Beckmesser

Beckmesser is the ugly music critic in Richard Wagner's Meistersinger von Nuernberg. He is portrayed as an unmusical, narrow-minded and self-opinionated person. His serenade to the beloved young woman Eva was a ridicoulous failure. Wagner aimed with this caricature at his ennemy Eduard Hanslick, the Viennese music critic who did not like Wagner's music.
A story from a time when music criticism was still taken seriously...