No, it's not Wellington's Victory, nor was it impossible for Beethoven to embarrass himself musically. But why keep yourself guessing. Check out the video for the dirty details.
My freshman year in college musicology class, our professor was covering programmatic music covering a specific event. "Here we have Beethoven's Wellington's Victory, in which you make a little noise, and have a little fun. And also Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, where you make even MORE noise and have even LESS fun." (I disagreed at the time and still do.) However, he was such a devotee of Haydn, and pretty much thought western music development ended with Haydn's death. But he had his weakness. A friend delivered some papers to him at his home, and found him vacuuming to Tchaikovsky's 4th blaring loudly from his stereo. The professor said he was satisfying his sweet tooth. He had a very dry sense of humor.
Thank you for bringing back the aroma of my university music major days . There was the avant-garde "everything written between 1600 and 1950 is crap" crowd. The Rennaisance Music prof admitted he listened to Debussy or Rachmaninov when he was "in a sugary mood". There was the Golden Boy pianist (who later went on to the Van Cliburn Competition) and the diva soprano. Another prof said "that's just not the way to play Schubert" after Horowitz' LP on the Moonlight and four Schubert Impromptus came out, about 1973. Oh, I had my predilections and defended fiefdoms too, and still do. But they were all SO much more sophisticated than poor little me........
Even with a cursory glance at the score one marvels at the way Beethoven notated each and every rifle shot and volley as well as the cannons and assorted ordnance. It's far more sophisticated and ingenious than Tchaikovsky's 1812. The final variations aren't too shabby either.
I always thought The Consecration of the House to be the dullest, least sexy title of anything in all of creation, but your comments moved me off my butt to FINALLY listen to it (Muti, Toscanini.) It's suddenly one of my favorite orchestral movements by Beethoven. Fabulous! The allegro theme is not unfamiliar. The title still sucks.
As long as the music is terrific! But I hear you. Imagine a thrilling series: The Painting of the House, The Cleaning of the House, The Roofing of the House...
I love this series, because by singling out the very few "lemons" great composers have written, we can actually better understand why them, and the rest of their output, is so great.
Two other nominations: The King Stephen Overture, an embarrassing potboiler, and The Glorious Moment cantata, which sounds like a parody of Beethoven' heroic style. I notice another commenter included this cantata.
Thanks for talking sense about Wellington's Victory. As a test, I ask people if they can name three pieces with cannons. Even people who hate classical music will mention the 1812. All who love classical music know Wellington's Victory. The Beethoven and Tchaikowsky pieces sound like works of genius after one hears the the third piece with cannons -- the most embarrassing work by ANYONE. I'm sure Dave knows what I'm talking about.
No. Prokofiev is infinitely better than what I'm talking about. Look for Lumbye's "Battle of Idstedt." More cannons than the 1812. Tries SO hard to be majestic, but it is the very definition of impotence. After hearing it, you will have a renewed appreciation for the genius of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky.
Dave, you are a genius of musical criticism, but oddly, I have always enjoyed the Overture for Kotzebue's The Ruins of Athens. Perhaps this is because of the extramusical association with this famous city and its sad decline under the Ottoman Empire. And by the way, did you know that Kotzebue, the author of the eponymous play, was assassinated by a Nationalistic university student? How odd, and how modern.
Beethoven biographer Edmund Morris wrote that, in being acclaimed by his contemporaries for 'Wellington's Victory' and 'Der glorreiche Augenblick', the composer had the experience of receiving his greatest approbation for the nadir of his achievement.
Dave, your my Mr. Jones of fun, informative music critic crack. I have to get a fix nearly every day. Never noticed the construction of the Overture, I have Beecham's recording of the complete incidental music. The Turkish March was transcribed by Anton Rubinstein, and the Dervish Chorus for piano by St. Saens. There's another beautiful chorus in there, too. I'll now have to see if you've reviewed the complete Egmont music.........
I feel that his most embarrassing orchestral work is the Namensfeier Overture. Occasional Overture he called it and it really goes nowhere... Ruins of Athens with the right performance can be redeemed. It needs gravitas in the slow section and the banal passage minimal rhetoric. It can be done. Karajan and Beecham did it.
@@fabiopaolobarbieri2286 The Coffee Cantata is great! I can enjoy the sacred cantatas, but I BELIEVE in coffee! (I might nominate that song about burning his finger on a pipe and comparing the pain to the fires of hell.)
