Series

New ears for new music! The new ears were necessary to appreciate the new music made by Serge Prokofiev.... As a composer, he is cerebral... The lyric themes are generally insipid.... The [Piano] Sonata, a second one, contains no sustained musical development. The finale of the work evoked visions of a charge of mammoths on some vast immemorial Asiatic plateau.... Prokofiev uses, like Arnold Schoenberg, the entire modern harmonies. The House Of Bondage of normal key relations is discarded. He is a psychologist of the uglier emotions. Hatred, contempt, rage — above all, rage — disgust, despair, mockery, and defiance legitimately serve as models for moods.

—Richard Aldrich, The New York Times, 21 November 1918

(From Nicolas Slonimsky's, Lexicon of Musical Invective)