by Stephen Fry
Officially, it's called Nabucodonosor. Thank goodness he shortened it to Nabucco. But then operas are like that. They're a bit like show dogs - they have a normal name and a ridiculous kennel name. Many operas of which we think we know the tide are, in fact, officially called something else. Cost fern Tutte, for example, when displayed in show, goes by the name of Cost fan Tutte ossia La Scuola degli Amanti, Catchy, huh? Beethoven's Fidelio won best in breed as Fidelio, oder eheliche Liebe. Obviously! Fairly rolls off the average Italian tongue, as rumours used to go about Vivaldi.
Another reason for the success of Nabucco might also have been the state of Italy at the time. The Italian nationalists were less tlian twenty years away from a unified Italy, and the symbolism of Nabucco, with its enslaved heroes, was not lost on Verdi's countrymen. 'Va, pensiero' was taken up as a national signature tune in the fight against the Austrian oppressors.
NATION SHALL SING A PIECE UNTO NATION
A longside Verdi and Nabucco in Italy was Glinka and Russian and ±Ludmilla in Russia. Both of them jam-packed full of great pieces to sing, both of them from 1842, and both of them the early expressions of the seeds of nationalism in their own countries.
Glinka was, as we all are no doubt, an amazing blend of different influences, chance acquaintances and minor quirks of history. Born in Smolensk in 1804, he'd been brought up largely on one of those stunning Russian country estates that you can now only dream of - his uncle even had his own house orchestra. After some lessons in St Petersburg with John Field - yes, John Field the composer: Field had gone there on tour with his then boss, the pianist-composer Clementi, and when Clementi left, Field stayed on. Bit complicated but stay with me - Glinka then, quite consciously, decided that he needed to be able to write 'a great Russian opera'. But before he could do that, he quite simply need to be able to write 'a great opera'. Seems fair. So what did he do? He quite simply took himself off to the home of opera - Italy - and decided to learn from the masters. He got to know Bellini and Donizetti but, more importandy, got to hear operas. Many, many operas. This done, he went to study with a Great Dane. Sorry, my mistake. That should read with the great Dehn: Siegfried Wilhelm Dehn, a very much respected musicologist and theorist. When Dehn thought he was ready, he sent him off with the line 'Go home, and write Russian music', and Glinka duly obliged.
For his first opera, he picked for his subject the invasion of Russia by the Poles in 1613. So a nice light opera, then. This is still very 'Italian' in style, it has to be said, and yet demonstrates lots of the new, up and coming 'nationalism'. For his second opera, though, he adapted a poem by Pushkin, Russian and Ludmilla, and it was this opera that was to be the turning point. It's now looked upon as setting the standard for the new, truly Russian opera style. It also, ironically, was the start of a mini-craze for 'orientalism', incorporating, as it does, authentic oriental themes, and what's known as 'whole tone scales': this is simply a technical, muso way of saying 'sounds a little eerie, with a bit of suspense, and more than a hint of sinister'. (Hope that helps.) Sadly, these days, the showstopping overture to Russian and Ludmilla tends to do precisely that - stop the show. At least, many more people now only ever hear the overture and nothing of the opera. Ah well. As they say in Germany, 'Sze sind zwei menschen, die anlich aussehen, und amgleichen taggeboren sind? How true, how true.
All in all, what with Glinka and his first Russian opera, Verdi with his resistance-friendly tunes and even Chopin with his Polish stuff, it's fair to say that the first seeds of musical nationalism have been sown. Now talking of Germany, lock up your daughters, hang on to your hats and do whatever else it is that you do in cliches before something cataclysmic happens. Whatever you do, do it. Because…
…Wagner has arrived.
THE WHOLE WAGNER
THING, PHENOMENON, BIT. OR WHATEVER
Q
uite. Quite. I agree. What a fantastic subject - the whole Wagner thing, phenomenon, bit. Or whatever. Absolutely. Couldn't have put it better myself. Nail-on-head-hitting mission accomplished, I think. Because to call Wagner a romantic is not really accurate. You can't just say Wagner was a romantic - I mean, he was. But he was much more than that - he was… well, he was just… Wagner. A one-off. There had been nothing like him before, and there would never be anything like him again. Thank goodness, some might say. But not I. Oh no. I will come right out of the Bayreuth closet and gladly shout, Peter Finch-like, from the windows, 'I'm a Wagnerian, and, as a result, I'm clearly as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it any more!' Well, something like that, anyway. What I mean, really, is that I think we need to look into this whole Wagner thing a little bit deeper. So put your horned helmet on - we're going in.
