George du Maurier
“The Latest Fashion in Music at Home”
Punch 80 (April 2, 1881), page 150
Here du Maurier pillories the “advanced” taste of Aesthetes for chromatic music, which challenged established structures of key and tonality, by composers such as Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt, who visited London to great acclaim in 1886. Those of Aesthetic tastes now affected to despise the simplicity of Mendelssohn’s music, written fifty years earlier: the pretentious Miss Prigsby explains to a bluff military man: “We nevah listen to Mendelssohn…because there are no wrong notes in it!”
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