Extracts From A Schimpflexikon: Special Wagner Edition

The more we see and hear of Richard Wagner, the more are we convinced that music is not his special birthright, is not for him an articulate language. ... Either Richard Wagner is a desperate charlatan endowed with worldly skill and vigorous purpose enough to persuade a gaping crowd that the nauseous compound he manufactures has some previous inner virtue; or else he is a self-deceived enthusiast ... too utterly destitute of any perception of musical beauty to recognize the worthlessness of his credentials.

—Henry Smart in the London Sunday Times, quoted in Musical World, 12 May 1855

Look at Lohengrin. ... It is poison — rank poison. All we can make out is an incoherent mass of rubbish with no more real pretension to be called music than the jangling and clashing of gongs and other uneuphonious instruments with which the Chinamen, on the brow of a hill, fondly thought to scare away our English "blue-jackets."

—Musical World, London, 30 June 1855

Wagner] affirms that national melody is unhealthy and unreal, being simply the narrow-souled emanation from oppressed peoples.... The symmetry of form ... ignored, or else abandoned; the consistency of keys and their relations ... overthrown, contemned, demolished; the charm of rhythmic measure ... destroyed; the true basis of harmony, and the indispensable government of modulation, cast away, for a reckless, wild, extravagant and demagogic cacophony, the symbol of profligate libertinage! Are we then to have music in no definite key whatever? ... This man, this Wagner, this author of Tannhäuser, of Lohengrin, and so many other hideous things — and above all, the overture to Der Fliegende Holländer, the most hideous and detestable of the whole — this preacher of the "Future," was born to feed spiders with flies, not to make happy the heart of man with beautiful melody and harmony.

—Musical World, London, 30 June 1855

The second part of the program began with a prelude and introduction of an opera by Monsieur Wagner, entitled, Tristan and Isolde. On this text, the composer certainly has surpassed anything that one can imagine in confusion, disorder, and impotence. One might say it was a challenge to common sense and the most elementary requirements of the ear. Had I not heard this monstrous piling of discordant sounds three times, I would not believe it possible.

—P. Scudo, L'Année Musicale, Paris, 1861

Wagner is a man devoid of all talent. His melodies, where they are found at all, are in worse taste than Verdi and [Friedrich von] Flotow and more sour than the stalest Mendelssohn. All this is covered up with a thick layer of rot. His orchestra is decorative, but coarse. The violins squeal throughout on the highest notes and throw the listener into a state of extreme nervousness. I left without waiting for the concert to end, and I assure you that had I stayed longer, both I and my wife would have a fit of hysterics.

—Letter from César Cui to Rimsky-Korsakov, 9 March 1863

With the last chords of the Twilight of the Gods, I had a feeling of liberation from captivity. It may be that the Nibelungs' Ring [sic] is a very great work, but there never has been anything more tedious and more dragged-out than this rigmarole. The agglomeration of the most intricate and contrived harmonies, colorlessness of all that is sung on the stage, interminably long dialogues — all this fatigues the nerves to the utmost degree. So, what is the aim of Wagner's reform? In the past, music was supposed to delight people, and now we are tormented and exhausted by it.

—From a letter of Tchaikovsky's from Vienna, to his brother, Modest, 20 August 1876

I do not believe that a single composition of Wagner will survive him.

—From a letter by Moritz Hauptmann, 3 February 1849

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