i) ... eccentric without being amusing; and laborious without effect.
ii) ... a crass monstrosity.
iii) ... oh, the pages of stupid and hopelessly vulgar music!
iv) ... eccentric, unconnected, and incomprehensible ... wanting in aesthetical feeling and in a sense of the beautiful ... monstrous and tasteless.
Stretching to the very last year of the 19th century, these dismissive criticisms of Beethoven's symphonies[1] show that even the long-term reception of a musical work is a very poor indicator of the work's artistic significance. Where is today the once so successful and praised music of Hasse, Hummel, or Dittersdorf? By contrast, there isn't a major orchestra these days whose season programs do not include Mahler's symphonies - the symphonies which half a century after their premieres were still dismissed by major music critics as "cheap", "banal", "interminable platitudes".[2]
