Tone Poem Tuesday

I could also title this post “I listened to it, so now I’m gonna make you listen to it too!” Because it’s a piece whose existence I learned about after I watched a video on YouTube called “Reacting to One of the Worst Pieces of Classical Music Ever“.

“Ooooh!” thought I. “He’s gonna rip on Ravel’s Bolero!”

Erp…no. He did not.

What did he rip on?

A piece called The Battle of Prague by Frantisek Kotzwara.

You are now no doubt wondering just who on earth Frantisek Kotzwara is or was. And I’m here to help! Kotzwara was an itinerant musician who played viola and double bass in addition to composing, and he traveled all over Europe after being born in Prague. He eventually settled in England, where he lived out the rest of his life before dying peacefully in 1791, either 60 or 61 years of age.

When I say “died peacefully”, I’m being nice. I’ll leave the details to the reader to search out, but according to Wikipedia, Kotzwara was “one of the first recorded instances of death by erotic asphyxiation”.

And you thought the folks of the “powdered wig” era were a bunch of no-fun types.

The Battle of Prague was originally written for piano primarily, but apparently it includes secondary parts for violin, cello, and percussion. The work memorializes a battle that took place near Prague (obviously), and it falls into a kind of mini-genre of “battle music”, not unlike Wellington’s Victory, a fairly silly potboiler of a piece that gains almost all of whatever cachet it has by virtue of its having been composed by Ludwig van Beethoven. Well, Kotzwara was no Beethoven, and I have to admit that I found this work (it’s been orchestrated here) entertainingly silly in a way that the Beethoven work also possesses. It’s hard to describe. The tunes are relatively catchy, and there’s some surprisingly impressionistic work here for a piece written in Mozart’s day.

Could it actually be good?

Well…no. Not to me, anyway. But it’s also not bad in the worst way, either. Apparently, from what I’ve sussed out online, The Battle of Prague was quite a popular piece in its day and after, and it’s got a certain crowd-pleasing weirdness to it. It’s a weirdly fun little listen. Here, you be the judge!

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