Craig_Heldreth comments on Things you are supposed to like - Less Wrong

68 Post author: PhilGoetz 22 October 2011 02:04AM

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Comment author: Craig_Heldreth 21 October 2011 01:48:09PM *  7 points [-]

How confident are you that your Beethoven fugue informants are reliable?

I am not an expert, but I do own a dozen or so Beethoven CD's and I have never heard of "Beethoven's fugue" as a standalone title. I do know that there are some pieces he wrote which are widely disliked. In particular there is one called "Wellington's Victory" which the current wikipedia page says, among other things,

The novelty of the work has worn down over the last two-hundred years; as a result, "Wellington's Victory" is not much heard in concert halls today.

Now, one day around seven or eight years ago I was reading a piece in the Sunday New York Times which was titled something like "the worst music ever composed by the greatest composers". This Beethoven work was very close to the top of the list. Then, a day later on the classical music station they played the sucker, it did sound ridiculous, and it was obvious from the way the DJ spoke that one of his friends or co-workers had played a practical joke on him (or maybe he was a great practical joker of a DJ--which I doubt, because I listened to that station all the time and this was a third string substitute DJ) because he just went on and on about the fantastic, but not much appreciated Beethoven work. It was kind of surreal.

You are going to have to provide more evidence than some cut paste you tube comments to convince me of this:

Articulate music lovers with excellent taste praise this piece to heaven.

According to the wikipedia page on op 130,

After the first performance of this work, mixed reactions and publisher suggestion convinced Beethoven to substitute a different final movement, much shorter and lighter than the enormous Große Fuge. This new finale was written between September and November 1826. This movement is marked:

  1. Finale: Allegro

(Also I mostly agree with what the musicologist said in his comment.)

Comment author: PhilGoetz 21 October 2011 04:00:49PM *  4 points [-]

Yes, people disliked the Great Fugue more when it was performed than today. But this is also true of the 3rd symphony.

There's some relevant history to Wellington's Victory. In 1813, Beethoven was seen in Vienna as a has-been. He needed to get back into the public eye. He premiered WV together with his 7th symphony. WV was tremendously popular, and its success carried the 7th Symphony along with it, and brought Beethoven back into the public eye, so that he could write and sell more actually good music. This is a case where the contemporary taste was "wrong". But I don't know the most important fact, which is whether the musical snobs of the day identified WV as bad.

By contemporary accounts, Beethoven got a great kick out of conducting WV, what with firing cannons and making lots of noise, so I won't be cynical about it.

You can also see this pattern at work in the Beatles, who became popular by writing dance pop music like "Twist and Shout" (which is good, as pop, but is pop), and this enabled them to go on to record Sergeant Pepper's and the white album.

Comment author: Craig_Heldreth 21 October 2011 06:09:29PM 4 points [-]

OK I went and gave it a listen. The copy I have is in this 8 disk box.

  1. I like this piece very much.
  2. No idea if I like this more or less than any other Beethoven String Quartet. I like them all very much.
  3. I swear I heard at least ten distinct samples Rodgers & Hammerstein Sound of Music soundtrack.
  4. I was so convinced of this I was expecting to get real red meat when I googled on the following terms: (rodgers hammerstein sound music beethoven string quartet 13). Alas, all I got was a long list of orgs who had both of those items in their immense repertoires, but nothing like grouchy musicologist's friends writing back and forth pro and con at length on similarity and difference.
  5. A conjecture. My mom's favorite record was the Sound of Music soundtrack, and she had simple taste. I bet she would have liked the "grosse fugue" on one listen, from which I would argue that this piece is accessible.

(Also Rodgers and Hammerstein were going for a German folk music sound, so perhaps Beethoven and they were both independently derivative of the same sources. Or this connection could purely be a figment of my imagination.)

Comment author: komponisto 21 October 2011 06:03:02PM *  4 points [-]

But I don't know the most important fact, which is whether the musical snobs of the day identified [Wellington's Victory] as bad.

They did indeed. In fact, the snobbiest musician of that time was Beethoven himself, who responded to critics of the piece as follows:

"What I shit is better than anything you could ever think up!"

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