At The Gates - Bister Verklighet (No Security Cover)

On the other hand, Parisian newspapers vied with each other to print various jokes that discredited Wagner. And in order to give their fabrications at least a semblance of credibility, the newspapermen, not embarrassed, began to attribute their authorship to the famous contemporaries of the composer. For Rossini there were many witticisms, often of dubious quality; it was as if created to be attributed to him. It is precisely these fabrications of the Parisian journalistic fraternity that include Rossini, who is now roaming from the book and attributed to the comparison of Wagner’s music, supposedly devoid of melody, with “fish-free sauce”, and the roar of the dropped maid tray with utensils, with “polyphony from the Grotto of Venus” ”; the opinion of the “Tannhäuser” score, which the maestro “began to understand only by turning upside down”.Rossini’s denials and open letters to the newspapers did not give anything - they went unnoticed by the general public, unlike the jokes themselves (such inattention is completely unforgivable for some musicologists who repeat all these absurdities in their works).