Wow. The most sublime choral arrangement ever written is "vulgar" and a "beer-hall tune." Your aesthetic needs some severe tuning. Or maybe you've recently received a blow to the head?
Leonard Bernstein used to mock it all the time.
Leonard Bernstein was a tin-eared hack who wasn't fit to copy Beethoven's liner notes. His opinion of the Maestro's music is about as meaningful to me as Michael Moore's.
Beethoven wasn’t really a melodist.
See above comment on your aesthetic. Or maybe you just need new hearing aid batteries.
Bernstein was almost certainly the most gifted musician in American history and a better melodist than Beethoven. Keeping in mind that writing melodies isn’t the end-all be-all of composition. Obviously Beethoven was a greater composer. Tchaikovsky also wrote better melodies than Beethoven but was not a greater composer. The ‘Ode to Joy’ melody, played on a piano without the bombast, is a very, very simple and diatonic tune. There’s nothing remarkable about it at all. Beethoven probably chose the tune because it was so simple and so reflective of *all* of humanity - high and low.