I’m trying to find the quote/critique/comment that Richard Wagner made about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. All I remember about it was that it was quite funny.
Perhaps this?:
“With the opening of the last movement Beethoven’s music takes on a more definitely speaking character: it quits the mold of purely instrumental music, observed in all the three preceding movements, the mode of infinite, indefinite expression. … It is wonderful how the master makes the arrival of the human voice and tongue a positive necessity, by this awe-inspiring recitative of the bass strings; almost breaking the bounds of absolute music already, it stems the tumult of the other instruments with its eloquence, insisting on decision, and passes at last into a songlike theme whose simple stately flow bears with it, one by one, the other instruments, until it swells into a mighty flood.” --Richard Wagner, 1846
Personally, I find this funnier:
“Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of bags of nails, with here and there an also dropped hammer.” --John Ruskin to John Brown, 1881
From this site, as well as other quotes and translations of the choral section.
If that was the quote, furryman has what can safely be called a unique sense of humor.
Well, this doesn’t answer the OP, but since you bring up Richard Wagner and funny remarks, who could forget Mark Twain’s remark that “Richard Wagner’s music isn’t nearly so bad as it sounds.”