Ray Bayles asks:

>And why are such tunes as the "irrefutably bad" such as the 1812 overture,
>so incredibly popular among many people?

We have no taste.  After all, we're also responsible for ABBA.

All seriousness aside, however, Tchaikovsky didn't think much of the 1812
- why, I can't tell you.  Furthermore, he was noticeably off the mark on
several other of his compositions, at least as far as crude numbers are
concerned.  He didn't think much of The Nutcracker, probably the most
spectacularly successful box-office ballet ever and by me a delight.
However, more interesting is how the 1812 got such a bad rap in the first
place.  It's no worse written than Brahms's Academic Festival Overture, as
far as its structural cohesion goes.  It's more tellingly orchestrated.  Is
it the cannons? Is it part of the out-of-date highbrow sniffing at anything
by Tchaikovsky? After all, Tchaikovsky's rep began to be resuscitated after
Stravinsky said it was okay to like him.

As a former English major, I see many parallels between Tchaikovsky's
reception and Shakespeare's.  Shakespeare had problems with the
university-educated who just *knew* he was an incompetent playwright
because he didn't follow classical unities.  Voltaire once remarked that
he didn't understand why the English people liked Shakespeare so much, when
they had the example of Addison's tragedy Cato before them.  Shakespeare
was a "penny author" for centuries before Dr.  Johnson and the early
Romantics resurrected him.  In fact, a lot of literary Romanticism was
formulated in examinations of Shakespeare's work.  Even today, however,
there's always someone who knows better - from Dr.  Bowdler to John Simon.
After forays into Mighty Five nationalism and Lisztian chromatic noodling,
Tchaikovsky basically invented an idiom, and he remains its greatest
practitioner.

Steve Schwartz, humming the march from the Pathetique