THIS WHOLE WAGNER THING, ONLY A LITTLE BIT DEEPER
W
ilhelm Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig in 1813, the product of an affair his mother had with an actor called Ludwig -how ridiculously apt - whom she later married. He had two sisters who were both singers, and was often to be found bunking off his piano practice in favour of trying to sight-read opera scores. If you add in a talent for poetry and a predilection for Beethoven, it's not hard to see how the whole Wagner world took hold.
After an early flop with an orchestral overture, he turned to opera, writing his own words from the start. He became a chorus master when he was twenty, which meant he summered in Lauchstadt, near Leipzig, and wintered in Magdeburg, some 250 kilometres west of Berlin. It was here that he met his wife, Minna, an actress, and they were married in 1836. Wagner's third opera, Das Liebesverbot - The Love Ban - was written for his Magdeburg company, but it ended up more or less bankrupting it. Just two years later, the couple sailed to Paris. Yes, I did say sailed to Paris. Don't ask me why, but they did and it was to prove a memorable journey in more ways than one. The boat took a full eight months to get to Paris - I'm still not quite sure how you sail to Paris - and the stormy voyage would provide Wagner with not only a deeper knowledge of his insides but also inspiration for his future opera, The Flying Dutchman - based on an old sailors' legend. More of that in a moment. Wagner was one of those people who thought the world owed him a living. And that's not just me being glib and reactionary, he honesdy did. Listen: T am not like other people… The world owes me what I need. I can't live on a miserable organist's pittance like your master, Bach!' See? I imagine it was little moments like that that did a lot to endear him to the people of Dresden.
And that more or less brings us incompletely and utterly up to date with Richard the Lionbreath. It's 1843 and he's just hit the big thirty. A quick look around will maybe get you right back up to date. There's been a revolt in Spain - General Espartero has been ousted. Nothing new there, you might say, except that, in this case, he's been ousted in favour of a thirteen-year-old, which must have been a bit galling to say the least. Imagine it now: 'Ah, hello, Queen Elizabeth? Yes, glad I caught you. I hope it's OK with you, just wanted to check: we've decided to rationalize your post as part of a modernization process. And in your place, we're having Charlotte Church. She's sitting for the stamps as we speak. Would you mind if we borrowed a tiara?' Mmm. Not sure it would go down a storm, really.
Anyway, in Spain, the thirteen-year-old is called Isabella, although, before long, she is officially declared 'of age' and people start to call her Queen Isabella II. There's been a revolt in New Zealand, too - the Maoris are none too happy about singing 'God Save the Queen'. Seems fair, really - awful dirge. Elsewhere, Washington to Baltimore have just got Morse - presumably Series I. Also, the first nightclub has opened up in Paris, although it is rather perversely entitled 'The English Ball'. What else can I tell you? Well, in a place called Tromso, Norway, they've really started to get into the brand-new pastime called skiing. In the world of science, JP Joule has determined how much work is needed to produce one unit of heat - the 'mechanical equivalent of heat', as it's known - while next door, in literature, Tennyson has just published Morte A'Arthur. In fact, taking the 'neighbours' lark a bit further, next door but
one, in philosophy, the feminist and radical John Stuart Mill has come up with his latest book, simply entitled Logic. But, three doors along, in the music department…
GOING DUTCH, MAN!
? if rell, in the music department, our hero, Wilhelm Richard VV Wagner, to give him his full name, is now thirty, as I mentioned. By the time they were thirty, most composers had done lots of their best stuff. In fact, if you take a goodly percentage of them, they'd more or less done it all. I mean, Mozart hadn't long left to live in which to do much more work, anyway, and a large number had already popped their clogs.
