OF CLASSICAL MUSIC

by Stephen Fry

  He dedicates it to his one-time teacher and lifelong friend, Eduard Marxsen. HOW CUTE IS THAT? What a cuddly, larger than life-size bear of a man he was.

  TWELVE MINUTES PAST SIX. TIME FOR AN OVERTURE

  fi I heard you the first time. fifi The publishers would like to apologize for the coarseness of this line, especially applied, as it is, to one of the world's great composers. They in no way would like it to be inferred that either Brahms or Mrs Schumann were, in any way, the sort of composers to ever try and 'cop a feel3. Indeed, some of the publishers3 best friends are composers, and only a small percentage - certainly under 10-have ever tried to (cop a feel3 with the said publishers. Thank you. ?, 1882 was proving to be, all in all, not a bad year, really. Brahms unveiled his forty-five-minute-long finger-crunching piano concerto, Mr and Mrs Stravinsky gave birth to a bouncing baby boy, Igor - whose first words were no doubt a wisecrack about how awful the music was on his wind-up toy - and Gilbert and Sullivan produced Iolanthe in London. OK, two out of three isn't bad/ But let's not forget, also in 1882, that a fresh-faced, twenty-year-old Debussy produced one of his earliest works, the aptly entitled Spring.

  Just to digress for a moment, in 1882 Debussy had a job teaching piano to the children of a wealthy woman of some standing, not to mention a fair amount of sitting down. He had been hired to play four-hand piano with them and tutor them, as well as going on holiday with them and generally being their musical 'man about the house!' But here's the thing.

  THE THING

  ,J!L old you. The woman in question, who was paying Debussy a tidy sum to play chopsticks with her kids every Sunday, was…? None other than Nadezhda von Meek. And if that name seems familiar, it's probably because she was the woman who was bankrolling Tchaikovsky, but would never allow the two of them to meet. And if the name seems wwfamiliar, well, she was still the woman who was bankrolling Tchaikovsky, but would never allow the two of them to meet. In fact, come to think of it, maybe that's why she wouldn't have him round to hers - because she was embarrassed about having old Debussy in the back room, knocking out Marche Militain with her ten-year-old. Then they might have to have that awkward, subdued conversation, 'So… you're patronising other men, are you?' 'Peter, I tried to tell you, in the middle of a 13/8 bar, but… well, it was never a good time.' In fact, who knows, if Tchaikovsky had opened the cupboard under the stairs, for all I know Grieg or Bizet might have ft Apologies, apologies - that was an awful, cheap wisecrack about the music of G and S, and I take it back. But only in the small print. fallen out - now that would have been a little tricky to explain to the vicar over barm cakes. Still. That's only a personal theory, so let's not go spreading it beyond these four page-walls.

  Back to 1882, now. World-wise, as it were, there's a very cosy Triple Alliance going on between Italy, Austria and Germany; the British have occupied Cairo - with a wordsearch, I think - and Edison has opened the first ever hydro-electric plant. The big book of the year is Treasure Island - actually, just think, for a moment, if that book had come out today. The merchandising and marketing men would have a field day - toy island, interactive treasure games on X-Box, everything. The big picture of the year is Manet's Bar aux Folies Bergere and the big deal of the year is that Queen Victoria has given Epping Forest to the nation. How jolly kind, ma'am. Maybe she got wind of the Central Line opening up. Otherwise, Longfellow, Trollope and Rossetti have all died, and Charles Darwin has simply stopped evolving. Musically speaking - or singing, to give it its proper name -Wagner conducts the first performance of his newly revised 'stage-consecrating festival play', Parsifal. Of course, if you are a member of Planet Earth, you may prefer to say 'opera'. And last, but by no means least, Tchaikovsky comes up with a little something.

