On 21 June 1813, Arthur Wellesley, the Marquess of Wellington — later to be the Duke of Wellington — led combined military forces of Britain, Portugal, and Spain in a decisive victory against the French Army near Vittoria, Spain.
This calls for some music!
To commemorate Wellington’s victory against Napoleon, mechanical musical instrument maker Johann Nepomuk Mälzel proposed that Beethoven write some victory music for his panharmonicon, which employed a revolving drum with pins to trigger real musical instruments.
Beethoven finished the composition “Wellingtons Sieg oder die Schlacht bei Vittoria” (“Wellington's Victory, or the Battle of Vitoria”) by October — not for the panharmonicon but for a conventional orchestra heavy on brass and percussion.
“Wellington’s Victory” premiered on 8 December 1813 at a concert to benefit Allied soldiers disabled in battle. The same concert premiered the 7th Symphony. The Symphony was a hit, but “Wellington’s Victory” was an even bigger hit and became Beethoven’s most popular work.
“Wellington’s Victory” is divided in two movements: Battle and Victory.
The Battle movement begins with snare drums and trumpets followed by “Rule, Britannia!” to represent the British army. Then, snare drums and trumpets from the French army are heard.
We might expect France to be represented by “La Marseillaise” (as it is in Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” of 1880) but “La Marseillaise” was too closely associated with the Revolution. It was no longer allowed under Napoleon’s reign and for many years after. “La Marseillaise” was also considered treasonous in Vienna at the time, so to represent France, Beethoven instead uses the French folksong “Marlbrough s'en va-t-en guerre.” For modern English-speaking audiences, this has the disadvantage of being recognizable as the tunes “The Bear Went Over the Mountain” and “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”
Following the introductions of the two armies, the battle rages in which English and French cannons are represented by bass drums.
The Victory movement of “Wellington’s Victory” includes variations based on “God Save the King” in the tempo of a minuet and as a fugato.
Recall that Beethoven had previously written piano variations for both “God Save the King” (Day 172) and “Rule Britannia” (Day 172).
#Beethoven250 Day 262
Wellington’s Victory (Opus 91), 1813
The argovia philharmonic (they seem to prefer lowercase) is based in the Aargau canton of Switzerland.
Even at the time, there were some who recognized “Wellington’s Victory” as a shabby piece of work. The Czech pianist and composer Johann Wenzel Tomaschek wrote that he was “very painfully affected to see a Beethoven, whom Providence had probably assigned to the highest throne in the realm of music, among the rudest materialists. I was told, it is true, that he himself had declared the work to be folly, and that he likes it only because with it he had thoroughly thrashed the Viennese.” (Thayer / Forbes, p. 565)
For Carl Dahlhaus, “Wellington’s Victory (the ‘Battle Symphony’) is only a petrifact [an object formed by petrifaction], a parody of the heroic style established in the ‘Eroica’.” (“Beethoven,” p. 17)
Lewis Lockwood discusses “Wellington’s Victory” in a chapter entitled “The Fallow Years.” He calls it “a shameless concession to the political wave of the moment, written to win him acclaim as a patriotic Austrian artist.” (“Beethoven,” p. 338)
Lockwood sees nothing wrong with Beethoven “riding the euphoric wave that swept over Vienna after Napoleon’s recent defeats and that seemed to promise a new era of political recovery after years of oppression and defeat.” (p. 339) That is sincere.
What Lockwood finds reprehensible is for Beethoven to “go further and publish the work, moreover to give it an opus number and place it in the series of his important compositions.” This shows an untoward “need for public acclaim.”
For William Kinderman, “Wellington’s Victory” is the first of three “patriotic compositions from 1813 to 1814” that represent another “new path” for Beethoven, this time a path influenced by “economic and political factors”:
“In these works Beethoven appears as a pioneer of kitsch at the dawn of the age of mass production and modern commercial propaganda. This is a surprising role, perhaps, for a cultural hero of Beethoven’s stature, but one nonetheless supported by the historical evidence. Beethoven’s patriotic potboilers offer the spectacle of a great composer lowering his art to gain economic reward and court political favor. This episode in his career raises fundamental aesthetic and ethical questions.”
After examining the score, Kinderman concludes:
“The occasional subtle touches do little to relieve the impression of pastiche and bombast. Some of the same rhetorical figures appear here as in Beethoven’s important compositions, but an integrating aesthetic context is absent or undeveloped.” (“Beethoven” 190, 191, 197)
Barry Cooper (in “Beethoven,” p. 244) advises us to avoid comparing “Wellington’s Victory” with Beethoven’s other works: “[I]t is different in kind, designed to be entertaining rather than serious and sophisticated. Beethoven responded supremely well to the challenge of writing a programmatic work in an overtly vulgar style…. As with the folksong settings, Beethoven takes a time-honoured genre and raises it to a new level in a highly imaginative and original composition.”
In a spirited defense of “Wellington’s Victory,” British musicologist Nicholas Cook reviews the criticisms and invites us instead to “reconstruct the occasion” and hear the music “outside of the ideological framework of a retrospectively constructed Viennese Classicism.”
For early audiences, the sounds of battle represented a “grim and threatening reality” and “it might be better to think of it as a period equivalent of the opening sequence from Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979).”
The lack of complexity or depth in the music is “less an act of condescension … than a concomitant of the genre.” Beethoven could do the battle symphony as well as anything else.
Even if the work itself is rejected, the money and fame it earned remain historically vital:
“If … Wellingtons Sieg largely bankrolled the works of the final period, then it may also have generated the acclaim, the emotional investment, necessary for the prolonged critical and hermeneutic effort by which the late works were subsequently claimed for the canon.”
— Nicholas Cook, “The Other Beethoven: Heroism, the Canon, and the Works of 1813–14,” 19th-Century Music, Vol. 27, No. 1, 2003, pp. 3–24, jstor.org/stable/10.1525…
An ugly dispute soon developed between Beethoven and Mälzel about who was responsible for the conception and structure of “Wellington’s Victory.” Mälzel wanted to take the composition on the road. He performed it in Munich without Beethoven’s permission, leading to lawsuits.
Beethoven dedicated “Wellington’s Victory” to the “Prinz-Regenten von England Georg August Friedrich,” but Beethoven was frustrated that this dedication was not even acknowledged. (In 1820, the Prince Regent became George IV after the death of his father George III.)
Although the Prince Regent didn’t acknowledge (or even care about) receiving Beethoven's dedication of “Wellington’s Victory,” the work was first performed in London on 10 February 1815 and achieved great success. The English were as fond of patriotic bombast as the Austrians.