Emanuel Overbeeke in De nieuwe muze, 2021, nr. 4:
‘Schönberger writes as a poet'

Els van Swol opnwww.8weekly.nl:
'... 54 catching, accessible and somewhat philosophical notes on changes in his musical taste…'

Maarten Steenmeijer, NBD Biblion:
'A treat to read.'

Rudy Kousbroek in PZC:
'Elmer Schönberger's essay - his Huizinga Lecture from December 2005, published in [the reissue of] Het Gebroken Oor - is in fact something of a miracle. [...] a unique and brilliant text in a unique and brilliant book.'

Ger Groot in NRC-Handelsblad:
'[...] Schönberger is unsurpassed in making contemporaries accessible.'

Anthony Fiumara in Trouw:
'Swimming against the stream of evolution, his essays always approach listening as the equivalent of breathing, [and] music as pure oxygen.'

Margriet de Moor in the preface to Het Gebroken Oor:
'I read a lot about music. I know of absolutely no one but Elmer Schönberger who can describe music equally to any old novelist.'

Roland de Beer in De Volkskrant:
...That is the greatest measure of Schönberger's narrative talent: whether you agree with him or not is of nominal relevance.'

Willem Jan Otten in Tirade:
''Where this prose thrives, no musicologist-prose survives.'

De wellustige tandarts & andere componisten
(The voluptuous dentist & other composers)
De Bezige Bij, 1985

Roland de Beer in De Volkskrant:
'Scintillating display from a counter-academic academic.'

Anton Haakman in Vrij Nederland:
'His portrait on the back flap offers a glimpse of the lining of his sport jacket. Brand: "New Man".'

See also the Digitale Bibliotheek

Robert Craft:
'The Apollonian Clockwork is an exhilarating account of a search, external and internal, for Stravinsky, both as a composer and as a man. (...) The most ingenious, sharply observed, and original book likely to be writeen about the composer for a long time.'

Richard Taruskin:
'The one book about Stravinsky Stravinsky would have liked.'

Paul Griffiths:
'What The Apollonian Clockwork has been devised to tell us is, of course, how Stravinsky ticks, and its methods are appropriately the Stravinskian ones of detachment, inspection and reconstitution.'

Gerrit Komrij in NRC Handelsblad:
'If Wilhelm Schön's subject had not been opera, but tulip bulbs or combating corns and callouses on rattlesnakes, I'd have read it with equal pleasure.'