Hi Ask Historians! I was wondering - did people think classical music, like Beethoven's 5th, was evil when it was performed? How and when did people grow to accept this music, and was that music replaced any another "evil" form of music?
Reason I ask this is people have said Rock and Metal were "evil" a few decades ago (or they still do), people say dubstep is "crazy", and then there was Disco Demolition Night.
How was classical music accepted, and more specifically, what did people think was "evil" music?
The reception of music is a difficult subject. There are many factors in play here.
The term you use, "evil." If we take it in the way some conservative christians use when talking about Metal, well... The people who have issues with that music are probably focusing on the subculture that surrounds it. One side is using controversial elements, and the other side reacts exactly as it was expected...
The metal subculture is quite... intense. It's kind of alienating, they do things to separate themselves from mainstream society.
Subcultures were not really a thing before the 19th-20th century. Our modern way of life with mass media, fast transportation and communication and mass production created situations that didn't exist back then, so we can't really compare this kind of phenomena.
The "crazy" in dubstep. If we take it in the way many grandmas (and some younger individuals) react to dubstep... If your music has consisted mostly of melody, regular patterns, and mostly consonance, dubstep might be problematic at first. Dubste relies on timbre, rhythm and change. It is still quite consonant, but the emphasis is not in plain melodies. The frequent usage of samples adds complexity: music is no longer about guys with fixed instruments playing predictably, "random" sounds can come and go and all hell can break loose at any given moment (and dubstep fans love when that happens). This music is made to be different, very different from what grandma was used to hear.
Generational differences are not really new, but the speed at which trends come and go has been accelerated by our modern way of life. Ten years make a huge difference in terms of what music is popular these days, ten years were (apparently) not that big a deal in the times of Beethoven.
Disco Demolition Night... Why have books been burned? Much of that applies.
Why the hostility towards disco? Because it was different? Because it was mechanical, artificial, synthetic? Because it was embraced by gay culture? Disco Demolition Night might have not been just about ideology, just look at the aftermath!
So, getting to your question.
As lady /u/caffarelli already said, the music of some composers was not enthusiastically received some times. Again, we can find some extra musical elements. Religion and some animosity towards foreigners, and foreign things, some times played a part.
Politics can also be relevant. Some composers would speak highly of the new music created by their friends and students/teachers, but might harshly complain about the music of their adversaries. Friendships have gone sour, musicians losing a highly paid position to somebody else. Ideological differences on what "good music" should be like.
In any case, we have surviving reviews, letters, anecdotes and so on from the past. Different people have praised and condemned the same music after attending the same concert, or analyzing the same score. Some times factions would be form and some would be quite vocal about their ideas.
Can we say it happened for the same reasons it happens now? I think in many case we can't compare the situations. But we can find some of the same elements influencing the discussions.
"Evil" might be putting too sharp of a point on it, but for some areas of "classical" music it got a definitely suspicious reception, Italian opera's receptions in foreign lands was often very rocky, particularly so in England, which I have talked about previously. Generally in any land non-Catholic Italian musicians and Italian music were regarded with some suspicion, though that didn't necessarily have much to do with the music.
Wagner's music also had some rough receptions, including persistent rumors that it killed people, as his first Tristan for Tristan and Isolde died after only 4 performances. The discordant, atonal style of Wagner was also more strange then than it is now, so many simply rejected it musically. I'm not sure to what extent I'd say people thought it was "evil" though.
It's worth noting that the bulk of what we now call "classical music" is "art music," the art-folk-pop divide is a bit hairy so I won't spread it too much, but this music was intended as highfalutin' artistic output and almost always funded by the wealthy. Most art music that composers were writing back then, and even today if you look at modern composers, was accepted. There is the intersection of class and privilege in this, which naturally makes it hard to usefully compare contemporary receptions of baroque/classical/romantic to 1950s American rock concerts.
Not necessarily in the same way, but the tritone, which is a interval of three tones and is very dissonant, was often thought of as the "Devil in Music." While there are stories that the Church actually banned the use of tritones in music because of this association, those are probably not true. However, Classical and Baroque composers used that interval to indicate evil in a piece.