On reading Weber's negative opinion of Wellington's Victory in the Cäcilia, Beethoven angrily scrawled on p. 166: "Ach du erbärmlicher Schuft, was ich scheisse ist immer noch besser als was du je gedacht" (Oh you miserable scoundrel, what I shit is better than anything you ever thought).Presumably this also includes Beethoven's Kakadu Variations (Opus 121a).
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
Pages
▼
Friday, September 29, 2017
Crappy Music
Letters to Beethoven and Other Correspondence, Vol. 3: 1824-1828, ed. Theodore Albrecht (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), p. 77, n. 6: