OF CLASSICAL MUSIC

by Stephen Fry

  Finally, after all that writing of just the words, he sat down and set about writing the music to it all. And by 1853, he had finished the first two parts: 'Siegfried's Death', which he'd now changed to Twilight of the Gods, and the first prequel, 'Young Siegfried', which he was now calling Siegfried. Phew. Hope you're understanding all this. If you are, could you by any chance explain it to me, because I haven't a bloody clue.

  Of course, he wouldn't finish all the music until 1874, so you get some idea of quite how mammoth an undertaking this all was. In their finished form, they take a full four nights to perform, a full fifteen hours of opera. If you ever happen to walk past an opera house and see people entering in full dickie-bows and DJs at 3.30 in the afternoon, you can probably bet that either (a) they are students, on their way home, lost and pissed from the night before's May Ball, or (b) The Ring is on.

  The Ring is definitely an acquired taste, but nevertheless it is one which can be as hugely rewarding to the inspiration as it is challenging to the bladder. Lots of it is utterly GORGEOUS music, music you can quite honestly get lost in. That having been said, not everyone agrees. It's known that Rossini wasn't a fan. Neither was Friedrich Nietzsche.

  'Is Wagner a human being at all?' he wrote. 'Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches - he has made music sick. I postulate this viewpoint: Wagner's art is diseased.' Don't hold back, Fred.

  Let me move on now, not even one year, but to just January and March of 1853.1 only mention it because it will help focus on the two dominant styles prevailing in music, and indeed opera, around this time.

  JANUARY 19TH AND MARCH 6TH 1853

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  he dates are, in fact, the first days on which the opera-going publics of Rome and Venice, respectively, were to hear the new works by Verdi - Trov and Trav. Or II Trovatore and La Traviata, to be more precise. And why is this important, apart from the fact that they are both stonking operas, still performed every five minutes, today? Well, it's important because when you put these two operas up against the two operas that we were discussing above -Gotterddmmerung (Twilight of the Gods) and Siegfried - then you have the basic gist of the two big schools of romantic music going on at this time: Italian and German. In the bold corner, there's Wagner, obviously, who, despite his unique, one-off individualism, is straight from the German tradition: his operas are logical extensions - well, logical in Wagner's brain, at least - of the legacy of Beethoven and Weber and the current legacy of Meyerbeer. In the italic corner, there's Verdi. He's directly continuing the line of Bellini and Donizet ti, and all their 'bel canto' Italianate characteristics. Wagner wants to advance his art form. Verdi is, ostensibly, a crowd pleaser. Wagner wants the heights. Verdi wants the hits. Wagner deals with Gods on horseback. Verdi deals in bums on seats. Together, they are romantic opera in 1853. But guess who is said to be about to put in an appearance, some twenty-six years after he'd died? If you guessed Beethoven, then award yourself ten points and a pair of glasses.

  BRAHMS AND 'THE MAN'

  r-r- he year I'm talking about, when the late Ludwig is said to have put in an appearance, is 1858, just some five years after Trov and Trav. To be fair, the person I'm on about is not Loud Wig, back from the dead. This guy is a whole different kettle of fish, altogether -different hang-ups, different style - later on, certainly - and different notes, generally. The man in question was said, in his youth, to have played piano in pubs and brothels to earn a living, and didn't actually start composing until pretty late on in life. He also kept a bronze bust of Chancellor Bismarck in the room where he did all his writing, as a constant reminder of his belief in a dominant Germany. And who was this rather corpulent composer, rarely seen without a cigar in his mouth, who had a full-on white beard and was said by many to have written 'Beethoven's Tenth'? Step forward Johannes Brahms, spinster of this parish.

  But before the connection from Brahms to Van 'The Man' - Herr Beethoven, that is - let me bring us up to date a little.

  There is - obviously: goes without saying - war a-plenty. Always is. The Anglo-Chinese is just coming to an end, but the Indian Mutiny has just started and the Taiping Rebellion has been put down (all that fuss over a brooch). Garibaldi has founded the Italian National Association, just last year, in Italy, while, in Britain, Lord Derby is now PM. On a more diurnal level, shall we say, the Daily Telegraph has been founded and Florence Nightingale has had her fifteen minutes of fame in the Crimea. Further afield, Livingstone comes across a simply breathtaking set of falls, on his exploration of the Zambezi river. It's in some of the most unspoilt and raw country you could imagine: it's exciting, it's breathtaking, it's deafening in its ferocity and… well, apparently, for Livingstone, it brings to mind a thirty-nine-year-old dame-like, stern-faced monarch with a bit of a Mona Lisa smile. So. He calls it Victoria Falls. Not Amazing Falls, or Ferocious Falls, or 'Jeepers, will you look at that' Falls. No. He calls it Victoria Falls. Doesn't seem right, somehow, does it?

  Elsewhere, in the world of books, while Livingstone has been away, the past few years have seen some very fine additions to the local libraries: Flaubert's Madame Bovary, a couple of years ago, Baudelaire's scandalous LesFleursduMal- 'The Flowers of Evil' - and Trollope's Barchester Towers. There are exciting developments in other areas, too: the world of art had just gained La Source, a painting by Ingres; the world of naughty substances has just witnessed the first extraction of pure cocaine; and, finally, the world of 'people named after bells' gained its first, and possibly only, member - the then Director of Public Works in London, one Sir Benjamin Hall. It will eventually sit up in St Stephen's Tower, and be known as Big Ben. Very cute way to go down in history, isn't it? As a bell. Not as 'the one who led thousands of people to their deaths' or 'the guy who first contracted that rather nasty skin disease'. But 'the man who gave his name to the bong you hear on News at Ten and at New Year'. So remember to drop it in, if you ever find yourself wading through tourists outside the Houses of Parliament and the clock bongs the hour: something like 'Ah, good old Sir Benjamin Hall, striking away in St Stephen's Tower.' Funny to think that this was all going on around die same time as a shy, fourteen-year-old girl, Bernadette Soubirous, claimed to have seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary in the southern French town of Lourdes. Big Ben and Lourdes, you see. Never knew they were connected, did you?

  Back to Brahms, though, and well, to put it diplomatically, I think you could say he is another of the what's termed 'late developers' in the world of composing. The proper form for a composer, as you probably know, is to have your best work done in your teens, then it's syphilis at twenty and dead by twenty-seven, thank you very much. Well, it wasn't to be the way for Brahms.

  Brahms is, how shall I put it, well… scared, really. He's quite a big fan of Beethoven, you see, and, for a long time, he feels very much in 'The Man's' shadow. In fact, on a bad day, he couldn't quite see the point of trying, almost, after what Beethoven had achieved. As a result, he's staving off writing his first symphony - not a bad idea, to be fair, considering the critics were always going to call it Beethoven's Tenth - and generally, well, filibustering. In 1858, though, he overcomes his nerves in order to produce his first piano concerto, in D minor. And, to be fair, he needn't have worried. It is still, today, seen as one of the chief weapons in the concert pianist's armoury - along with surprise, fear and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope (sorry, best not get into that) - although, admittedly, at its premiere it did not go down too well. In fact, come to think of it, the PC No 1 wasn't regarded very highly in his lifetime, at all. And now that I think of it, it only came into the mainstream concert pianist repertoire during the twentieth century. So, to be fair, he did really have something to worry about. So, sorry, Brahms. You were right to fret. Still. I like it.

  Anyhow, Brahms's PC No 1 comes out around the same time as the latest surge of creative juices from Mad Hector's house. Sorry, let me rephrase that. Berlioz writes another masterpiece in the same year. Yes, he's still around, still bonk
ers, and still knocking 'em asleep with his EPic stuff. (That's EPic with a capital EP.)

  1858 brings forth the EPic (with a capital EP) OPera (with a capital OP): es Troyens How's that for an Epic typeface? These days, it's Wagner who has gone down in the history books as the man who simply couldn't put his pen down, and, therefore, left the world HUGE long operas that you can only watch in their entirety if you have a thermos, some glucose tablets and a bladder of steel. But Berlioz did it too, you see, and long before Brad Pitt in a skirt. In fact, with Les Troyens, it's not just a case of it being ridiculously long - four and a half hours, when you count nipping up to the crush bar for a smoked salmon sarnie and an overpriced mini-bottle of fake champagne: with Les Troyens, it's also a case of it being just too big.

  Les Troyens translates, as you may have guessed, as The Trojans. Sorry, let me do that title justice, first.

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  | rip • JSL JL %»• _JL. JL Jr??4?. JL JL?» Good. Feel better for that.

  Anyway, about the size thing. Well, let's dig a little deeper, here. Berlioz based The Trojans on The Aeneid, by Virgil, no small tome itself, as any schoolboy will tell you/ So Berlioz decided to split his opera into two - jolly decent of him - namely La Prise de Troie and Les Troyensa Carthage. All well and good so far. Problem is, he made them both disproportionately long, a problem that could be got round if it was the only issue. Thing is, he also made the opera one of the most expensive to produce - well, think of Brad Pitt and all those extras! Not to mention nobody makes a good wooden horse, these days.

  As a result, Berlioz never saw the whole thing performed in his lifetime, and, even today, you're likely to fare little better. Very few opera companies would have the budget to be able to take on such a huge project as The Trojans, and live to tell the tale. Having said that, Opera North did it a few years ago, I think, and they are still very healthy, thank you very much, so it can obviously be done. And, indeed, although I've never actually seen it, I'm told the rewards are great, with much of it being very beautiful - the 'Nuit d'ivresse' duet, for example. For now, then, maybe nip off and buy yourself a good 'highlights' CD and just imagine what it might have been like to be there. At a performance, I mean. Not… inside the wooden horse, nose pressed up against the rear end of some sweaty Greek oik in front of you.

  It's a funny thing, size. Size was clearly important to the then current batch of opera composers. Berlioz, Meyerbeer, Wagner: they were all obsessed with size. Looking back, now, it's tempting to see them as a little too obsessed, but that might not be totally fair. Back then, in 1858 for example, you really are DEEP in the thick of High Romantic Opera, and, as we've said before, where you are in the life cycle of any particular 'era' or 'period' largely dictates what type, style and, it's got to be said, size of music you're going to get. Early in any given era, you will get perhaps smaller works in that idiom, first fi??? know, I can still hear the sound of my Latin teacher shouting the phrase, 'It's an ablative absolute, boy, isn't that obvious' It's "He, having been aboutto… HAVING BEEN ABOUT TO…"' Ah, those were the days. Such a shame that a teacher isn't allowed to launch one of those wooden board dusters at your temple, these days. Takes all the danger out of being taught Latin, don't you think'. ventures into previously unknown areas. Later, the works will get bolder and bigger, with the era now established - and more or less everybody doing it. Then, towards the end, you get the biggies - the 'You want "era X?" I'll give you "era X!"'-type pieces. People will ALWAYS do this. They will always take an era, a style, an art form, whatever, to its absolute end. And that's what these guys were doing now. 'You want high romantic? I'll give you HIGH ROMANTIC… with knobs on!' Berlioz and Meyerbeer had very much blazed the trail in this area, but Wagner was about to leave them all in the shade, somewhat, with his go at it. But, and this is a beautiful irony, the man who wrote operas longer than is medically recommendable is about to WOW the entire world…with just one chord.

  TRISTAN SHOUT!

  1859. There was such a lot going on, musically, and yet it is a year that is largely going to be remembered for more or less one chord. OK, so I'm pushing it a bit, but still, there is something in it. It is the big chord in 1859, yes, but it's also the big chord of the next 250 years. People never forgot it. Maybe they never will. Certainly, music professors are still talking about it in 2004. It is, possibly, the MOST FAMOUS CHORD IN HISTORY - if you don't count 'The Lost' one or the one that held up Adolf Hitler's father's trousers. And, oddly enough, this chord has a name. It's called 'Tristan'.

  Tristan, the chord with a name, is the latest little baby of Ric 'I'm hard' Wagner. We've already had Ring Cycle Parts 3 and 4 - Siegfried and Gotterdammerung - and so, by way of a little light relief, he starts to busy himself on a little love story. Of course, Wagner being Wagner, he comes up with one that will take its place in history. To the illustrious list of lovers that include Orfeo and Euridice, Romeo and Juliet, and Mills and Boon, is added the eternal pairing of… Tristan and Isolde. At the time, Wagner was having one of his many extra-marital affairs, this one with the impressively named Mathilde Wesendonck. Some say she inspired him to make the character of Isolde, whereas other say it was the other way round - writing Isolde made him yearn for an affair with her. Who knows? What is certain is that Tristan and Isolde was to go down as one of the most important works of the entire nineteenth century, not least for its harmony.

  Harmony, yes. Especially in that chord, 'Tristan', or, to give it its posh full name, 'The Half-Diminished Seventh'. That chord was just part of the whole, well, shifting sort of 'gear changing' stuff that Wagner was doing with the harmony in this opera, T amp;I. He pushes the 'key' thing to its limit, so that you can't really tell, musically speaking, where the original key is at all. Or indeed, where the current key is.

  If die word 'key' means nothing to you - as I am frequently told it means nothing to me, usually after I've sung something - well, try this instead. Imagine you can hear home - your own home, imagine it has a sound. Much like it has a smell. Yes? Come on, get it in your heads, what does your home 'sound' like? Right? Is it there? Well, that's it's 'key'. Now, imagine: most composers, up until T amp;I, had stayed 'around die home', as it were, in their pieces of music. Sometimes they wandered off, but never too far, or if they did go too far, they always knew how to get back. And they always did get back. Home, that is. And, more importantiy, if they did wander off, they could always see home - or hear it - and maybe even left themselves a good old ball of wool as a trail. Well, if all that is the case, then in Tristan and Isolde, Wagner has basically walked way out of the garden, miles away from home, and has taken an amazingly complicated route round town - like a cabbie on low money day. You can't see home at all, now. Not at all. In fact, you are unsure if you ever did know where home was in the first place.

  Does that help? No, didn't think so. Still. Anyway, that's what Wagner was doing. He was pushing the whole 'key' or 'home' thing to its limits, and calling it 'chromaticism', which is, strictly speaking, the word for it.

  And he was doing it in 1859. Now, though, of course, it's soapbox time, and the subject is the rather convoluted: 'Going to See Live Music, Especially Stuff you Might not Normally Consider'. I know I keep mentioning this - and why not? - but Tristan and Isolde is a perfect example of something you have to go to hear live to appreciate fully. Someone once said, 'Delius is all the same intoxication, but Wagner has a hundred different ways of making you drunk' - and nowhere is this more apt than in Tampersandl. Sorry, T amp;I. It is the music of utter speechlessnesslessness. Music that can make you unaware of the time. So that famous quote about Wagner I shared with you earlier - well, ignore that completely. That was clearly said by someone who didn't know shinola from anything. Wagner operas, if done well, are exactly the opposite. They make you hate the interval with its crush bar and its wine glasses resting on one of those gadgets for perching wine glasses on the side of plates so that you can still have one hand left over to do the actions to the word 'Daaaaaaarling!' Wagner o
peras done well are Lost Worlds where you are lost for words, where you can go to forget other inferior music. In fact, come to think of it, talking of being lost for words, it's said that Wagner hated the saxophone. Absolutely loathed it. He said it sounded like the word lReckankreuzungsklangkewerkzeuЈfe a lost word itself, which translates as… well, something untranslatable, really - it's a series of German puns, all in one word. Reckankreuzungsklangkewerkzeuge. Absolutely. Write it down and bring it out at parties. Will clear a room in seconds.

  Now let me build a bridge between Wagner's 1859 and Verdi's 1862.

  RECKANKREUZUNGS KLANGKEWERKZEUGE!

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  ell, as good a tide as any for a section that bridges three years. It's 1859 that we need to jump from, the year that a fifty-year-old naturalist really puts the cat among the pigeons when he finally writes up the notes from his trip on die HMS Beagle some twenty-three years earlier. Clearly a one-finger typist. He calls his finished opus On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Very nice. Caused quite a stir, I would imagine. Elsewhere, in 1860, a soldier and one-time member of Giuseppe Mazzini's Young Italy Society, marched on Palermo and Naples with 1,000 men, dressed in red shirts, and claimed them for Victor Emmanuel II. Not the red shirts, you understand - Palermo and Naples, I mean. He then proclaims Victor Emmanuel 'King of Italy' after the seizure of the Papal States. Garibaldi and 'I mille' - the thousand - as it comes to be known.