By and large, we like to fill the pages of BBC Music Magazine with our enthusiasm for composers and performers alike – it’s a wonderful world out there, teeming with musical talent. However, perhaps we sometimes go over the top in our enthusiasm. Not every musician is beloved by every music lover, after all, and even the very greatest can split opinion as to the true level of their genius. So who are the composers that our writers secretly don’t believe deserve their place at the top table? Here, five come out and name their ‘most overrated’ – and please remember, it’s not meant to be taken personally.
Overrated composers: Hector Berlioz (1803-69)
By Natasha Loges
My first encounter with Berlioz was singing his Grande Messe de Morts (Requiem) in a London choral society. Despite my decades of experience, it felt like pushing through a Tough Mudder obstacle course – and the music was definitely not worth it. I fled the choir, initially reproaching myself for my inadequacy – but was comforted when I learned that some of Berlioz’s own choristers had complained about singing the work and resigned, together with the choirmaster! Good composers write formusicians, not against them, unless the aim is to trigger a laryngitis epidemic.
My second encounter was teaching the five-act, five-hour behemoth-opera Les Troyens in a music survey course I inherited. I dutifully studied the massive score, recordings and literature year after year, yet my students were inevitably baffled and glazed-eyed. Apart from a solid plot (thanks, Virgil) and one decent love duet (thanks, Meyerbeer, who inspired it with his own duet from Les Huguenots), listening to the opera was like being trapped by the world’s most tenacious pub bore. Berlioz, however, was not known for his self-awareness and remained disappointed that it was not performed in full during his lifetime. Even the great singer-composer Pauline Viardot, for whom he originally conceived the work in the 1850s, detested it when she finally heard the entire piece four decades later.
A man of questionable personality...
Personality matters to me, and as a Brahms scholar, I am used to the North German’s modesty and personal restraint. Berlioz, in contrast, was… troubling. He stalked his first wife, the actress Harriet Smithson, eventually blackmailing her into marriage by feigning suicide. When the pianist Camille Moke left him, he hatched a detailed plan to murder her. His mistress-turned-wife, Marie Recio, fared somewhat better, but she died young, and her mother ended up as Berlioz’s carer. He wasn’t alone, and he wasn’t the worst, but I wouldn’t want to encounter him on a late-night train.
I’m also no fan of rabid nationalism in music. Berlioz was so fiercely anti-Italian he failed to appreciate the beauty of Rome when he visited, or the craftsmanship evinced by Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti in their sparkling operas. Sure, he could think outside the box. His innovations in musical-dramatic form and orchestration left us with works like Symphonie fantastique, Harold in Italy and La Damnation de Faust.
His Symphonie fantastique is tolerable, but the opera Benvenuto Cellini was a lost cause (devotees need not worry, as there are still at least 20 recordings). Yes, he could write good passages – most composers can – but his ego blinded (deafened?) him. Little surprise that his short-lived Philharmonic Society, which he ostensibly founded to present the works of ‘great masters’, featured mainly his own music. I love Berlioz’s witty, perceptive writing as a critic and I admire his success as a conductor – but my heart sinks when I see his name on a programme!
Overrated composers: Johannes Brahms (1833-97)
By Claire Jackson
Timpani solemnly marks time as strings pace the room; the adjacent Allegro barely contains its agitation. Even in the hands of one of the world’s finest ensembles, Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 sets my teeth on edge. From filigree counterpoint to the serialists and spectralists, I am borderline obsessed by almost all types of music, but with one exception: the dour Romanticism epitomised by Brahms. The rest of that First Symphony is seeped with melodies that are often described as ‘noble’. I find the development turgid – the classical equivalent of a B-list Britpop band pouring lacklustre lyrics over boring guitar sequences. Symphonies Nos 2-4 aren’t much better: No. 2 is supposedly Brahms at his sunniest (darkness lurks even in the upbeat Allegretto grazioso); No. 3 is dully wistful; No. 4 is stilted in its imagination.
As a flautist I could easily avoid Brahms, and it wasn’t until I was working on a piano magazine that his restless presence loomed. His piano concertos are long, drearily virtuosic… but incredibly popular. Every pianist and his dog has recorded them, and while there are inevitably some impressive moments, there are many other piano concertos I would rather hear.
