[1] Described by Gilbert Kaplan as "surely the most controversial and arguably the most influential journalist covering classical music",[1] his writings have been praised as entertaining and revealing, while others have accused them of sensationalism and criticized their inaccuracies.

Herman Trotter of The Buffalo News wrote that Lebrecht's "widely discussed 1992 book "The Maestro Myth" seems to have been a warm-up for his current magnum opus.

"[16] He also published Covent Garden: The Untold Story: Dispatches from the English Culture War, 1945–2000 (2000),[17] covering the history of the Royal Opera House.

His career as a novelist began in 2002 with The Song of Names (2002),[18] a tale of two boys growing up in wartime London and the impact of the Holocaust.

Lebrecht published a work of social history titled Genius and Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847–1947 by Oneworld (UK) in October 2019 and by Simon & Schuster (USA) in December 2019.

"[23] Rebecca Abrams in the Financial Times described the book as "[i]mpressively wide-ranging in scope and unflaggingly fascinating in detail".

"[25] Mark Glanville wrote in The Times Literary Supplement: "Lebrecht's book is an extended meditation on the question of what it is about Jews that has enabled them to change the world in so many different ways.

Besides major, familiar figures, such as Einstein, Freud, Marx, Proust and Schoenberg, his kaleidoscope of characters includes Rosalind Franklin, whose important work on the double helix has still not been fully recognized; Leo Szilard, who split the atom; and Albert Ballin, to whom Lebrecht attributes the invention of the hamburger.

I was startled, amused, sometimes delighted by such critiques as “Paul Badura-Skoda, recording on a Beethoven-era Erard, clunks about like bad plumbing”; or “The space between each note is separated like chess pieces on a world championship board”; or “A 1990 Brussels recording by the Russian exile Mischa Maisky with the Argentine wanderer Martha Argerich sounds like a morning-after hotel breakfast, desultory but deeply affectionate.” One moment he’s vulgar, the next moment he’s classy, but always, unfailingly, he’s interesting.'

[27] In 2007 the founder of Naxos Records, Klaus Heymann, sued Lebrecht's publisher, Penguin Books, for defamation in London's High Court of Justice.

As a result of the settlement, Penguin issued a statement acknowledging the baselessness of Lebrecht's accusations and apologising for "the hurt and damage which [Heymann] has suffered".

The publisher also agreed to pay an undisclosed sum in legal fees to Heymann, to make a donation to charity, to refrain from repeating the disputed allegations and to seek the return of all unsold copies of Lebrecht's book.

"[2]Lebrecht's polemical writings have drawn strong and diverse responses; Gilbert Kaplan described him in 2007 as "surely the most controversial and arguably the most influential journalist covering classical music.

"[1] Robert Craft praised The Maestro Myth as an "exposé of the business practices of orchestral conducting [that] is likely to be the most widely read classical music book of the year".

When he is on – as in his portraits of Karajan and Ronald Wilford, the Machiavellian power broker of Columbia Artists Management – his lance can be deadly.

Too much of The Maestro Myth in fact betrays the sensibility of a tabloid columnist who cannot distinguish between tattle and truth – and worse, doesn't seem to care.A generally skeptical sketch of Daniel Barenboim and his career ends with the unlikely image of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conductor standing alone "between the shoreline and the stinking slaughterhouses" – razed more than 30 years ago.

[36]The book [The Maestro Myth] is a syntactic miasma of received gossip, recycled anecdotes, rickety extrapolations and cultural penis-envy, with a gaffe-account in the hundreds.

In the same breath, though, Scheel is misidentified as the founder of the San Francisco Symphony.In Chicago (where Claudio Abbado was not "Solti's candidate" to succeed him), Daniel Barenboim (who was) "stands alone between the shoreline and the stinking slaughterhouses," razed more than 30 years ago.

About his native heath, he writes that "Georg Solti never wanted the job" of music director of London's Covent Garden Opera.

But Solti did want it; his dilemma in 1959 was whether to take the Deutsche Oper in Berlin plus the Hamburg Philharmonic, or Covent Garden plus the Los Angeles Phil.

Still, the little slips make one all the more leery of big gaffes.Contrary to what one reads, Kreisler and Joachim were not the only composers who wrote cadenzas for the Beethoven violin concerto.