There are many similarities between football and classical music.
In both fields, not everything goes according to form. If Arsenal were drawn in the FA Cup against, say, Enfield Town, you would bet your house on an Arsenal win. But every year some Premier League club plays awfully and gets knocked out by lowly opposition.
It’s the same with composers. Buy a ticket to a Beethoven concert and you expect (and nearly always get) a certain quality. It’s called genius.
These composers wrote some terrible music
1. Beethoven
But even Beethoven had off-days. Years ago, someone decided it would be fun to perform his Wellington’s Victory beside the Wellington Arch in the middle of Hyde Park Corner in central London. What a disaster! Around the performers the traffic roared, but that wasn’t the main trouble. The problem was that you could still hear the music. It was terrible: trivial, noisy and blatant. How could the colossal mind that created the ‘Eroica’ and the late string quartets also have churned out this noisy dross?
Yet we know that the work’s first performance was the biggest commercial success of Beethoven’s life. His fellow composers fell over themselves to take part. Louis Spohr played in the violins. Salieri, Hummel and Meyerbeer boosted the vast percussion section. The audience loved it. Beethoven pocketed a small fortune.
2. Tchaikovsky
All of which proves two things. First, popularity is no guarantee of quality. Even the composers themselves recognised that. To the end of his life Tchaikovsky was bemused, indeed dismayed, by the public’s ecstatic acclaim of his 1812 Overture, which he considered (correctly) to be one of his worst works. Written to order and famously featuring real cannons, it thrilled audiences but embarrassed Tchaikovsky himself. He called it “loud and noisy” — not his proudest work.
Commissioned to celebrate Russia’s victory over Napoleon, the 1812 is packed with cannon fire, church bells, and patriotic themes. It was instantly acclaimed as a rousing crowd-pleaser and remains a staple of outdoor concerts. Musically, though, it leans more on spectacle than subtlety, stitching together anthems rather than developing ideas.
And secondly, even the greatest composers are capable of producing duds. In other words, genius doesn’t guarantee you will create a winner every time.
3. Liszt
Franz Liszt’s Grand Galop Chromatique (1838) is one of the most dazzling examples of sheer pianistic showmanship in the 19th century — and one of the most musically hollow. Written at the height of his career as a touring virtuoso, it’s a whirlwind of lightning-fast runs, thundering octaves, and relentless chromatic scales designed to leave audiences gasping at his supernatural technique.
Subtlety, however, is nowhere to be found. The piece is almost comically over-the-top, pounding forward with relentless bravura but offering little in the way of memorable melody or harmonic depth. It’s essentially a circus stunt for the keyboard: fun, flashy, and exhausting, both for the performer and the listener. While Liszt’s later works would reveal a profound, searching musical voice, Grand Galop Chromatique remains a reminder of his early career as a showman first, composer second — an impressive firework, but a brief one.
4. Shostakovich
Even a giant like Shostakovich had his misfires — often because of politics rather than inspiration. Many critics and even Shostakovich himself pointed to his Symphony No. 12, 'The Year 1917' (1961) as his weakest.
Written under pressure to commemorate Lenin and the October Revolution, it’s full of pounding marches, bombast, and programmatic titles like Aurora and The Dawn of Humanity. Unlike his great symphonies, there’s little ambiguity, irony, or psychological depth — just dutiful Soviet optimism. Shostakovich reportedly dashed it off quickly, and it feels that way: noisy, simplistic, and lacking the biting edge that made his music unique.
Some also nominate works like Song of the Forests (1949), an oratorio praising Stalin, or the film score to The Fall of Berlin (1950) — both blatant pieces of socialist realism. But the 12th Symphony usually takes the crown as his most hollow, least inspired effort.
5. Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein did so many incredible things for the growth of classical music in America, it seems churlish to point out a misfire in his repertoire. But his Mass of 1971 is just that.
Commissioned for the opening of the Kennedy Center, the Bernstein Mass is an ambitious, wildly eclectic theatre piece that fuses Catholic liturgy with rock, gospel, blues, Broadway, marches, and even spoken dialogue. Bernstein wanted to create a big, messy portrait of doubt and faith in modern times — but many heard it as bloated and incoherent. The piece runs well over 90 minutes, veering between moments of genuine beauty and passages that feel dated, bombastic, or embarrassingly earnest.
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At its premiere, Mass shocked audiences: some were moved, others appalled. The Catholic Church was deeply suspicious, and many critics panned it as indulgent. Bernstein himself remained fiercely proud of it, though, and in recent years it has undergone something of a revival, with listeners more open to its chaotic blend of styles.
Writing for the pay cheque
Can I suggest four reasons why composers don't get it right every time? The first is pressure: the pressure of time, of expectation, of relentless deadlines. Composers such as Bach and Haydn faced the 18th-century musical equivalent of an essay crisis every week of their working lives. No wonder some of Bach’s obscure cantatas and Haydn’s lesser symphonies seem to have been composed on autopilot. Or, in Handel’s case, that he raided the back-catalogue – his own or someone else’s – so frequently to get an opera finished before the curtain went up.
Secondly, you can sometimes almost feel a composer’s contempt for the commission, or the person commissioning, in the music they churn out. In other words, they are writing purely for the money, and it shows. I’m not sure how true that was of Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory. By 1813 he was thoroughly disillusioned with Napoleon. But it was certainly true of all those dreadful sycophantic cantatas and incidental pieces that Shostakovich and Prokofiev had to compose to appease Stalin. They did it because, if they didn’t, they would have been sent off to the gulags. But they certainly weren’t going to waste any real inspiration on the task.
Sometimes inspiration just fails
Thirdly, you can blame posterity – us. We turn composers into gods who can do no wrong. Performers, record companies and radio stations obsess about presenting their ‘complete works’, irrespective of quality. Then we are confronted by, say, Mozart’s first 20 symphonies, or the try-out cantatas Elgar wrote in the 1890s, and wonder why they don’t inspire us. We feel cheated. We forget that even geniuses need time to find their own voice.
And fourthly? Well, tragically, that’s when none of the above applies. Inspiration simply fails. It affects the best of us from time to time. Does anyone think that Stravinsky, who thrilled and shocked the world with The Rite of Spring, really felt fulfilled by the grim 12-tone pieces he turned out late in life? And although some distinguished musicians have made the case for Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, the piece always strikes me as something he might have composed after waking up with a migraine, burning the toast, missing the train to work and spilling ink over his trousers.
But the true greats climb to the highest highs
As Oscar Wilde said, ‘Only the mediocre are always at their best.’ The definition of genius is not that you never have bad days. It’s that, on your good ones, you climb to heights nobody else can imagine.
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