With some great exceptions the Classical period bores me also. In addition to its other shortcomings already described, such as the maddening reliance on tonic-dominant, its preference for building using short repeated figures at the expense of longer lines can drive me crazy.
The great influence of Classical period forms like sonata form on the Romantics was not necessarily a good one. Charles Rosen has written of how sonata form in the Romantic period was often an empty shell that had lost its vitality, and ran counter to the Romantics' need to write in freer melodic patterns. Schubert for one might not have wandered around so long in his movements had he not been seeking to fill out a form not really suited to his more melodic talents. His lieder succeed better because they're more natural to him. The one Romantic composer who really used sonata form as a still-living structure was Brahms, who of course was not a typical Romantic composer but a sort of throwback to earlier periods, though a very great one.
Louis Armstrong's Hot Five records while famous are still generally unappreciated as supreme works of American genius and are mostly unlistened to. I have found they throw off new little details to appreciate for the first time even after 56 years of listening. His trumpet improvising after 1930 was almost always on a much lower level.
Beethoven bores me with his dramatic self-righteous insistent morality which comes thru clearly even in the non-program music.
Bach is boring sometimes, especially in arias that are not particularly inspired but written out to a predetermined standard form with their very long repetitions. But on the other hand the number of really great works he wrote is enormous. Someone who does not "get" him is entitled to his opinion but is really missing out on a heck of a lot of supremely great music.
Rachmaninoff's music has mostly a single theme: lachrymose self-pity.
Hemingway is a great writer so unappealing in character and personality that I decline to even try him.
Likewise Woody Allen. Someone who with the whole wide world before him could not find anyone to marry except his childrens' sister is the ultimate in narcissistic uncaring self-absorption, practically to the point of criminality. The children he parented, especially his two biological children who do not speak to him, are probably facing lives as difficult as those subjected to sex abuse. How the literati and elites still honor him and fawn to him is to me indicative of a pretty sick culture.
Probably drifting into Diner territory here, so I'll stop.