Wagner, of course, was Mr Exception that proves the rule. Mr Perverse, if you like. A late developer, as it were - you know the sort, who get that first, whisper-thin, slightly pathetic moustache just before they leave school. Well, I think that's Wagner. True, he'd produced some things by now - operas such as Die Hochzeit, Die Feen and the aforementioned Das Liebesverbot, but, well. Just reread that sentence again. Better still, let me help. Here: True, he'd produced some things by now - operas such as Die Hochzeit, Die Feen and the aforementioned DPLS Liebesverbot, but, well. Exactly. Ever heard of any of them: Hochzeit, Feen and Liebesverbot'? Unless they made up the midfield for Borussia Monchengladbach in the '70s, then I imagine the answer is probably no. Which tells you a lot about what calibre of work he'd produced up till now. To be fair, he has yet to realize his potential. But, equally, to be fair, not everyone around him is agreed that he even has potential. After all, he'd been expelled from Leipzig's Thomasschule, and then spent most of the short time before he left university - early, I might add -gambling, drinking and womanising. (What you might call, these days, a model student, but, in those days, a disgrace.) Also, his formal musical training amounted to no more than six months with the Cantor at Leipzig Cathedral. When he finally got a job, the one at the Magdeburg Opera House, when he was twenty-two, his first ever production - his own opera, of course - had succeeded in bankrupting the place, and he'd been forced to flee the town, along with his wife Minna, and head for Riga, in what was then Russian Poland. So, a genius-in-waiting or an unpleasant megalomaniac with 'small-man' syndrome? (He was only 5 foot 5 inches, by the way.) Well, as the Geordie voice on Channel 4 might say, 'You decide!' Whatever the case, one thing was for certain. All of a sudden, quicker than you could say T love me, who do you love?', Wagner's luck was about to change.
His new opera, Rienzi, was staged in Dresden, and it was a huge success. Messrs Hochzeit, Feen and Liebesverbot were well and truly last year's men. Rienzi was a hit and, as they say in Internet world, a hit is a hit is a hit. Interestingly enough, the music of Rienzi is still very much early Wagner, even at thirty. It's not his mature style, and you might even say it was pretty much in the style of the current vogue composer, Meyerbeer. Of course, if you did say that, it might be best to say it out of earshot of Tricky Dicky. As far as he's concerned, he's got a hit on his hands and it's all his own work - what I did in the summer holidays by W.? Wagner, aged thirty and three-quarters.
So, when Wagner was asked to follow it up, rather than come up with more of the same, he decided that it was time to unleash something completely different on the unsuspecting Dresdonians. After all, they'd loved Rienzi, they would love his next one. All he had to do was to get down on paper the amazing sound-world that was in his head, and - VOOM - he'd have another hit on his hands. He cast his mind back, just a few years, to 1839, when he'd had that particularly unpleasant, and rather gut-wrenching, sea voyage. Er, to Paris. Three times, his ship had almost gone to the bottom of the ocean in much the same way as the contents of his stomach. The other abiding memory of the trip, though, was a tale he had heard, the story of the wandering Jew of the ocean, who had boasted that he could sail round the Cape of Good Hope in all conditions, and had been sentenced to sail the seas for all eternity. Bit harsh, if you ask me, but still. The conditions of his sentence allowed for him to put into port just once every seven years - presumably to stock up on sickbags - and his plight would be over only if he could find a love that would be true to him till death. What a totally ridiculous story, thought Wagner, and therefore absolutely perfect for an opera. Before long, he had the libretto written. Oddly enough, he offered it to the Paris Opera, hoping for a commission to finish it off, music and all. Instead, they gave him 500 francs for the story, and bade him good day. In his financial position, he wasn't going to turn it down, so he took the money and ran back to Dresden. There, he was able to use his earnings to give him time to finish the music. And he did. His brand-new opera - still a bit beholden to Meyerbeer but nevertheless with many of the remarkable soundworlds that would make his later work the stuff of legend - was complete. It was finished. It was concluded. It was… accomplished. It was…a flop. A big, flaccid, floundering flop.
It was also called The Flying Dutchman or, in his native German, Der Fliegende Hollander. And they hated it. Couldn't wait to get out of the opera house. Positively ran to hills to avoid it. Obviously, the world was not yet ready for the maturing Wagner.