  In fact, let me write in hushed tones, because Tchaikovsky has come up with a reserved little number to consecrate the Temple of Christ the Redeemer in Moscow, a very evocative, holy place - still and calm, even. Can you imagine, then, the first performance, back in 1882? In the temple, the crowd, still hushed, are, at first, moved, not just by Tchaikovsky's introduction but by the general atmosphere of candles, semi-darkness and incense, but also by the fact that he has incorporated an old Russian hymn, 'God, preserve thy people', into the music. Lovely. One craggy-faced elderly woman, dressed in black, turns to her neighbour - a craggy-faced elderly woman, dressed in black - and smiles a half-smile in approval. Lovely. And doesn't the temple look nice? Just as the congregation are settling into their seats, Tchaikovsky decides to, how shall I put it? Well, he paints a musical picture of THE BATTLE OF BLOODY BORODINO! Complete with the 'Marseillaise' and 'God save the Tsar' fighting with each other for the Tackiest Sequence in Music award. In fact, just when our two old ladies think it's safe, he goes and wheels out the bloody cannons! Just quite what was he thinking of?

  Actually, stepping back for a moment, can you honestly imagine it? Gargantuan sounds and breathtaking cannons, all set in a first performance at the Temple of Christ the Redeemer. Personally, if I listen to it on CD, I always try to crack open a packet of sparklers at the appropriate moment, in an attempt to do it justice.

  THE BIZARRE AND CHARMING

  TASTE OF A PINK SWEET

  STUFFED WITH SNOW

  ? dd title but, still - bear with me. 1883, then. What's… 'goin' down', as they say in the trendy world of dropped letters? Well,?? tell you what's 'goin' down'. Skyscrapers, that's what's goin' down. Or up, should I say. In Chicago, to be precise. The first ever. Not exactly huge by today's standards, but still, there it was, up there, and, well, doing what skyscrapers do, just… scraping the sky. Well. Good.

  Also, Paul Kruger has become President of South Africa; the Orient Express has had its first run - Paris to Istanbul: slight delays in Strasbourg - seasonal manpower shortages, but otherwise a cracking start. What else 'gives', in 1883? Well, Nietszche writes Also Spmch Zarathustra, no doubt giving the then nineteen-year-old Richard Strauss something to think about; Renoir paints Les Parapluies, and, to be honest, we lose a bunch of heavyweights. Turgenev, Manet, Karl Marx and, saddest of all, just one year after Parsifal, Wagner.

  One minute's silence, please. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60.

  At the risk of going immediately from the sublime to the ridiculous, 1883 is also the year that the Comte de Chambord died - wait for this one! It's a belter. Here goes. 'That's God proving tliat, while he may be omnipotent and all powerful, he is a little impolite because…'

  …it's coming, it's coming… '…because HE TOOK THE LAST BOURBON!' Oh, come on, it wasn't that bad.

  RINGFLUENTIAL

  4

  o, the world MINUS the Wagmeister. What sort of an effect will that have on the price of eggs? Well, let me come up to the surface somewhere in 1883. The year that the Metropolitan Opera House opened in New York, and, more pertinently to us, here and now, it's the year that Leo Delibes had an unexpected hit on his hands.

  Apart from Coppelia, Delibes has been more or less dining out on his only other great success, the ballet music to Sylvia.

  Delibes was another child prodigy, born in 1836 at St Germain-du-Val, midway between Angers and Le Mans. He attended grown-up Conservatoire from the age of twelve - a little late by prodigy standards (remember, Bizet was there by nine) - but struggled to find any real success with his work. Then, when he was thirty, the Paris Opera put on his ballet, La Source, a work that was to start his composition career in earnest. Coppelia followed soon, a work still very much in the repertoire of ballet companies today. Opera-wise, though, he had lesser success.

  Then all of a sudden, just eight years before he's due to pop his pointe shoes, he comes up with the music to an opera with so breathtakingly ludicrous a plot that even Barbara Cartland would have put it back in her bottom drawer. Yet, as so often happens, Delibes is virtually libretto-blind, and he somehow came up with the score to save it. Lakme - the world
's favourite opera, if you like, considering it contains the delicious 'Flower Duet', beloved of British Airways ads, but nonetheless beautiful for it - thus giving the cue for? further fifteen minutes of fame and a few more suppers where he can turn to the woman on his right and start with the line, 'Haven't you seen me somewhere before?'

