OF CLASSICAL MUSIC

by Stephen Fry

  In Vienna, the same year, the cognoscenti are all awhirl over the premiere of Bruckner's new symphony, his eighth. Ironically, despite his age - he's now nearly seventy - it's only been since his seventh that he's been considered a true master. Sadly, too, he's only got four years left. His Eighth is, as those in the know had now come to expect, a mammoth work, running to nearly an hour and a half unless the conductor has somewhere to get to. Coming after the slow movement of his Seventh, written in honour of his late idol, Wagner, the Eighth still shows Bruckner as a huge disciple, with its quartet of Wagner tubas and a scherzo that is virtually perfection.

  Stand the two pieces back to back, and they are chalk and cheese; north and south; hairy and smooth (not sure about that one, but still) - the Bruckner a mighty sledgehammer of a piece, with the Tchaikovsky the nut. As concert-going spectacles go, they need a different frame of mind. The Nutcracker is a tight, pleasure cruiser of a piece, a sort of hop-on, hop-off of perfect little tunes, while Bruckner Eight is more an ocean-going liner - once you're on board, you're on board. There's no getting off for quite a while, but there's plenty of luxurious, sophisticated entertainment to keep you ecstatically happy all the way. My word, don't I talk bollocks? But you know what I mean.

  1893 IN THE STYLE OF THE

  ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD JAMES

  JOYCE. ONLY WORSE

  ??7 ighteenninetythreesome of independentlylaboured with JtjKiermosthardie aswellasthe dual-duel-jewelaffordedby franc(incensed?)russian and now trulyallied. Cheerfor Hansel greetall by humperdinck, englebert - names alongsidedly decidedly HenryBenzKarlaFord and backagain. Oh, moveover newartnouveau-ver, the tolling bellextolling 'gone Gounod, hear Coalport, gone petrilichtchaikovskyite'. Man reaches Manchester-le streets run with watercanal, while materialmatters in matabele materialize in rabelaisian rebellion. A lady, Margaret Scottfree is a woman with little importance-or-less, at once the same time.'

  Good. Clear as a bell. Actually, let me just pick one partially concealed item from that litany of nonsense, namely 'gone Gounod, hear Coalport, gone petrilichtchaikovskyite'. That was meant to be something like 'Gounod^ dies (in 1893), but Cole Porter is born, whereas Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky dies.' True enough. In exchange for one of the greatest songwriters ever, we had to part with Gounod and Tchaikovsky in 1893.

  Earlier in the year, Tchaik had travelled to Cambridge to receive an Honorary Doctorate of Music from the university, and, not long after, conducted the premiere of his new symphony, the Sixth, presumably with one hand firmly on his crown so as to spare the people in the front row the distasteful spectacle of his head falling into their laps. (Well, it would be awful, wouldn't it? I mean, just think of the dry-cleaning bills, alone.) He'd labelled his Sixth Symphony the 'Pathetique', and its first night audience would prove to be more than a little unimpressed. But let's not get on to that.

  Cut now, instead, to Ellis Island, where Dvorak had recently landed - not long after Tchaikovsky had left - with the firm intention of making America his home. Spookily, he, too, had an Honorary Doctorate in Music from the University of Cambridge in his case.

  So. It's 1893 - I know, I know, I keep saying that - and two very different composers have come up with two very different symphonies. I mentioned chalk and cheese earlier, and here it is again: these two symphonies, heads firmly above the parapet, as if to prove not only quite what a melting pot of different styles and sounds 'late romantic' really was, but also quite what a different hand life had dealt their two creators. On the one hand, you have Tchaikovsky's Sixth, the 'Pathetique', complete with a quote from the Russian Requiem J» Gounod, Charles: French composer, mainly remembered today for his reworking of Bach's First Prelude to make the 'Ave Maria'. In his time, he thought he might turn out to be a priest, but, eventually, composing got the upper hand. He won the obligatory Prix de Rome (didn't they all) and even spent five years in London, where he went on to found what is now the Royal Choral Society. Sorry to put Gounod in a footnote, but, well, space is at a premium. service and described variously as one of the greatest of the genre, 'a homosexual tragedy', and 'the most pessimistic utterance in all music'. On the other hand you have Dvorak's Symphony No 9, 'From the New World', complete with quotes from Negro spirituals and Native American tunes, and so full of optimistic exuberance for a new beginning. 'Pathetique', and 'From the New World' - just their titles say it all. Within months, the depressed composer of the 'Pathetique' would, some say deliberately, help himself to a glass of cholera-infected water and die. Within years, the optimistic composer of 'From the New World' would return to Prague, become boss of the Conservatory, and be made a life peer in the Austrian House of Lords. Two symphonies, two composers, two vastly different outcomes; but both high romantics at the height of their powers, producing simply fantastic works. Incompletely and utterly yumerouslyness.