To be fair to the audience - and, indeed, to all first-night audiences at major music events in history - can you imagine being in their shoes? Put yourself there. It's 1843, you're in Dresden. You've just heard Richard Wagner's first semi-mature work. Previously, the most shocking thing anyone would have ever heard up to that point was probably, what? Well, maybe the Symphonic Fantastique by Berlioz, or even Les Huguenots by Meyerbeer? And, to be fair, only a lucky few hundred have heard those, too, so far - you can't exactly download the MP3 of Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable off the Internet. So what do you do after the first night of something like Der Fliegende Hollander? What DO you DO?
You're probably speechless. I mean, who could have dreamt up such a series of sounds? Lots of it didn't quite make sense to you. And the people around you appear to be speechless, too, so it can't be just you. So what do you do? It's ended. And you're speechless. The curtain has come down. In less than a moment, it will come back up again. What DO you do? Do you stay silent? Do you dare… clap that first clap? Well, you don't really even like doing that when it's an opera you absolutely love, so you definitely won't do that. You don't know what to do. Do you? No! So?
So, you boo like crazy, more out of discomfort than anything else, and because you're pretty sure no one around you liked it either. Then you reach into your pocket for that lump of rotting artichoke that you just happened to bring for your interval snack. Ah well. Too bad, Wagner, you think as you lob. Ooh, great, got him right in the small of the back, too. Good shot. Made the bugger fall flat on his arse. Fantastic.
Still, Wagner's day will come. In fact, in about, let's see, just two pages' time, give or take a concerto. Which gives me the perfect excuse to skip a couple of years and come up in 1845. Let me fill in the news gaps.
IT'S 1845: HERE IS THE NEWS
fi Sounds a little odd, really: 'Hello, my name is Stephen. Pm an Aquarius, realty, but I do have Maori rising.' ood evening, this is the last two years' news in brief, and I'm John Suchet reading it. The Anglo-Sikh war has now begun, which is a big nuisance to the civil servants back home in Blighty, who were already having a spot of trouble with the rather tedious and aforementioned Maori rising/ Interesting things are afoot in the US, too. Texas and Florida have come into the family of states, and - possibly more importantly - the rules of baseball have been codified by the quaindy named Knickerbocker Baseball Club. Presumably, somewhere in there are the rules that (a) no game shall take less than three weeks, (b) you must all eat junk food, and (c) you must learn to love die electric organ. As far as more handlebar-moustache sporting events are concerned, so to speak, die Oxford and Cambridge University Boat Race has transferred allegiances: not from BBC to ITV but from Henley to Putney as a venue. It's possible that one or more members of the teams might have been taken with the new book of this year, The Condition of the Working Classes, which Friedrich Engels published in Leipzig. In fact, it had been only last year that Engels had met Karl Marx in Paris. History
has it that they found they agreed on virtually everything except who would pay for the cappuccinos. Other recent books on the shelves included Vingt Ans Apres, the sequel to Les Trois Mousquetaires by Dumas, as well as a little something called Carmen by Prosper Merimee. The master of French neo-classicism, Ingres, has just exhibited his Portrait of the Countess Haussonville and JT Huve had finished La Madeleine in Paris.
That was the world in 1845. Now the weather, and light wars are expected around Lahore next year, with the odd blustery annexation out towards New Mexico. The rest of the world will be sunny with showery intervals.
THE NAME'S WAGNER… RICHARD WAGNER!
A
s one of my favourite people, Oscar Wilde, once said, T like his music better than anybody's.' Absolutely. I wholeheartedly concur. OK, if I'm to be honest and decent and true, then what he actually said, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, was, to be precise: 'I like his music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without people hearing what one says. That is a great advantage.' OK, well, yes. He was being facetious. But, regardless, Wagner really is one of my favourite geniuses. Before we refocus on him, though, what's happening with his fellow luwies, the composers of the day? Who's still around? Well, Chopin, Berlioz and Liszt are still the big noises. Mendelssohn is still alive, though, as are Verdi, Schumann, Gounod, Offenbach, Suppe… lots of them really. The Classical Music First 11 is fielding an odd, some would say illegal, 4/2/20-odd formation, and the big four, attacking up front, are Frederick, Hector, Franz and new boy Richard. Of that attacking front four, it is, to be fair, Wagner who is going to become top goalscorer, in terms of history, and eventually command the biggest following, or claim the biggest influence.
