#clickbait: accidentally wrote an essay on wellingtons sieg

[impetuous-impulse]

Wellingtons Sieg: Aesthetically Pleasing or Populist Potboiler?

This is a post responding to @empirearchives on this question: "Was Wellington’s Victory popular in Vienna because of the quality of the music itself or because of the political context (Austrians celebrating the defeat of Napoleon)?” I examine the background of Wellington's Victory and its audiences in reference to Beethoven’s heroic aesthetic and in comparison to the Eroica. In my final paragraph, I also attempt to engage with this post by @diagnosed-anxiety-disorder. (Hi! I love your enthusiasm for classical music and Napoleonic history! It’s just that Idk how to socially interact djflskdjf,,,) WARNING: LONG.

To answer the question, Wellington's Victory—or, in German, Wellingtons Sieg—was entangled with its political context in the outset, so judging its popularity by separating its context from its aesthetic qualities is impossible. Let me touch on the political and aesthetic qualities of the piece in turn.

Wellingtons Sieg was comissioned by Johann Nepomuk Mälzel (aka. the guy who gave Beethoven his ear trumpets) for celebrating Wellington's success in the Battle of Vittoria. It was, further, made to be played on Mälzel's panharmonicon, which was a mechanical orchestra based off of barrel organ technology. At the very same time, real barrel organists would have been in the streets playing lowbrow pieces that celebrated Wellington, so the piece had common themes with the popular music of the day. Thus it is unsurprising that Beethoven wrote Wellingtons Sieg was "nothing but an occasional piece" [nichts als ein Gelegenheitsstück], but he did not mean it pejoratively; he was acknowledging its historicity.

When discussing musical merit, the arbiter of a piece's aesthetic qualities are always its audiences. Austria in 1813 was a police state that censored anti-Royalist sentiments and lauded pro-Royalist ones, so Wellingtons Sieg, commemorating an Austrian ally's victory, would have inavariably been well-received in terms of aesthetics and political content. Laura Turnbridge, in chapter six of Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces (2020), points out that Wellingtons Sieg "premiered in the University Hall on 8 December 1813, at a charity concert in aid of Austrian and Bavarian soldiers wounded in the recent Battle of Hanau.” Turnbridge continues:

Wellingtons Sieg was enthusiastically received and played again and again, including at no fewer than five benefit concerts in which Beethoven participated, on 2 January, 27 February, 29 November, 2 December and 25 December 1814. At the first of these, at the Großer Redoutensaal, Beethoven played up the piece’s spectacular potential by having the French and British bands advance towards each other down long corridors on either side of the hall. The hall seated up to a thousand people and the orchestra was unusually large for these concerts, numbering 120 players, an aspect that Beethoven noted with glee in his diaries [...]. Beethoven attempted to add a further patriotic spin to the January concert, trying to arrange for a statue of the Kaiser, which stood in the hall, to be revealed from behind a curtain on being summoned by Zeus in his incidental music for Die Ruinen von Athen (The Ruins of Athens). The Russian Emperor Alexander and other leaders were invited to attend his academy on 29 November, which also included the Seventh Symphony and a new cantata, Der glorreiche Augenblick [...].

The sovereigns and soldiers that Wellingtons Sieg was made for certainly loved its aesthetic qualities, but said qualities had different qualifiers to our aesthetic preferences of Western art music today. This means the overtly political nature of Wellingtons Sieg makes it impossible to be judged by modern aesthetics. Nevertheless, it cannot be said Wellingtons Sieg was only popular with the public, for it was appreciated for its artistry, or at least for the composer behind it. In these contexts, Beethoven was lionised as much as Wellington, the subject of his piece. The following is from Nicolas Mathew, in his 2006 article "History under Erasure: Wellingtons Sieg, the Congress of Vienna, and the Ruination of Beethoven's Heroic Style”:

Shortly after attending the Akademie on 2 January 1814 while in Vienna, the Romantic poet and Beethoven fanatic Clemens Brentano, brother of Beethoven's friend and correspondent Bettina, sent his hero the “Vier Lieder von Beethoven an sich selbst" (Four Beethoven Songs to the Composer Himself) and an effusive, barely coherent covering letter. The third poem resounds with a confluence of archaic musical and military imagery, taking the transposition of Beethoven and Wellington, Leyer und Schwert [lyre and sword], as its central conceit. "Du hast die Schlacht geschlagen, Ich habe die Schlacht getont" (You have fought the battle, I have set the battle to music), it begins, eventually reaching this exhortative finale: Die Rosse entspann' ich dem Wagen Triumpf! auf Tonen getragen, Zieht mein Held ein, der Ewigkeit Pforten Rufen in meinen Akkorden, Wellington, Viktoria! Beethoven! Gloria! [I slacken my steeds from the chariot Triumph! Carried upon tones, my hero moves into the Gates of Eternity Summoned in my chords, Wellington, Victoria! Beethoven! Gloria! ]