  Not a million miles away, in Troldhaugen, the composer Edvard Grieg is also allowing himself to enjoy life a litde more. He's currendy at work on a tribute to one of the founders of Danish literature, one Ludvig Holberg. In 1883, Grieg was forty and had the benefit of a Norwegian government annuity to keep him comfortable. So he was able to take it all a litde easier, something which might account for why he had done almost all his best work by the time he was thirty-three. Still, he duly finished his suite of pieces for piano, which he called, not surprisingly, the Holberg Suite. Then, no doubt, he made himself a cup of coffee. Then, maybe, stared out of the window for a few moments. Maybe he would go down and lean on his gate later that afternoon. He took another sip of his coffee. Maybe he'd look out of the window again. Or should he save that for later, after 'the gate'? So he looked down at his new piano suite. 'I could always… what… transcribe it for strings?' And so he did.

  It was this latter piece, by EG, that Debussy called 'the bizarre and charming taste of a pink sweet stuffed with snow'. Right. Yes. Not quite sure I know what he's on about, there, but still. (I'd take him out, Matron, he's almost ready!)

  Now, a brief insight into the heady twelve months that liked to call itself 1884 - or 'Toby' to its friends.

  TO TOBY!

  A

  h yes, Toby. What a great year. But what is there to say? Well, I could tell you that some lucky people have been digging in the Transvaal aand haave now got raather a lot of gold in their haands. Not quite so glamorous, some other people have been digging in the middle of London, and have come up with the Bakerloo Line. In Paris, Le Matin, issue one, appears, possibly containing an article on the new work by local boy Auguste Rodin, called The Burghers of Calais. It might also have had a leader column on the poindess pointillism of Georges Seurat, as his latest, line Baignade Asnieres, m giving people cricked necks die same year. In Britain, George Bernard Shaw joined the small but perfecdy formed Eabian Society, while in die good old U S of A Huckleberry Finn was a bestseller for Mark Twain.

  Back in Vienna, Brahms has swept aside all thoughts now of Beethoven, with his brand-new symphony, which many consider his greatest. Well, at least he thought he had. Sad to say, some critics immediately start calling it 'his Eroica AAAgghhh! Don't you just hate it when that happens? CRITICS! They can never examine a new work without feeling they have to point out any similarities it bears to things they can vaguely make out themselves. 'Ooh, didn't that bit sound a bit like the first bar of "Oh I do like to be beside the seaside"? It did, didn't it! Pretty sure it did!' - cue article in paper next day: 'This is quite clearly HIS "Oh I do like to be beside the seaside". Patendy!' AAAGGHH!

  Anyway. I should stop there. Suffice to say, Brahms's Third Symphony is Brahms's Third Symphony is Brahms's Third Symphony. It's wonderful, and that's all there is to it.

  THREE FAT LADIES. ER,

  AND A RATHER THIN GIRL

  (WITH A FUNNY HEAD) 1888. It was a very good year. Let's just focus, gradually, on what was hap- actually, 'and flat feet'. That tide should read 'with flat feet'. Can we correct that?

  THREE FAT LADIES AND A

  RATHER THIN GIRL (WITH A

  FUNNY HEAD) AND FLAT FEET

  L

  ovely. Sorry, but Neville is in the Retail, as theysay. 1888, then. A very good year. And to focus in, as I said, well, there was rather a lot going on.

