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Published: Thursday, 07 November 2024 at 09:00 AM
‘Trivial, noisy and blatant’: sometimes even great composers write terrible music
Read on to discover why even the best composers sometimes produce terrible music…
There are many similarities between football and classical music – as Shostakovich, that fanatical footie fan, might have observed. In both fields, not everything goes according to form. If Arsenal were drawn in the FA Cup against, say, Enfield Town, you would bet your house on an Arsenal win. But every year some Premier League club plays awfully and gets knocked out by lowly opposition.
Terrible music… even great composers have off days
It’s the same with composers. Buy a ticket to a Beethoven concert and you expect (and nearly always get) a certain quality. It’s called genius. But even Beethoven had off-days. Years ago, someone decided it would be fun to perform his Wellington’s Victory beside the Wellington Arch in the middle of Hyde Park Corner in central London. What a disaster! Around the performers the traffic roared, but that wasn’t the main trouble. The problem was that you could still hear the music. It was terrible: trivial, noisy and blatant. How could the colossal mind that created the ‘Eroica’ and the late string quartets also have churned out this noisy dross?
Terrible music… popularity is no guarantee of quality
Yet we know that the work’s first performance was the biggest commercial success of Beethoven’s life. His fellow composers fell over themselves to take part. Spohr played in the violins. Salieri, Hummel and Meyerbeer boosted the vast percussion section. The audience loved it. Beethoven pocketed a small fortune.
All of which proves two things. First, popularity is no guarantee of quality. Even the composers themselves recognised that. To the end of his life Tchaikovsky was bemused, indeed dismayed, by the public’s ecstatic acclaim of his 1812 Overture, which he considered (correctly) to be one of his worst works. And secondly, even the greatest composers are capable of producing duds. In other words, genius doesn’t guarantee you will create a winner every time.
Terrible music… the pressure of deadlines
Can I suggest four reasons why that’s the case? The first is pressure: the pressure of time, of expectation, of relentless deadlines. Composers such as Bach and Haydn faced the 18th-century musical equivalent of an essay crisis every week of their working lives. No wonder some of Bach’s obscure cantatas and Haydn’s lesser symphonies seem to have been composed on autopilot. Or, in Handel’s case, that he raided the back-catalogue – his own or someone else’s – so frequently to get an opera finished before the curtain went up.
Terrible music… writing for the pay cheque
Secondly, you can sometimes almost feel a composer’s contempt for the commission, or the person commissioning, in the music they churn out. In other words, they are writing purely for the money, and it shows. I’m not sure how true that was of Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory. By 1813 he was thoroughly disillusioned with Napoleon. But it was certainly true of all those dreadful sycophantic cantatas and incidental pieces that Shostakovich and Prokofiev had to compose to appease Stalin. They did it because, if they didn’t, they would have been sent off to the gulags. But they certainly weren’t going to waste any real inspiration on the task.
Terrible music… sometimes inspiration just fails
Thirdly, you can blame posterity – us. We turn composers into gods who can do no wrong. Performers, record companies and radio stations obsess about presenting their ‘complete works’, irrespective of quality. Then we are confronted by, say, Mozart’s first 20 symphonies, or the try-out cantatas Elgar wrote in the 1890s, and wonder why they don’t inspire us. We feel cheated. We forget that even geniuses need time to find their own voice.
And fourthly? Well, tragically, that’s when none of the above applies. Inspiration simply fails. It affects the best of us from time to time. Does anyone think that Leonard Bernstein, who wrote some of the most scintillating music of the 20th century, was happy with those hopelessly dull and pretentious symphonies he felt he had to write? Or that Stravinsky, who thrilled and shocked the world with The Rite of Spring, really felt fulfilled by the grim 12-tone pieces he turned out late in life? And although some distinguished musicians have made the case for Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, the piece always strikes me as something he might have composed after waking up with a migraine, burning the toast, missing the train to work and spilling ink over his trousers.
But the true greats climb to the highest highs
As Oscar Wilde said, ‘Only the mediocre are always at their best.’ The definition of genius is not that you never have bad days. It’s that, on your good ones, you climb to heights nobody else can imagine.