@@fabiopaolobarbieri2286 As Dave said in a video about his Bach problem: His secular cantatas are stupid, but it doesn't matter. His church cantatas are stupid as well, and it does matter. I cannot pinpoint some particular egregiously stupid and joyless example of Bach's cantatas, any one will do: When contemplating Christ's wounds I have some faint hope of escaping eternal damnation, but I doubt I will (I made this one up, but it is the general tenor of most of his cantatas). So perhaps we could nominate his entire body of church cantatas as his most embarrassing work : wasting much of the world's most sublime music on making people feel unworthy, unhappy, and afraid of eternal damnation.
I discovered this channel a few days ago and was intrigued by the titles "...Most Embarrassing Work..." which I immediately interpreted as "...the worst work...". I can now see that this is absolutely not the case. This video clearly shows what you mean, and it's very interesting. Your arguments for this Beethoven work are convincing. Someone just mentioned the Hammerklavier Sonata. I have to say that I don't rank it among Beethoven's peaks, nor his 16th quartet. They're obviously not embarrassing works in the sense that you mean, but I find that they lack the qualities of his monuments.
As a newbie I’d peruse my high school library’s Grove Dictionary for starters and under LVB’s works was a piece called Der Glorreiche Augenblick. The instrumentation list was intriguing: chorus, soloists, and full orchestra including percussion. But there was no other reference to it anywhere (this was decades before the Internet and TH-cam), and even Sam Goody’s, which had EVERYTHING, had not a single recording of it… so I figured that, at least as far as being treated as a pariah by the greater musical world was concerned, this was Beethoven’s most embarrassing work.
Never heard it, but there are doubtless recordings of it by now. Just flashed on his Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, also unknown to me. And the "Bundeslied".
Wasn't The Consecration of the House overture written for another production of the Kotzebue play? If so, then that would be evidence Beethoven knew the incidental music needed a better overture.
I'm not arguing in favour of the ouverture - apart from anything else, I can't remember it, which is rare for a Beethoven Ouverture. But the whole suite is, by your definition, embarrassing. It is mostly magnificent, with the great sacred march "Schmuckt die Altaere" being the best of a fantastic bunch, but Beethoven has wasted his genius on the dumbest piece of occasional flattery ever. It's as if he had used his genius to create advertising jingles. The subject of "The Ruins of Athens" is so fantastically ridiculous, overblown, absurd, that it aqctually makes it worse that Beethoven's music for it should be so great. It's like having a splendid redwood tree in a garbage dump.
@@DavesClassicalGuide As music, I love it. I have sometimes used Schmuckt die Altaere to compliment something or someone whom I thought deserved the highest praise, and the bass solo reminds me of Mozart's Sarastro. But the subject is so dumb...
I was thinking that you would choose "Christ on the Mount of Olives." It's not recorded a lot and what I've heard on what recordings of it exists they are not that good. The "Hallelujah" (" Welten singen Dank und Ehre ")which comes at the end is probably the most well known work, but my thought is if someone with the skill, perhaps Gunter Wand, had their control of the forces the piece would mean something. The only recording I have of it was on Hanssler Classic and Muscial Heritage Society made it available back in the days. As much as I like Helmuth Rilling conducting the ensemble, it seems as if everything before leading up to the"Welten singen..." doesn't lead up to the finale of the piece. It's like "let's record this and when we get to the finale" let's pull out all the stops because this is what everyone is waiting for."Someone leading the orchestra, soloists, and chorus has got to better prepare those forces so that even the smallest work like a recitative or aria or chorus stands out as important as the final 4 minutes and 5 seconds making it a cohesive work instead of a series of of smaller less recognizable works leading up to the "big bang."
Das Neue Orchester under Christoph Spering is good performance. Concentus musicus Wien under Nikolaus Harnoncourt is good, especially in the final chorus, giving the trombones some needed prominence.
It's not an embarrassing work, obviously, but I always feel really bad for the tenor who has to sing the march in the last movement of the 9th. That tune makes no sense for the human voice.
@@WMAlbers1I think the Mass in C is charming. Transcended to the power 9 by the Missa Solemnis but still a very pleasant corner, a shady nook, on the Beethoven estate. It provided Beecham and Giulini with two of their best recordings.
