Oddly enough I turned the radio on about a month ago, and there was a rambly and very repetitive orchestral work being played, which I vaguely recognised?   At the end they announced it was Bruckner 9.  It is, as DE says, a mental block...  my radar goes off even when he arrives unannounced    (Dare I mention his abilities as an orchestrator again?)

It's not that I actively "dislike" his works... I simply cannot understand the attention that is given to them, and vast resources lavished upon them,  for example, in the Proms each year?    I realise that it's a poor argument to begin comparing their "worth" with that of other C19th symphonists...  but whilst Borodin's rarely played...   

Berlioz could probably be added to that list ?

Although i dont have a particular aversion to any composer i find their are some days when my appreciation of music of any form is only luke warm and  then are other periods  where i find my attention totally absorbed - of course this is not the composers fault but totally due to my mood
 

Having not been on the Beeb boards, I can't see a need for sensitivity, but I'll try to respect it.

Stu, you don't like Schubert? What the h*** is wrong with you? 

I completely understand, though don't share, the lukewarm attitude toward Mozart. Right now I am teaching a course in Classical form and analysis, which is supposed to focus on the work of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. The way it ends up being, Haydn gets 50% of our attention, Beethoven 35%, and Mozart about 15%. This is purely because the innovations of Haydn and Beethoven are easier to describe than those of Mozart.

Mozart gets trotted out for his clear examples (textbook cases of this or that technique), but an appreciation of him doesn't start with form (though of course the 'orthodoxy' of his forms is attributable to the fact that our 'canon' of forms owes him a huge debt of gratitude) but with instrumentation, melodic invention, and more heady topics like "troping" technique. The operas are an important exception -- they are true masterpieces also in their formal construction.

But with Schubert, I don't know where to begin.  I have never heard a piece of his that I didn't like. The late piano sonatas (with repeats where required!), the octet, the Cello Quintet, the G major String Quartet, lieder from the vignette ("Wanderers Nachtlied") to the ballad ("Grenzen der Menschheit")... he's a real heavyweight, in a different sense than Bruckner.

Apologies to those who have read this before, but I've a theory that whether Britten's music gets hold of you or not has quite a bit to do with when you first hear it, and that the man's own Peter Pan-ish qualities are in some way subsumed into his music, focussing its appeal particularly to the young and young-at-heart. One of the first LPs to arrive in the house in the mid-fifties was the Van Beinum Young Person's Guide and Four Sea Interludes and Passacaglia, and it was the record I loved most as a pre-teen.

I didn't hear any other Britten until I went to grammar school, but the record library there was quite well stocked with his works, and the highlights from Peter Grimes and the Spring Symphony became firm favourites. The War Requiem was premiered during my first year, the records were issued about a year later, and the Christmas following that, they were my main present. His music spoke very directly to me and touched me in a way that little else did (apart from certain other British, and a few French and American composers) in those frankly rather unhappy years away from home as a boarder. It was still being written, too, so there was more to discover: I came to know nearly all of the succeeding works as they appeared, and that increased the excitement.

Since then, there are other composers who may have moved him away from pole position for me, but the music you hear as a teenager tends to stay with you, either as part of the fabric of your being, or else something to kick against: for me Britten is definitely the former. There must be something special about any composer who can create such strong feelings pro and contra.


Incidentally, I've also mentioned before my problems with a high percentage of Mozart's work: I recognise his genius, and find some of the operas extraordinary, but so much of the rest of it seems to me to have gone from initial inspiration to manuscript without any struggle or intervention; it doesn't engage me, and that's what I want from music. My fault, not his, of course.

I agree with Ron regarding the music you hear as a teenager (or much younger, in my case) staying with you.  I was born and brought up with the music of Mozart and, even it seems really cheesy and naff to say so, it is absolutely a part of me which I cannot envisage being without - it's a massive part of my life.  Parental influence was a major factor in my musical upbringing.  My dad was (and still is) a great lover of Mozart's music and I cannot see that either of us could ever be swayed against it.

As a teenager, I foolishly allowed myself to be persuaded that Mahler's music was 'difficult' and I shied away from it without giving it a fair chance.  It was only at university (when I was lucky enough to have a wonderful lecturer who was an expert on it) that my eyes and ears were opened.

Your faune is ringheinghe.

I could mention Bruckner (oops I have done now) but several others have already done so.

Someone with whom I really can't get on is Telemann. Yes, I know he was supposed to have been far more highly regarded than JSB at the time - hard to imagine. I posted elsewhere about a tedious bit of Telemann I recently heard. His music does absolutely nothing for me.