Noble... but turgid
Being in that revered group of historic ‘genius’ composers, Brahms is almost universally praised, and eyebrows raise when I turn down writing jobs featuring him on the programme (I don’t think it’s fair to performers for me to critique music I know I dislike). When invited to contribute to this piece, I half-expected my colleagues to censor my choice for my own safety. But I am not alone. Sharing my feelings about Brahms’s symphonic writing, Wagner wrote, ‘little chips of melody like an infusion of hay and old tea leaves, with nothing to tell you what you are swallowing but the label “best”’, while Hugo Wolf opined, ‘Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz and Liszt, the leaders of the post-Beethoven revolutionary movement in music, seem to have left no impression upon our symphonist’.
Age can shade views, but on certain subjects I have remained steadfastly resolute, and my dislike of Brahms is one of them. Almost. Perhaps it was the sound of waves lapping in gentle accompaniment, or the burnished sunset over which bats gave their ballet, but the yearning clarinet melodies at a recent chamber music festival held me enraptured. The work? The Clarinet Quintet by one Mr Brahms.
Overrated composers: Felix Mendelssohn (1809-47)
By Christopher Cook
‘Mendelssohn’s tragedy was that he died too old.’ It’s a cruel quip from a waspish critic but there’s a grain of truth here. Had Mendelsssohn died in 1827 as a teenager, he’d be remembered as the prodigy who composed an elegant string Octet and the airy Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture. But Mendelssohn didn’t die: he transformed himself into the very model of a German Romantic composer with lots of songs – some with words – chamber music, piano music, oratorios and symphonies. An awful lot of music.
Decorous, complacent and respectable
Written intermittently in the late-1820s, the symphonies map Romantic Europe, south to Goethe’s beloved Italy and north to Ossian and Sir Walter’s Scotland before coming home to embrace the Lutheran Reformation that had shaped a new Germany in the 16th century and the 19th. Mendelssohn dropped his musical cartes de visite on audiences who knew they were unlikely to leave hearth and home. So, the Hebrides, Naples and Ein feste Burg were to be savoured from the depth of a well upholstered chair. A Biedermeier chair for sure, for as he slid into his thirties, Mendelssohn’s music became more Biedermeier than Beethoven.
Biedermeier, the invented writer whose limping verses first appeared in a Munich newspaper, was the embodiment of all that was decorous, complacent and respectable in bourgeois life after the radical impulses of the Napoleonic period had been put to flight. If Biedermeier art was as soothing as a warm bath, Biedermeier music was emotionally restrained – damp handkerchiefs rather than hearty weeping. That’s what you hear in the sugary Violin Concerto and both piano concertos, the second of which even disappointed his friend Schumann: ‘[Mendelssohn] gives [virtuosos] almost nothing to do that they have not already done a hundred times before.’
Discouraging Fanny from publishing her works
There are other sins to lay at Mendelssohn’s door. This is the director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra who reinvented symphony concerts, dressing his players in full evening dress while building the classic three-step programme of overture, concerto and symphony, a cultural tyranny that continues to this day.
Then there’s his sister Fanny Mendelssohn, as gifted musically as him, as we are slowly discovering. In 1837, she hoped to publish her music and her mother wrote to Felix. His reply is chilling: ‘To encourage her to publish I cannot do… I regard publishing as something serious… and I believe one should do it only if one is willing to appear and remain an author for one’s life. That means a series of works, one after the other… From my knowledge of Fanny, I should say that she has neither inclination nor vocation for authorship.’ And why? Because she was a wife and mother. How ironic, then, that the nearest thing to a late masterpiece that Mendelssohn composed was his String Quartet in F minorin memory of Fanny after her death in 1847.
Overrated composers: Benjamin Britten (1913-76)
By Jeremy Pound
As a chorister back in the 1980s, I loved Britten’s choral music. I still do, in fact. OK, I could happily live without the tedious teenage trundler that is his Hymn to the Virgin, but the likes of his Missa Brevis, Hymn to St Cecilia and, best of all, Rejoice in the Lamb are still on my regular playlist. And in operas such as Peter Grimes, Billy Budd and the deliciously creepy Turn of the Screw, his ability to spin a compelling narrative, conjure up an atmosphere and present captivatingly believable characters is second to none.
This is hardly the description of an overrated composer, is it? Maybe my words have somehow crept into the wrong feature. But then there’s the other Britten, the one who wrote reams and reams of music that I find charmless and bland, as self-indulgent as it is deeply irritating – so much so that in some instances it makes me want to throw things against the wall.
