Rick: Let us not forget the small squad of Mozart haters, whose literary hero was the philistine Jim Dixon in Kingley Amis’s novel Lucky Jim. Hearing a tune, Jim identifies it as “some skein of untiring facetiousness by filthy Mozart.” This was considered terribly shocking back in 1954. Amis was spat at in the street and barred from entering respectable clubs. He spent the rest of his life futilely protesting that he actually liked Mozart, and that Jim Dixon was a character in a novel.

It would be nice to think that people could be that shocked by anything nowadays, let alone any opinion about classical music.