OF CLASSICAL MUSIC

by Stephen Fry

  A. 1838 is the year that Queen Vic was crowned. It's also the year the Boers defeated the Zulus at Blood River, with more than a little help from Michael Caine. 'You're only supposed to blow the bloody Boers off!' Q. What else is 'big' in 1838?

  A. Well, ships are 'big', so to speak. Quite literally, too; huge great ocean-going steamers are the 'in' way to travel, and they're getting bigger. AND faster. Not long after the 103-ton Sirius docks in New York, the mighty 1,440-ton Great Western clocks in with a time of fifteen days, Bristol to Big Apple. Impressive. Q. Who was 'in the picture' in 1838?

  A. You must be referring to Daguerre, who may or may not have been around to shoot the Great Western crossing the finishing line. He was probably too busy presenting his new system, the 'Daguerre-Niepce' photos, to the French 'Academie des Sciences'. Say 'Rocquefort'! Q. Name one of the bestselling novelists of 1839.

  A. OK, you could have Charles Dickens. 1839 saw die release of Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. There was also Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, as well as it being the year that Auguste Comte officially christened the emerging social science of 'Sociology', thus single-handedly making it OK for future generations of students to spend three years drinking in the union bar, so long as they popped in to see their tutor on his birthday. Q. What was the size of Britain's Navy in 1838?

  A. Hah, bet you think that's a tough one, don't you? Not a bit of it. Britain had 90 ships, while Russia had 50, France 49 and the fledgling US a very respectable 15. Q. Who was fighting whom?

  A. Good point. The First Opium War had broken out between Britain and China, in fact. Elsewhere, the Dutch and the Belgians tripped to London to sign a treaty - London: very nice, good venue for a treaty, tea- and coffee-making facilities in the rooms, etc - and promised not to be beastly to each other any more. Also, the Boers founded the independent republic of Natal. Q. Which composer was born in 1839?

  A. Mussorgsky. In other worlds, there were also Paul Cezanne and George Cadbury - not two people you normally hear spoken of in the same breath. Being both an art lover and a chocolate lover, I do feel we have to bear them both in mind, though. The man who gave us Cadbury's chocolate. MWAH!" p Although, of course, with my name, I do have some allegiances to the makers of Chocolate Cream. Q. Who married in 1840?

  A. Well, that's rather vague, isn't it? I imagine thousands of people married in 1840 - Enid and Keith Sprogg, for example, of 6, The Sewers, East Grinstead. The nuptials to which I must assume you refer, though, were those of Queen Victoria to a rather dull foreign royal, the Prince of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Or, Albert the Square, as he was known to Londoners. Q. Which great wit and man of fashion died in 1840?

  A. Again, rather a vague question, but I presume you are referring to Beau Brummell, although, if you ask me, he didn't exactly go out on a high. Beau Brummell, man of genius wit. But what were his last words? What nugget of ingenious observation did he come up with on his deathbed? I'll tell you. T do try,' he said. I do try. Marvellous. Add to that the fact that, when they got his death certificate, they discovered his real name was in fact Bryan, and, well, I think he's ripe for the revisionists. Q. Who would love to have run out of ham?

  A. Now you're just being silly. Napoleon, I guess, is your man. He tried another unsuccessful conspiracy and found himself in the fortress of Ham. Q. Who's in and who's out in 1840?

  A. Your vaguest yet. Let me try and round up. Fenimore Cooper's new one, The Pathfinder, is out. Work starts on building the Houses of Parliament, transportation to New South Wales for convicts is stopped. The German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich dies, but Monet, Renoir and Rodin are born - what a year! - as are Thomas Hardy, Emile Zola and Peter 'Is this my glass?' Tchaikovsky. While we're at it, two new places of interest get on the map. Kew Gardens has its first queue, and Nelson's Column has its first… er… column. Q. How many people lived in 1841?

  A. Wow, now that's a tough one. Not sure I know. Let me tell you what I do know. The population of Britain stands at 18.5 million, only narrowly beating America's admittedly fledgling 17 million. Other news: in Britain, Lord Melbourne has resigned and Sir Robert Peel is the new PM - a Whig for a Tory, as Paul Daniels's dresser was once heard to say. Q. What kept Queen Victoria up at night in 1841?