  Germany gets through two bosses: William I dies, as does his successor, Fred III. Fred Ill's place is taken by William II - sounds like a very odd game of chess, doesn't it? William II, of course, is now more commonly known as The Kaiser or Kaiser Bill, Kaiser being simply a Germanic version of the original for emperor, Caesar, much like the Russian word Tsar. In London, Jack the Ripper has started his reign of terror, the Football League has been founded and the -FT has commenced publication. It would be only a matter of time before someone cracks one of my favourite jokes: What's pink and hard in the morning?^ Lovely. Only last year, '87, LL Zamenhof had devised Esperanto, the international language, and supposedly 'extras tre facile lernabla lingvo? And if you understood that sentence, then it must be true. Back to '88, and Emile Zola publishes La Terre, not in Esperanto, but in French, while Oscar Wilde brings forth The Happy Prince, and other tales. Elsewhere, the twenty-eight-year-old Mahler becomes Music Director of the Budapest Opera; Kipling writes Plain Tales from the Hills, and Van Gogh paints The Yellow Chair - nothing like a spot of DIY, is there?

  Focusing in a little further still, on Russia, in fact, we find Peter Tchaikovsky, writing up his diary. He has had to go to some rather elaborate lengths to hide his sexuality, although some say his periods of heavy drinking were more simply symptomatic of a generally tormented soul. His journals contain many cryptic references to something he terms 'Sensation Z' - his homosexuality - so, set in the Russia of the 1880s, it's not surprising that his inspiration had, for most of the last seven years, all but dried up. 1888, then, must have seemed like a fantastic year for Tchaik - no doubt he underlined it in red and looked back on it with a smile. It was the year he got back on course. It was the year of his Fifth Symphony.

  There's something about fifth symphonies, don't you think? Mahler. Beethoven. Shostakovich? And, here and now, or rather there and then, Tchaikovsky. To me, this beautiful 'Circle of Fifths', to purloin a phrase, is more than enough to keep me going on a desert island. While I would miss other music if I didn't have it, to have this happy band of brothers would certainly fill a mass of different spots, musically speaking.

  Tchaikovsky's is probably the easiest, in a way, out of the bunch. It has one minor problem attached to it, though. Someone, somewhere - own up, whoever it was - once taught me slightly rude words to virtually every movement and, ever since, I haven't been able to get them out of my head. Occasionally, if you can't shake them, it can get the better of you and spoil the entire thing. I remember sitting in on an open rehearsal of it once, and fully expecting the conductor, when he stopped and started the band, to say things like, 'OK, let's go from three bars after the Key to the Shithouse… everybody got three bars after "Shithouse"? Good. AND…' Strangely enough, he didn't.

  Tchaik 5 - as I'm reliably told it is known in music orchestral circles - is, to me, absolutely glorious. Of course, if you were the critic of the Musical Courier at the British premiere, it was 'a disappointment… a farce… musical padding… commonplace to a degree!' I think he also went on to add that the Beatles were crap, too. Still -you can't win them all. Now, though, let me leave 'Tchaik 5' behind, and, by way of a quick aside, have a look at what it means to be 'romantic' in 1888. What I mean is, what is everybody writing? What does it all sound like? Does it all add up? Well? Follow me as I take a quick cross-section of the Romantic tree in 1888.

  A QUICK CROSS-SECTION OF THE ROMANTIC TREE IN 1888

  orry if that title looks poncy - and it does - but all I mean is, ?

  Romanticism - is it something that you can hear? Is everyone doing the same thing, more or less, give or take the odd smoking jacket? Well, the quick answer is…

  … 'No.'

  Wow, pretty easy, this musicology lark, isn't it? Right. Move on, I think. OK, go on then. Let me go into a bit more detail. J» Answer: the Financial Times crossword.

  A QUICK CROSS-SECTION OF

  THE ROMANTIC TREE IN 1888 -

  IN A BIT MORE DETAIL

  T

  ? be honest, romanticism is like that bit just before the end of a Spike Milligan sketch from his «2.series. You know the bit? The bit - and he used to do it virtually every week - the bit where it has all got gradually sillier and sillier? The bit just before the bit where everybody started edging forwards, chanting, 'What are we gonna do now?
What are we gonna do now?' Not the 'What are we gonna do now?' bit, the bit before. Am I making myself clear? Well, that bit, THAT'S the Romantic period in 1888. Why?