After looking at that score the, the ENTIRE tenor part is virtually unsingable. Not just the solo but the chorus too. It is however pretty genius the way it outlines the harmonies, just extremely hard to sing even for a soloist, let alone a choir
Hammerklavier Sonata would be my vote. I wanted to drape myself across the keyboard in mid sonata and defend the poor instrument from that abuse. What did that piano ever do to hurt him?
First time I heard this was driving and tuning in during mid sonata. It was such an assaultive angry piece of music that determined to listen until the end just to see who the bozo was who wrote it. It not only is IMHO the worst thing Beethoven wrote but in my top 10 of worst classical pieces ever written in the standard repertoire
@@barrymoore4470 Etsi omnes, ego non. To me, Hammerklavier will always be Beethoven's ugliest sonata. It wants to seem powerful, but only succeeds in being brutal. It wants to seem complex, but is merely complicated.
@@paulschlitz5256 The man was deaf by then. And frustrated/angry/disenchated because of it. This I look upon as direct expression of his violent attempts to break GODDAM through his impairment back to the realm of sound! It is said Beethoven's last piano was so beaten during his last years it was beyond repair... P. S.: Look at the name given the piece. "Hammer. Klavier". That is what is basically done with it.
My freshman year in college musicology class, our professor was covering programmatic music covering a specific event. "Here we have Beethoven's Wellington's Victory, in which you make a little noise, and have a little fun. And also Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, where you make even MORE noise and have even LESS fun." (I disagreed at the time and still do.) However, he was such a devotee of Haydn, and pretty much thought western music development ended with Haydn's death. But he had his weakness. A friend delivered some papers to him at his home, and found him vacuuming to Tchaikovsky's 4th blaring loudly from his stereo. The professor said he was satisfying his sweet tooth. He had a very dry sense of humor.
Thank you for bringing back the aroma of my university music major days . There was the avant-garde "everything written between 1600 and 1950 is crap" crowd. The Rennaisance Music prof admitted he listened to Debussy or Rachmaninov when he was "in a sugary mood". There was the Golden Boy pianist (who later went on to the Van Cliburn Competition) and the diva soprano. Another prof said "that's just not the way to play Schubert" after Horowitz' LP on the Moonlight and four Schubert Impromptus came out, about 1973. Oh, I had my predilections and defended fiefdoms too, and still do. But they were all SO much more sophisticated than poor little me........
With Beethoven, most of the major embarrassment is outside the music! 😂
Oh I'm SO glad you didn't say "Wellington's Victory" was embarassing! I actually really like that piece. Its GREAT for youth symphony orchestras!
Even with a cursory glance at the score one marvels at the way Beethoven notated each and every rifle shot and volley as well as the cannons and assorted ordnance. It's far more sophisticated and ingenious than Tchaikovsky's 1812. The final variations aren't too shabby either.
I always thought The Consecration of the House to be the dullest, least sexy title of anything in all of creation, but your comments moved me off my butt to FINALLY listen to it (Muti, Toscanini.) It's suddenly one of my favorite orchestral movements by Beethoven. Fabulous! The allegro theme is not unfamiliar. The title still sucks.
As long as the music is terrific! But I hear you. Imagine a thrilling series: The Painting of the House, The Cleaning of the House, The Roofing of the House...
@@DavesClassicalGuide It is also a remarkable hommage of Beethoven to Handel, his preferred composer.
@@DavesClassicalGuide Sounds like foreseeing Richard Strauss, really. :)
I love this series, because by singling out the very few "lemons" great composers have written, we can actually better understand why them, and the rest of their output, is so great.
Glad David did not do the obvious and pick Wellington'r victory - which has come good stuff in it as well as just stage setting.
Two other nominations: The King Stephen Overture, an embarrassing potboiler, and The Glorious Moment cantata, which sounds like a parody of Beethoven' heroic style. I notice another commenter included this cantata.
I am guessing that Shostakovich will be featured in a video....Song of the Forrests?
Shouldn't it be the 12th? The Dawn of Humanity? Yeah, sure, Dmitri.
Thanks for talking sense about Wellington's Victory. As a test, I ask people if they can name three pieces with cannons. Even people who hate classical music will mention the 1812. All who love classical music know Wellington's Victory. The Beethoven and Tchaikowsky pieces sound like works of genius after one hears the the third piece with cannons -- the most embarrassing work by ANYONE. I'm sure Dave knows what I'm talking about.
