WHAT CRETIN SAID THAT NOBODY EVER erected a monument to a critic? (I’ll tell you: it was that lugubrious drunk Jean Sibelius). Actually, he could simply have added “at least, not in a good way”.
It’s a monument made of vibrating air rather than marble, but the old monster Richard Wagner himself worked out his spleen against the eminent Viennese scribe Eduard Hanslick by caricaturing him as whining creep Sixtus Beckmesser (originally “Veit Hanslich”) in Die Meistersinger. And, as it happens, there is also a bust of Hanslick in the courtyard of Vienna University.
So there, and so much for Sibelius. It’s true, of course, that the only time you actually hear about critics is when our journalistic “colleagues” gleefully dump their night-soil on us when they get a whiff of a story about one of us disgracing himself (it’s always him, natch).
Recently it was the guy who insulted the poor old lady in ENO’s . Before that, the