  SEAL OF THE CENTURY

  W

  ow, this seems like a huge leap, but, well, I refer the honourable gentleman to the title on the front of the book cover that I gave, a few moments ago. Incomplete! JNcomplete! OK? Good. Now, I want to cut, mercilessly, to 1897, so let me lift up the edge of the carpet and show you a few years that I swept underneath.

  I've got to mention 1896, without whom this film would never have been made. Sorry, I was reading from the wrong set of notes, there. I've got to mention 1896, because of Richard Strauss, and a piece of music he composed therein. It's more or less a symphony - a three-movement symphonic poem, to be precise - the first two minutes of which are a sort of 'The Big Bang for orchestra', and make one of the best uses, ever, of the organ as an orchestral instrument. It was called, after the Nietszche book, Also Sprach Zamthustm, and part of it went on to fame and probably no fortune when it was featured in the Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was also the year that gave us the last Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, as well as a whole lot of stuff going on in South Africa - far too complicated to get into one line. It is, of course, also the year that a host of countries unite in the first modern Olympic Games. All that and one of the greatest, most romantic (in the 'slush' use of the word, I mean) operas ever written. The thing of beauty that is… La Boheme. (Wipes tear from eye.) But, sadly, we haven't got time for that right now - maybe later. We've got to crack on and seal the century.

  Yes, it's 1897 - what about that for sleight of hand? - and we really are skating. Very soon, there would be a new century, and then where would we be, eh? Indeed. But for now, it's fin de Steele', as they say in Leeds - the nineteenth-century's autumn years. Queen Vic was having her Diamond Jubilee and HG Wells is the author of the moment. This year, he had starded everyone with The Invisible Man and, a couple of years back, it was The Time Machine - he's on a roll. Also, JJ Thomson has discovered the electron. In fact, I have a transcript, here, of the precise moment he did: '…Bloody hell, that's small!' Wow. It's as if you were there, isn't it? Added to that, there was a famine in India, die remains of a Gold Rush in Canada's Klondyke, and, well, you can almost feel the new century approaching. The art world, too, is really pulling into another interesting period. Just as Sir Henry Tate donates an art gallery to the British people, figures such as Matisse and Pissarro are really beginning to produce amazing work. This year, it's The Dinner Table from Matisse, and the Boulevard des Italiens from Pissarro. Rodin is also still knocking 'em out - a bronze of Victor Hugo in 1897. In music, sadly Brahms has died, and Mahler has taken over as MD of the Vienna Opera House. Good and bad, I suppose, depending on your point of view. Yes, he did produce wonderful things with the Viennese Opera, but it is said that he didn't suffer fools gladly - a bit of an acid tongue, old Gus, by all accounts. Of music in general, though, in 1897? Well, it's still such a mix! It's not just a mix of styles now, either, it's a mix of out and out languages too. That Spike Milligan bit I was talking about. It's not that people don't agree on the styles o? the sounds to make any more, or on the feel of the music. No. Very soon, if not already, they will start to disagree on the very ESSENCE of music - the syntaxe
s, the languages, the rules on what even constitutes music. In much the same way as it happens in literature and in art, music will look in on itself and say, 'Well, no, actually - I don't take that as understood at all. I want to go right back to the basics and question how we think of, and what we think of as, music' And let's face it, once you start doing that, there's no stopping.

  But for now, we're safe. No one has split the atom, no one has split the tone. Er, as it were. Indeed, if you wanted to be assured that 'music' is still intact, so to speak, and that it would always be there if everything went wrong, then you need look no further than what John Philip Sousa was putting out in 1897.

  It was called The Stars and Stripes Forever, and it felt like pure, botded Uncle Sam, scored for military band. It would do Sousa's bank balance no harm at all, with the royalties making him better off to the tune of some 300 grand, during his lifetime alone. The clever little sausage. For now, though, let's nip back to Blighty, with a stop-off in Paris.