Prokofiev right?
No. Prokofiev is infinitely better than what I'm talking about. Look for Lumbye's "Battle of Idstedt." More cannons than the 1812. Tries SO hard to be majestic, but it is the very definition of impotence. After hearing it, you will have a renewed appreciation for the genius of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky.
@@CannonfireVideo oh wow, never come across that before, I’ll have to check it out XD
Dave, you are a genius of musical criticism, but oddly, I have always enjoyed the Overture for Kotzebue's The Ruins of Athens. Perhaps this is because of the extramusical association with this famous city and its sad decline under the Ottoman Empire. And by the way, did you know that Kotzebue, the author of the eponymous play, was assassinated by a Nationalistic university student? How odd, and how modern.
I enjoy it too, but as I've said so many times, that's not the point!
@@DavesClassicalGuide OK, OK I get it.
Good choice. I find Der glorreiche Augenblick kind of embarrassing too.
Wellington's Victory was by far one of his most popular work during his lifetime... The public is never wrong LOL
Beethoven biographer Edmund Morris wrote that, in being acclaimed by his contemporaries for 'Wellington's Victory' and 'Der glorreiche Augenblick', the composer had the experience of receiving his greatest approbation for the nadir of his achievement.
Dave, your my Mr. Jones of fun, informative music critic crack. I have to get a fix nearly every day. Never noticed the construction of the Overture, I have Beecham's recording of the complete incidental music. The Turkish March was transcribed by Anton Rubinstein, and the Dervish Chorus for piano by St. Saens. There's another beautiful chorus in there, too. I'll now have to see if you've reviewed the complete Egmont music.........
I feel that his most embarrassing orchestral work is the Namensfeier Overture. Occasional Overture he called it and it really goes nowhere... Ruins of Athens with the right performance can be redeemed. It needs gravitas in the slow section and the banal passage minimal rhetoric. It can be done. Karajan and Beecham did it.
You don't dare to do Bach, do you?😏
Sure. Why not? He was just a guy.
That's splendid news!
@@DavesClassicalGuide The Coffee Cantata?
@@fabiopaolobarbieri2286 The Coffee Cantata is great! I can enjoy the sacred cantatas, but I BELIEVE in coffee! (I might nominate that song about burning his finger on a pipe and comparing the pain to the fires of hell.)
@@fabiopaolobarbieri2286 As Dave said in a video about his Bach problem: His secular cantatas are stupid, but it doesn't matter. His church cantatas are stupid as well, and it does matter. I cannot pinpoint some particular egregiously stupid and joyless example of Bach's cantatas, any one will do: When contemplating Christ's wounds I have some faint hope of escaping eternal damnation, but I doubt I will (I made this one up, but it is the general tenor of most of his cantatas). So perhaps we could nominate his entire body of church cantatas as his most embarrassing work : wasting much of the world's most sublime music on making people feel unworthy, unhappy, and afraid of eternal damnation.
I discovered this channel a few days ago and was intrigued by the titles "...Most Embarrassing Work..." which I immediately interpreted as "...the worst work...". I can now see that this is absolutely not the case. This video clearly shows what you mean, and it's very interesting. Your arguments for this Beethoven work are convincing.
Someone just mentioned the Hammerklavier Sonata. I have to say that I don't rank it among Beethoven's peaks, nor his 16th quartet. They're obviously not embarrassing works in the sense that you mean, but I find that they lack the qualities of his monuments.
As a newbie I’d peruse my high school library’s Grove Dictionary for starters and under LVB’s works was a piece called Der Glorreiche Augenblick. The instrumentation list was intriguing: chorus, soloists, and full orchestra including percussion. But there was no other reference to it anywhere (this was decades before the Internet and TH-cam), and even Sam Goody’s, which had EVERYTHING, had not a single recording of it… so I figured that, at least as far as being treated as a pariah by the greater musical world was concerned, this was Beethoven’s most embarrassing work.
Sam Goodys music store. What a blast from the past!
That's roughly from the same background as Wellington's Victory, celebrating the defeat of Napoleon.
Never heard it, but there are doubtless recordings of it by now. Just flashed on his Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, also unknown to me. And the "Bundeslied".
Love Liszt's piano transcription of it though!
Interesting choice. I don't know why Beethoven didn't develop his ideas and tunes in that piece. It's actually rather charming. ...
