The Composition Today
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. Many critics lump it into a category of so-called "battle pieces" along with Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture and Franz Liszt's Battle of the Huns: Charles Rosen writes that 'Beethoven's contribution lacks the serious pretentiousness or the incorporation of ideology of Mendelssohn's Reformation Symphony, or of Berlioz' Symphonie Funèbre et Triomphale, but it is only the less interesting for its modesty.'
In their book Men of Music, authors Wallace Brockway and Herbert Weinstock termed the piece an "atrocious potboiler".
Beethoven, having no illusions about the merits of this particular piece, responded protectively to similar criticism in his own time: "What I shit (scheisse) is better than anything you could ever think up!"
The composition has had somewhat of a renaissance in recent years as it forms the centre-piece of the Battle Proms Concerts which takes place at a number of stately homes around the UK. This is the only concert series known to play the piece with the full complement of 193 live cannon. Modern technology has allowed this piece to be played in this way using electronic firing devices, which are operated by the orchestra percussionist.
Read more about this topic: Wellington's Victory
Famous quotes containing the words composition and/or today:
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
“A new world is not made simply by trying to forget the old. A new world is made with a new spirit, with new values. Our world may have begun that way, but today it is caricatural. Our world is a world of things.... What we dread most, in the face of the impending débâcle, is that we shall be obliged to give up our gewgaws, our gadgets, all the little comforts that have made us so uncomfortable.... We are not peaceful souls; we are smug, timid, queasy and quakey.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)