Puzzling over the continued reluctance of music lovers to accept new music, I have turned to reading what critics had to say about earlier music when it, too, was new. It is difficult to remember today that even Beethoven did not meet with immediate comprehension. A modern reader may well be shocked by this review of Beethoven's Fidelio from a Vienna paper of 1806. "All impartial observers were in agreement that never was anything as incoherent, shrill, chaotic, and ear-splitting produced in music. The most piercing dissonances clash in a really atrocious harmony, and a few puny ideas only increase the disagreeable and deafening effect." Wagner fared no better with a critic of 1873 who found his music a wild chaos of tones. "It was as if a bomb had fallen into a large music factory and had thrown all the notes into confusion." In Boston the Evening Transcript of November, 1885, reporting that large numbers of people left the concert hall between movements of the Brahms C minor Symphony, adds regretfully that "to the larger part of our public Brahms is still an incomprehensible terror." Even Debussy's La Mer was, to a New York Post critic of 1907, "the dreariest kind of rubbish. Does anyone for a moment doubt that Debussy would not write such chaotic, meaningless, ungrammatical stuff if he could invent a melody?"