Blue Self-Portrait, by Arnold Schoenberg, circa 1910. Courtesy the Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna

The Lexicon of Musical Invective may be the only music reference book compiled mainly out of spite. Edited by the composer and conductor Nicolas Slonimsky, it’s a selection of hatchet jobs culled from the classical music press of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Part of the pleasure of the Lexicon is the simple fun of reading a takedown—more fun still because ad hominem insults were once a fixture of music criticism. But by emphasizing “biased, unfair, ill-tempered, and singularly unprophetic judgments,” Slonimsky was also…