Peter Pears... thin and reedy
Perhaps my dislike has something to do with the voice of Peter Pears. As Britten’s partner and muse, Pears had work after work lovingly tailored by the composer for his distinctive tenor timbre. Britten clearly loved that sound; I tend to agree with descriptions I’ve read that range from ‘thin and reedy’ to ‘elderly sheep’. A work does not stand or fall by a sole performer, of course, but so many of the works Britten wrote for Pears sound strangely uncomfortable when sung by tenors of a less geriatric ovine persuasion. Witness, for instance, those strained, top-of-the-register renditions of the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings that regularly crop up in concert halls. It’s not a nice experience.
Smug and clever
Or maybe it’s that much of Britten’s music is just so clever-clever. For many, his word setting is brilliantly witty; I often find it mannered and even a little smug. Not that he needs words to irritate me. When others chuckle at the little twists and turns of his Six Metamorphoses after Ovid for solo oboe, are they really amused, or simply keen to show that they get some sophisticated musical reference, like those who know all the obscure jokes in Shakespeare?
Britten in person was never short of sycophants to remind him constantly of his genius, which may account for some of his more unpleasant traits. Waspish put downs of others were part of his armoury, as were hissy fits when things did not go his way. And those who didn’t cluster around in admiration risked being professionally and personally blanked – or, as he put it, becoming one of his ‘corpses’.
A cult following
Part bully, part brat, then. And his music can be dismally dull. Yet, nearly 50 years after his death, Britten still enjoys a unique cult following, with thousands making the pilgrimage each year to his home patch in Suffolk, with its big skies, brooding sea, curlew calls and all. I don’t begrudge him that but, given that, compared to some other British composers, his output is not that widely known, I do wonder what lies behind his elevated status. Is it simply that ‘I don’t like Britten’ is an opinion that must not be expressed among those who want to be taken seriously?
Overrated composers: Richard Wagner (1813-83)
By Geoff Brown
Wagner, oh Wagner! I fully acknowledge his greatness, singularity and revolutionary impact: generations of composers in the 19th century and beyond didn’t fall under his sway for nothing. Yet each time I emerge from one of his epic operas, I feel an irresistible urge to restore my health, my sanity and sense of proportion by listening to something short and light, where no-one sings a note. A Satie piano piece or a light music trinket by Eric Coates usually does the trick.
Part of my problem lies with the manner and dramaturgy of Wagner’s librettos. The pace is tortoise-slow. Characters spend ages chewing over their thoughts or recalling past actions that the audience has not seen. Moreover, the operas’ plots – if they can be so called – are hard to swallow unless one takes unusual interest in building costs in Valhalla (not on the usual tourist trail) or endless questing after the Holy Grail, or enjoys the company of giants who use magic helmets to turn themselves into dragons.
Another libretto problem, though it’s not entirely Wagner’s fault, is the open invitation that his operas offer for ridiculous or otherwise taxing stagings. I’ve seen Tristan und Isolde set on the outskirts of what looks like a huge plughole, and Rhinemaidens seemingly dressed in spaghetti. Sometimes my eyes can get accustomed to a stage director’s visual interpretations as the Wagner hours roll by; equally, or more often, they do not.
Long stretches of musical maundering
Wagner cannot escape blame, however, for much of the operas’ notes. I happily make an exception of their purely orchestral sections: music often of visionary power, harmonically extraordinary, music with drive and audible splendour, paraded separately with good reason in concerts and recorded albums alike. Unfortunately, since Wagner wrote operas, his characters will start to sing; not for the most part in pungent set pieces, but in long stretches of musical maundering demanded by the slack librettos.
This is when my agony arrives, probably reaching its peak with Gurnemanz’s Act One narration in Parsifal, which seems to last until the end of time. During such slabs, with ears drooping, I try to take comfort recalling the zip and sparkle of Donizetti’s finales or a dramatic Verdi chorus. It’s also possible, I find, to get tired of Wagner’s famous leitmotifs, for all his ingenuity in mapping them out and applying them to tie his colossal constructs together.
The underlying problem for me is that Wagner takes himself so very seriously. I don’t expect all operas to dance along like Lehar's The Merry Widow: Wagner was pursuing a very different goal and had every right to do so. But his serious thinking would be so much easier to bear if he could have absorbed along the way some of the virtues regularly found in less pretentious fare: a sense of moderation, proportion and humility; of humour, too. Had he done so, though, Wagner would not have been Wagner.