  A. WeU, if you're suggesting it was the baby, then I would say you're wrong. I imagine the last person who was going to stay awake at night was Victoria herself. Yes, in 1841, QV gave birth to a bouncing baby boy, Edward. It's said he had his dad's eyes, and his mother's beard. Q. Name a famous Belgian.

  A. Ooh, I love these - thanks for the cue. 1841, and Adolphe Sax makes his bid to be included in the game of Ten Famous Belgians when he invents the saxophone. Q. Name a famous novelist of 1841.

  A. Another easy one. Charles Dickens will do again, because he's still knocking 'em dead with, this year, The Old Curiosity Shop. While we're talking of old curiosities, let me just add that it was also this year in which Sir Joseph 'Don't call me boring or I'll sue' Whitworth proposed… wait for this… proposed THAT SCREW THREADS SHOULD ALL BE THE SAME! Mmm. The words 'get', 'out' and 'more' need very little rearranging, to be honest. Bring on the music, that's what I say. And what a good year to be around, too, because Rossini is about to break his vow of silence.

  A SERIOUS MATER

  G

  ood. I'm glad we caught up, because it's very important to know not just when things arrived, but also in what context. Could it have been any of those things we've just mentioned that prompted Rossini to come out of musical hiding and spring his first work in years on to an unsuspecting and unready public? Who knows. He'd been working on the piece since 1831 which, in itself, may give the odd clue to what's been keeping him. Remember, this is the man who wrote The Barber of Seville in, some say, only thirteen days. For him, spending twelve years is nothing short of phenomenal, and would maybe hint at there being possibly a crisis of inspiration rather than just that he'd decided to sit back and simply enjoy his money and his cooking. You could give him the benefit of the doubt even here, though, especially considering that the two works he did produce following his self-imposed silence were both religious - this year's Stabat Mater and then, some twenty-two years after that, the Petite Messe Solonnelle. Could it be that he was devoting himself to a greater, somehow more valid, way of working that forced him to write and write and write, until a piece was perfect in the eyes of God? The fly in this argument's ointment is possibly The Sins of Old Age, a series of small and light pieces which Rossini dashed off in his later years, and which are no more than pleasant and amusing litde favours.

  The Stabat Mater, though, is something different. It sets the words of the thirteenth-century Franciscan, Jacopone da Todi, describing Mary, die mother of Jesus, grieving at the foot of the cross. It was added to the Roman Catholic liturgy, officially, in 1727 and had been set by an illustrious line of composers over the years, before Rossini had a go: Josquin des Pres, Palestrina, the Scarlattis, Pergolesi, Haydn and Schubert. Maybe this long line of settings, too, added extra pressure on Rossini's need to leave a lasting impression on the Stabat Mater»

  Its sad subject matter would continue to inspire beautiful music, long after Rossini too: Verdi, Dvorak, Szymanowski and Poulenc -many were attracted to this delicate little verse. By the time he wrote his version, Rossini was back living in Italy - not in his native Pesaro, but in Bologna. He travelled back to supervise the first performance of the Stabat Mater at the Salle Herz in Paris and, thankfully for him, it was immediately recognized as a late work of beauty and genius. Some have referred to it as a late opera, but this just seems to make light out of what is one of Rossini's chief virtues - his ability to show the human voice in its best light, even if that usually meant, as it would do for an opera composer, a dramatic light. And so Rossini brought out the drama in the lines of the Stabat Mater. I'd say the idea of a mother standing by the cross of her only son is drama enough to justify it. Nip along to hear it in concert, and judge for yourself. In the meantime, let me tell y
ou who else is still around.

  NEBUCHADNEZZAR OPUS

  1842, then. Who's up, who's down, who's flying around, and who are those magnificent men in their flying machines? Well, I'll answer a full 50 per cent of those questions right now.