There was more fanboying, but you get the idea. Nor was the popularity of Wellingtons Sieg limited to the Congress of Vienna—it was celebrated long after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. In 1824, the highbrow musicians and music lovers who begged the increasingly reclusive Beethoven to put on a concert in Vienna (to combat the dominance of populist Italian opera) referenced only one of his compositions: "For years, ever since the thunders of the Victory at Vittoria ceased to reverberate, we have waited and hoped to see you distribute new gifts from the fullness of your riches to the circle of your friends.” Beethoven was evidently comfortable with the popularity his ode to Wellington’s victory earned, as he alludes to the piece when writing to Count Franz Brunsvik on 13 February 1814 about the progress of war: "no doubt you are delighted about all the victories—and mine also.” It is implicit that Wellington’s victory is also Beethoven’s triumph—while Beethoven's heroic image was constructed in Napoleon's Eroica, his heroic credentials are equally prominent in Wellington’s Sieg. 

To me, the Eroica and Wellingtons Sieg are two articulations of the same heroic theme (regardless of how “bad” they sound). A. B. Marx, a Berlin critic that Beethoven admired, compared both works in a dialectical analysis. Aside from defending the unsutble tone painting of Wellingtons Sieg, he posited that Wellingtons Sieg was an external realisation of the internal Kampf-und-Sieg of the Eroica—two sides of the same coin. As Mathew puts it,

Wellingtons Sieg—with its fanfares and marches, its battle, its realism, its extrinsic historical derivation, its sheer explicitness—offers a perspective on the poetic content of the Eroica. By turning the Eroica toward the world—by providing a concrete realization of its guiding poetic idea, as Marx would have it—Wellingtons Sieg becomes a hermeneutic key, a kind of musical exegesis.

While Marx toned down the narrative foiling of the Eroica and Wellingtons Sieg in a later biography of Beethoven, he cannot deny that both works spring from the same heroic seed—Beethoven’s struggle-and-victory model of composition. Their popularity as of 1813 in large part came from its famous composer, whose name made it part of the Viennese repertoire. From an artistic perspective, rather than being partial to either side of the political conflict, Beethoven's heroic approach to music simply found the next Great Man to eulogise. In doing so, he transcended the “greatness” of both his subjects, a greatness that is only beginning to be deconstructed by scholarship.

It was only when the Napoleonic era grew increasingly distant that Wellingtons Sieg was seen as problematic by critics. Mathew points out that while there were mixed responses to the piece, it was a more than decade later that "contemporary critical misgivings about Beethoven's imitative music prompted a fully argued polemic against Wellingtons Sieg" (notably, Gottfried Weber's 1825 review of it in his journal Cäcilia, who Beethoven responded to with his profanity-laden quote). Weber’s opinion shaped musicology’s indictment of Wellingtons Sieg. It was certainly aesthetically pleasing to the shell-shocked veterans of 1813, and continued to delight highbrow and lowbrow audiences until political and musicological circumstances pushed it into obscurity. Finally, let’s face it—Wellingtons Sieg simply didn’t fit the image of apolitical, isolated artistry that Beethoven enthusiasts wanted to elevate him to, by conveniently forgetting that Beethoven had to eat too.

Serious analysis aside, here’s a hot take: I think Napoleon would have enjoyed Wellingtons Sieg a lot more than Beethoven’s famous works. According to the article @empirearchives has linked for us (a good starter guide), that man’s music taste was so out of line with what we think is the Western canon today! Paisiello certainly isn’t being revered as the Italian genius of the 1790s by the general public. And which average classical music enthusiast has heard of Jean François Le Sueur, much less broadcasted the music of Napoleon’s coronation on the radio? The musical hegemony of Beethoven, apparent sympathiser of Napoleon, has ironically shoved the pleasant, simple melodies and the opera that Napoleon liked out of the spotlight. And that was exactly the type of music a great number of Beethoven’s contemporaries liked—give Napoleon catchy motifs based on war marches, easy melodies, and some tone-painting, and he’s a happy audience.

I hope my response isn't too confusing and that it shed some light on the question. If you want any further sources or proper citations, please ask and I will reply accordingly!

#clickbait: accidentally wrote an essay on wellingtons sieg #ludwig van beethoven #napoleon bonaparte #classical music #congress of vienna #wellington's victory #to everyone whose posts i haven't read!! sorry!!! i'll catch up on them when i can ;;;;;