Wellington's Victory

Bust of the composer (1812)

After the Battle of Vitoria, Beethoven's friend Johann Nepomuk Maelzel talked him into writing a composition commemorating this battle that he could notate on his 'mechanical orchestra', the panharmonicon, a contraption that was able to play many of the military band instruments of the day. However, Beethoven wrote a composition for large band (100 musicians), so large that Maelzel could not build a machine large enough to perform the music. As an alternative, Beethoven rewrote the Siegessinfonie for orchestra, added a first part and renamed the work Wellington's Victory.

The piece was first performed in Vienna on 8 December 1813 at a concert to benefit Austrian and Bavarian soldiers wounded at the Battle of Hanau, with Beethoven conducting. It was immediately popular with concertgoers. Also on the programme were the premiere of his Symphony No. 7 and a work performed by Maelzel's mechanical trumpeter.[2]

This performance, which featured 100 musicians, has been noted as being particularly loud. Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim described it as a "sonic assault on the listener" and the "beginning of a musical arms race for ever louder... symphonic performance", quoting an unnamed attendee as remarking that the performance was "seemingly designed to make the listener as deaf as its composer". Musicologist Frédéric Döhl described performances of this work as "not like an evening at the Berlin Philharmonie, but rather like a modern-day rock concert".[3]

Wellington's Victory is something of a musical novelty. The full orchestration calls for two flutes, a piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, six trumpets, three trombones, timpani, a large percussion battery (including muskets and other artillery sound effects), and a usual string section of violins I and II, violas, cellos, and double basses.

In the orchestral percussion section one player plays the timpani, the other three play the cymbals, bass drum and triangle. On stage there are two 'sides', British and French, both playing the same instruments: two side drums (englisches/französisches Trommeln in the score), two bass drums (Kanone in the score), two (four) ratchets, played by eight to ten instrumentalists.

The work has two parts: the Battle (Schlacht) and the Victory Symphony (Sieges Sinfonie). The first part is programme music describing two approaching opposing armies and contains extended passages depicting scenes of battle. It uses "Rule Britannia" for the British side and "Malbrough s'en va-t-en guerre" ("Marlborough has left for the war", also popularized today as "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow") for the French side.[4] Beethoven may have elected to not use "La Marseillaise" to represent the French forces, as Tchaikovsky later did in the 1812 Overture, perhaps because playing "La Marseillaise" was considered treasonous in Vienna at the time.

If this first part is pictorial music, the second is far from vulgar and exhibits some typical Beethoven composing techniques. It can be considered as a sonata form that, stripped of the development section, features an extended coda. The first theme is a fanfare in D major, which switches to the distant key of B-flat major for the second theme.[5] This is "God Save the King", the British national anthem:

However, the final cadence (bars marked E in the score above) is not played. Instead, motif D is repeated so as to switch back to D major and to the re-exposition of the fanfare theme. This is followed by the re-exposition of "God Save the King", now in the main key (D major) and adopting the pace of a "Tempo di menuetto moderato". Again the final cadence (E) is avoided and replaced by successive repetition of motif D, this time leading to a coda in imitative style. This fugal section ("Allegro") starts as a string octet (later joined by the full orchestra) with the phrase

stemming from phrase A of the "God Save the King" tune. Later a second phrase joins in, still in imitative style,

derived from the anthem's phrase B, thus building up a little double fugue. It all ends with a section based on motif

(which reworks motifs C+D of the original theme) and at last by a final derivative of phrase A:

The first version of "Wellington's Victory" was not written for an orchestra. Mälzel, known today primarily for patenting the metronome, convinced Beethoven to write a short piece commemorating Wellington's victory for his invention, the panharmonicon. It never caught on as anything more than a curiosity. Nonetheless, Mälzel toured Europe showing off Beethoven's work on the mechanical trumpeter and the enthusiasm for the music convinced Beethoven to turn it into a full-blown "victory overture".

The manuscript of the second part of this version was discovered by Willy Hess in a revised copy by the author (Hess 108).

The novelty of the work has waned, and "Wellington's Victory" is not performed often today. Many critics lump it into a category of so-called "battle pieces", along with Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture and Liszt's Hunnenschlacht (Battle of the Huns): Charles Rosen wrote that "Beethoven's contribution lacks the serious pretentiousness or the incorporation of ideology of Felix Mendelssohn's Reformation Symphony, or of Hector Berlioz's Symphonie funèbre et triomphale, but it is only the less interesting for its modesty."[6]

In their book Men of Music, Wallace Brockway and Herbert Weinstock termed the piece an "atrocious potboiler".

Beethoven was well aware of the triviality of the work and responded to similar criticism in his own time: "What I shit is better than anything you could ever think up!"[7]

• Wellingtons Sieg: Scores at the International Music Score Library Project
• Wellington's Victory or the Battle of Vittoria, Op. 91, composer's autograph manuscript, Berlin State Library
• Wellington's Victory or the Battle of Vittoria, Op. 91, copyist's manuscript, Berlin State Library
• Wellington's Victory or the Battle of Vittoria, Op. 91, Beethoven House