  1 ACROSS: CONFUSING GAME IN MUSIC FROM 1899 (6)

  B

  efore we get to 1899, a stop-off, as promised, in the Paris of 1897. Paul Dukas was Paris born and bred. He lived in Paris, studied at the Paris Conservatoire and, indeed, would end up teaching composition there before his death, in Paris, at the age of sixty-nine. He was one of a number of young chaps who were very fond of the music of Lille-born composer Edouard Lalo. By 1897, though, Lab was dead, and Dukas was working on a symphonic poem - wasn't everybody? -which he hoped would make his name as a thirty-two-year-old composer with his very own voice. Sadly, in the incomplete and utter scheme of things, we haven't really got too much space to devote to M. Dukas, let alone Edouard Lalo (I hope against hope that he had two children called Leila and Lulu but I can find no evidence for it), except to mention two things. Firstly, in 1897, Dukas did, in fact, come up with a piece that established his own voice, namely The Sorcerer's Apprentice, beloved of Disney fans everywhere and originally written as a musical depiction of Goethe's story 'Der Zauberlerhling'. 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' is one of those titles that is equally poetic in all three languages - in English, it certainly has a certain style and shape; in German it is impressively declamatory, and in French, it's simply sumptuous: VAppnnti Sorcierl Mmm. Gorgeous.) Secondly, the tragic thing about Dukas is that, some ten years or so after having found his voice, he lost it again - that is to say, when he was in his forties, he burned almost all the works he'd written since the age of twenty. Tragic. He's also one of those people who, when you discover their dates, seem to be in the wrong time. Before I knew anything about him, I had always put him in my mind next to Brahms or Mendelssohn. To find out he was still alive in 1935 came as a complete shock. Paul Dukas and, say… Churchill, sharing breathing space. Doesn't seem right, does it? But it is.

  1899 is right on the edge. We are teetering not only over the vast unknown of a new century but also over the gaping chasm of a new era. A new musical era, that is. They would eventually call it MODERN - the Modern Era - which is a bit daft, if you ask me, because, well, of course it's modern, it was 'today'. What else would it be? And what do you call the period after that, then, eh, when you've burnt your bridges with 'modern'? The VERY modern era? The BLOODY modern era? The 'Ooh, it's so modern, it hurts' era? Exacdy! Where will we be then, eh? Well, that remains to be seen. For now, let me tick off my eras, otherwise the time and motion people will have me up on one: 0 Early 0 Medieval 0 Renaissance 0 Baroque 0 Classical 0 Early Romantic

  0

  and

  Late Romantic (it always helps, having a sibling in an older year) Good, and any minute now, I'll have Modern. Marvellous, the complete set. I haven't felt this happy since I got my full series of original GWR rolling stock pictures, signed by the drivers. Priceless! Enough of that, though, because I wanted to zoom in on England, as I said, and, in particular, on Malvern in Worcestershire. Bit of a giveaway, really, for yes, I am heading for the home of England's finest, one Eddie 'The Eagle' Elgar.

  Yes, the man in the handlebar moustache - or, as someone once said, 'Not so much a handlebar, more die whole bike!' - is the saviour of English music, Elgar. But where is he? Not geographically, I mean, but in 'the great scheme of things', as they say on a monsters' housing estate. It may help, actually, if we try one of those either/or sets of questions on him, the sort of the thing that have become very popular as small space-fillers in the Saturday and Sunday papers. Try this: Beatles or Rolling Stones? Big or small? Roger Moore or Sean Connery? k amp;'4 IVVIL fl«rwf Avifrft-??^4^!?^ e*f*#»w«j. / Brahms or Wagner? Upstairs or downstairs??^??^ /ffcpn-ifc/rf What was your most embarrassing experience? Where or when were you at your happiest? How would you like to be remembered? i»efii~iiel*f wb bh-it*mt»VJRV |fe???-?????? Has that helped? No? Sorry. Worth a try.

  Elgar was the first important English composer, at least on the world stage, since Purcell back in 1695. In fact, England, in between these two giants, was dubbed 'the land without music'. But Elgar changed all that. Elgar was the first British composer in years who was not only recognized as 'great', but whose music could be traced back to its land of origin. It didn't sound like any other country - not colourful and vibrant Russian, not delicate, pointillist French, not even severe, iron-clad German. It sounded ENGLISH. Not surprising, really, when you look at Elgar himself.