  Chopin's still around, for one. Tragically, despite being only thirty-two, he's got just another seven years left to live. But 1842 finds him in Paris, probably at his creative peak. Even though he really didn't have the ideal constitution for it and was in somewhat dubious health - in fact, in the flighty world of the ultra-romantic Pole, someone had once remarked that the 'only constant thing about him is his cough'. Just last year, 1841, despite all his debilitating nerves and personal turmoil, he'd gone down a storm in Paris, and a follow-up concert in February 1842 was just as good. When I say 'personal turmoil', I mean chiefly the fact that this was the time Chopin was at the height of his affair with the novelist Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin, Baronne Dedevant, better known as George Sand. At first, he'd resisted her charms - indeed, he'd not immediately recognized any charms at all. T did not like her face,' he said. 'There is something off-putting about her.' Maybe it was the fact that she smoked and wore men's clothes in public. Maybe it was her well-known coterie of lovers. Whatever the initial setback, they were now lovers, living separately in Paris but summering together in Nohant, some 300 kilometres south of Paris, in the heart of Indre et Loire.

  Although the concert of 1842 was to produce some of Chopin's best ever reviews - 'sheer poetry superbly translated into sound' - it proved to be the penultimate public concert of his life, the last being at the Guildhall in London, just a month before he died. In fact, from here on in for Chopin, the going appears to be pretty much downhill. A split with Dedevant Sand, failing health and somewhat convenient if soulless marriage. But let's look on the bright side, eh?

  Actually, what is the bright side? Is there one? Of course there is, but, as so often with composers, it comes in the form of the 'pay now, receive later' standard artist format. In 1842, he was the undisputed bantamweight champion of the romantic piano. Everything's black and white to him, he's the sort of nineteenth-century 'Fat Reg from Pinner' - and, let's face it, he's still writing virtually nothing that doesn't have a piano in it. More 'bright side' comes if you look at the facts, too, because, in a career of only thirty years or so, he utterly transforms what the piano can and can't do, both on a technical level - sometimes - and on an emotional one. Add to this the fact that his influence would be felt for at least a good fifty years after he died, and you're talking a premier league player, here.

  Berlioz, of course, is still around, big-time. The man who put the mad into 'madrigal' is still very much a contender in Morecambe's Mr Romantic 1842 competition, I think it's fair to say. And if Chopin is the bantamweight of the early romantic movement, then Louis- Hector is certainly one of the heavyweights, pushing orchestral rules to their limits, refusing to be fenced in by old forms and - and this is quite a key thing for Berlioz - managing to get his imagination into his music. In fact, I need to stop here and go into how important this is.????)

  Good. Now how can I say this better because, throughout history, this becomes more and important. What I mean is, of all the early romantics, Berlioz was one of the best at being able to say, 'Right. I'm imagining a… pair of lovers,' and VOOM! there they are, quite literally AUDIBLE in the music. There's a particular bit from the 'March to the Scaffold' from the Symphonic Fantastique, in which he's writing music that depicts a guillotining taking place, and so acute is his symbolic orchestration that you actually hear the decapitated head bobbling into the basket. Gruesomely macabre and very Berlioz, but yet SUPERB romantic craftsmanship. As music progresses through the periods, composers had sought more or less - usually more - realism in their music. Remember Gluck putting thunder into his opera on page 83? Well, it's just a very sophisticated form of that. As time passes, the deepening levels of this musical picture-painting will rock to and fro.

  It's a similar concept to when artists paint pictures; if you put it at its crudest, they can either paint EXACTLY what they see, or they can paint something totally abstract. You have a set like the Impressionist painting a sort of half-way house, and then lots of points on the curve, too: Seurat, with his pointillist version, Braque with his cubist outlook - all manner of different takes on 'painting what it is I see'. And so it would be with composers. Some would want you to be brought face to face with an event in their heads, others would want to give you merely a general impression of what it was like and indeed some would just continue to want you to hear simply the music that was in their heads. And it will hopefully always be like this.

  START

  Good. 1842 wasn't all plain sailing, though. Sadly for arts lovers everywhere, a Czech national dance, known as the polka, has come into fashion with the elite circles of high society. Poor darlings, making right pillocks of themselves, skipping around like hermits on their day out. Around the same time as polkas, a paper is published called 'On the Coloured Lights of the Binary Stars'.

  So what? I hear you say. Well, let me tell you that it was written and published by one CJ Doppler.

  Still so what? I hear you cry. So let me tell you, then, that it was the same paper, and the same Doppler, that isolated the effect known as… the Doppler Effect. What then, hmm?

  Right. OK. I see. So what, still. OK, let's move on - nothing to see here.

  And so to the 'Nebuchadnezzar Opus', as it were. Not merely or even necessarily the 'magnum' opus, so to speak, but one that was to prove a turning point for a young composer from Busetto, in the Parma district of Italy.

  Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi, to give him his full if slightly worrying name, was born in the small Italian village of Le Roncole, near Busetto. He led a fairly ordinary Italian village life, too, give or take the odd early incident. In Verdi's case, it was that, while serving at the altar at church - as an acolyte, to be precise - the priest had noticed that he was paying too much attention to the sound of the organ, and not enough to his sacramental duties. As a result, he did what any priest worth his salt would have done - he kicked him sharply up the arse, sending him tumbling down the altar steps and leaving him almost comatose at the bottom.^ Oddly enough, Verdi never really sought a musical opening in the Church - so maybe that Catholic priest did Italian opera the biggest favour possible.

  At the age of twenty-three, Verdi might have had even more reason to give up on the whole music thing, too. By then, he'd been to the big city, Milan, to seek his musical fortune, only to be unceremoniously dumped on before he even got into music college: the powers-fhat-be denied him a place at the conservatoire. 'Lack of piano technique', said one; 'over age', said another: 'insufficientiy gifted', said a third. So he slunk back to his native Busetto and got a local job, as Director of die Philharmonic Society. And that's how it could have stayed. A big albeit undeveloped fish in a very small pond. But it didn't.

  Back in Busetto, Verdi married. Her name was Margherita, and despite the fact that she was plain - only cheese and tomato - they had two children. Tragically, though, his kids died in infancy, and, just two years later, he lost his wife too. Verdi did what many musicians before him had done - he threw himself into his music.

  He grafted hard on the city's music by day, and then on his own by night. He was working on an opera. He had high hopes for it and spent every unallotted moment tweaking a note here or reorchestrat-ing a phrase there. So convinced was he that it was a winner, his magnum opus, that he moved back to Milan, and took his now completed opera widi him. It was 1840, and, amazingly enough, for the man rejected by the conservatoire, the most famous opera house in the world, La Scala, Milan, agreed to stage his opera. Verdi was right. The world would sit up and take notice of his opera.

  Well, OK, he was partly right. The world would sit up and take notice, only not of this opera. Let me try the title on you, and you tell me when was the last time you saw it in any opera house's forthcoming season brochure: ®btxtBf Ce
nto tit?»???? amp;?? Quite. Says it all, eh? Despite the fact that it maybe didn't achieve its fi OK, any priests reading, I'm using irony here, OK? Or is it litotes? I can never work that baby out. place in history, it did, nevertheless, achieve its place in the La Scala season of 1840/41, and to modest success, too. As a result he was commissioned to write another. THIS ONE! THIS ONE would be the magnum opus. This would be one to go down in history. And so he came up with: Hit «©????????? OK. Wrong again. In fact double wrong, with cheese. Wrong Royale, as it were, because not only would this not go down well in history, it would not go down well in the La Scala season of 1841. Verdi was nearly broken. Look at him - he'd lost his wife and children, he'd given up his safe job in his hometown, he'd had a minor hit with his first opera, and now he'd had a turkey with his second. It was not the start he had hoped for. In fact he was on the point of giving it all up. Indeed, he visited his opera producer, a chap called Merelli, with the express purpose of telling him that he was packing it in. Merelli, however, had other ideas.

  He'd been approached by a librettist, Solera, with a 'book', as they say in opera circles, for an opera of the story of Nebuchadnezzar, set in the Jerusalem and Babylon of 568??. Ignoring Verdi's protestations, he forced the manuscript into his hands, ushered him out, and locked his door. Verdi spent a few minutes pleading with his colleague from outside, but to no avail. Exasperated, he retired to the nearest coffee house for an espresso.

  Over coffee, the libretto fell open. It was at the page where Verdi could read the words 'Va, pensiero, sull'ali dorate' - 'Fly, thought, on wings of gold.' His mind immediately began to wander over the musical possibilities of the words, and he started to think. After a few minutes he put on his coat, flung some coins on the table and rushed home. By the time he got there, virtually the whole of one chorus was written in his head. All he had to do was 'copy it out' of his brain, so to speak. The chorus was 'The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves': the opera was Nabucco. It was to turn Verdi's career, and the path of Italian opera, completely around. Within the year, Italian opera was, once again, King, and Giuseppe Verdi was its most famous composer.