Because it's a theatrical overture--it's not the absence of development that's a problem--it's the absence of repetition, of balance.
Wasn't The Consecration of the House overture written for another production of the Kotzebue play? If so, then that would be evidence Beethoven knew the incidental music needed a better overture.
Good point.
I'm not arguing in favour of the ouverture - apart from anything else, I can't remember it, which is rare for a Beethoven Ouverture. But the whole suite is, by your definition, embarrassing. It is mostly magnificent, with the great sacred march "Schmuckt die Altaere" being the best of a fantastic bunch, but Beethoven has wasted his genius on the dumbest piece of occasional flattery ever. It's as if he had used his genius to create advertising jingles. The subject of "The Ruins of Athens" is so fantastically ridiculous, overblown, absurd, that it aqctually makes it worse that Beethoven's music for it should be so great. It's like having a splendid redwood tree in a garbage dump.
Actually, I think the rest of the incidental music is lots of fun.
@@DavesClassicalGuide As music, I love it. I have sometimes used Schmuckt die Altaere to compliment something or someone whom I thought deserved the highest praise, and the bass solo reminds me of Mozart's Sarastro. But the subject is so dumb...
I was thinking that you would choose "Christ on the Mount of Olives." It's not recorded a lot and what I've heard on what recordings of it exists they are not that good. The "Hallelujah" (" Welten singen Dank und Ehre ")which comes at the end is probably the most well known work, but my thought is if someone with the skill, perhaps Gunter Wand, had their control of the forces the piece would mean something. The only recording I have of it was on Hanssler Classic and Muscial Heritage Society made it available back in the days. As much as I like Helmuth Rilling conducting the ensemble, it seems as if everything before leading up to the"Welten singen..." doesn't lead up to the finale of the piece. It's like "let's record this and when we get to the finale" let's pull out all the stops because this is what everyone is waiting for."Someone leading the orchestra, soloists, and chorus has got to better prepare those forces so that even the smallest work like a recitative or aria or chorus stands out as important as the final 4 minutes and 5 seconds making it a cohesive work instead of a series of of smaller less recognizable works leading up to the "big bang."
It's a bore (relatively speaking), but it's not embarrassing.
Das Neue Orchester under Christoph Spering is good performance. Concentus musicus Wien under Nikolaus Harnoncourt is good, especially in the final chorus, giving the trombones some needed prominence.
It's not an embarrassing work, obviously, but I always feel really bad for the tenor who has to sing the march in the last movement of the 9th. That tune makes no sense for the human voice.
Well, his other choral works ar not all up to par either. Take for instance the Mass in C major Op. 86. Embarrasingly conventional.
The Missa Solemnis is near or at the top of Beethoven's achievments. So the vocal parts are tough - but they are magnificent. @@WMAlbers1
@@WMAlbers1I think the Mass in C is charming. Transcended to the power 9 by the Missa Solemnis but still a very pleasant corner, a shady nook, on the Beethoven estate. It provided Beecham and Giulini with two of their best recordings.
After looking at that score the, the ENTIRE tenor part is virtually unsingable. Not just the solo but the chorus too. It is however pretty genius the way it outlines the harmonies, just extremely hard to sing even for a soloist, let alone a choir
Hammerklavier Sonata would be my vote. I wanted to drape myself across the keyboard in mid sonata and defend the poor instrument from that abuse. What did that piano ever do to hurt him?
Many would cite this as Beethoven's single greatest piano sonata.
First time I heard this was driving and tuning in during mid sonata. It was such an assaultive angry piece of music that determined to listen until the end just to see who the bozo was who wrote it. It not only is IMHO the worst thing Beethoven wrote but in my top 10 of worst classical pieces ever written in the standard repertoire
@@barrymoore4470 Etsi omnes, ego non. To me, Hammerklavier will always be Beethoven's ugliest sonata. It wants to seem powerful, but only succeeds in being brutal. It wants to seem complex, but is merely complicated.
@@paulschlitz5256 The man was deaf by then. And frustrated/angry/disenchated because of it. This I look upon as direct expression of his violent attempts to break GODDAM through his impairment back to the realm of sound! It is said Beethoven's last piano was so beaten during his last years it was beyond repair...
P. S.: Look at the name given the piece. "Hammer. Klavier". That is what is basically done with it.
I think your understanding of the Hammerklavier is perfect. Couldn’t have said it any better myself