  In 1899, Elgar was forty-two. He was born in Broadheath, near Worcester, the son of the local organist and music shopkeeper, a man very much at the centre of musical life in the town. 'A stream of music flowed through our house and the shop and I was all the time bathing in it,' he once said. His early hits were cantatas - The Light of Life, King Olaf and Caractacus. They were delightful, 'of their period' choral works, but destined to be eclipsed by what came in 1899 and beyond. It was in this year that he put together a set of pieces based on a single, short theme. He called them the Variations on an Original Theme - the Enigma, or The Enigma Variations for short.

  To be fair, there were two enigmas involved. The first was that each piece was a musical picture of one of Elgar's friends but bore only the initials or the nickname of that friend. So 1899 society had to work out who it was being portrayed in each movement. So, for example, the most famous movement, 'Nimrod', could be worked back to Elgar's publisher. How? Nimrod was 'the mighty hunter' in the Bible - the German for hunter is jaeger - August Jaeger was Elgar's publisher. See? It's not quite Araucaria, but it was good enough. But it's the second enigma which is possibly more interesting and it is simply this: what was the theme? Was it just a totally original theme, written by Elgar -end of story? Or was it, as rumour came to have it, hiding another well-known tune? Some say it is totally original, some say it is 'Auld Lang Syne' - messed around a bit - while others say it is 'Rule Britannia' or the theme to Are??? Being Served?"® There is even one school of fi To be fair, that's actually my own personal theory. thought - yes, this has, over the years, occupied many waking thoughts of the musical cognoscenti (or should we say in this case in-cognoscenti?) - that the theme isn't the theme at all, and that it is merely a tune that 'fits round' another tune, this second tune left unplayed. Are you with me? No? Never mind. It doesn't really matter. As for Elgar himself, well, in true English schoolboy style, when asked to reveal the theme, he more or less replied 'Shan't! Can't make me!' Sorry, let me rephrase that: he retained an impressive level of decorum by maintaining a healthy silence on the matter all his life, eventually taking the secret of the Enigma to his grave. The Enigma Variations, though, thankfully will remain with us for ever. 1899 was also the year that the young Viennese composer S g wrote his work for string orchestra, Verklarte Nacht. Sorry about disguising the man's name, but I don't want to frighten the horses. It's a name that can discomfort people, you see, and often necessitates the use of a supporting helpline, to run during the credits.-13 His full name is printed in the footnote at the bottom of this page. S g would have been twenty when Elgar wrote his Enigma Variations and he, too, was a shopkeeper's son - a shoe shop, though, n
ot a music shop. His dad died when he was sixteen, and he immediately went out to earn money to support his family - often walking a fine line between living and barely just existing. As a result, he had virtually no proper musical training, although he had already, by then, taken up violin and cello. He put his innate musical talents to good use, though, by conducting theatre orchestras and taking in other people's music, which he would orchestrate for money. His early fi Arnold Schoenberg was the first great exponent of a style of music known as 'twelve-tone', or, if you're writing a posh academic paper, dodecaphony. It sounds complex but it's really quite simple. If you look at a piano keyboard, you will notice that there are twelve different notes between any two notes of the same name. So, between middle? and the? above, there are twelve notes; between D and the D above, twelve again, and so on. Basically, the whole of music is made up of twelve notes repeated over and over again at different registers. All Schoenberg did was invent a set of rules that said you couldn't play any one note again… untilyou had played all the remaining eleven first. Does that make sense? So, if you wrote an E, say, you couldn't just write another E straight after it. You had to wait till you'd played each of the other eleven notes - (C, C#, D, E«», F, F#, G, A?, A, B? and B, in this instance) before the E could sound again. Of course, most people think this somewhat arbitrary rule results in music that sounds like the devil clearing out his garage. It is for this reason that I will spare you the name Schoenberg except in small print. music, such as the aforementioned Verklarte Nacht, is very much in the style of Wagner or even Richard Strauss, so, if you see it on the bill of a concert, the composer's name alone should not make you run for the hills. It was only after this, and, to be fair, after the epic Gurrelieder (the 'Songs of Gurre', the Danish castle, home to the song-cycle's hero, King Waldemar), that someone accidentally left S g out in an overheated room, and he, sadly, detuned himself. Schoecking, but true/©