by Stephen Fry
Charles Ives. It's a very nice name, very placid, I always think. But it conceals a wonderful life, that placid name. Mr Ives was originally a Connecticut businessman and a very successful one, too. He made millions. From insurance, would you believe. But when he had to leave his business through ill health, he turned to what had up until then been his hobby - his music. His dad had been a band leader, and I think it's fair to say that he was not a typical late-nineteenth-century example of the species. He'd have his son sing in one key while he played piano in another, just for fun. (This is one area where I feel I'm at a distinct advantage compared to even some of the best musicians in that I've been able to sing in anything BUT the key being played ever since I was little.) With an upbringing like that, something was always going to stick, and Ives went on to experiment with 'bi-tonality' (as they call it in boffinland, literally 'two keys') in his more serious mature pieces. So, in Three Places in New England, from 1904, he features two bands playing different music at different speeds. It was said to have been inspired partly, too, by an occasion where he witnessed something similar in the street, with two marching bands approaching the same point, playing different stuff. Great fun.
This was also the Year of the Butterfly for the forty-six-year-old Giacomo Puccini. Puccini was born into a time in Italy when a man with a gift for heartfelt music and a love of opera could only ever do well. By the time Puccini was twenty-six, Verdi had been on a self-imposed musical silence for some eleven years - hadn't produced a note, opera or otherwise. And he wouldn't for a good few years yet. A Verdi-less period, in the end, of some thirteen years! A gap had opened up in Italian opera. Puccini entered a one-act opera, Le Villi - The Witches, in a local publisher's opera competition. Totally brushing aside that it was not even mentioned in despatches, he managed to get die work staged and it was a big success. By 1904, Puccini had already written three truly great operas - Manon Lesctmt, La Boheme and Tosca, with La Boheme entering many folks' books as one of the greatest operas ever written. This year, though, produced what Puccini would go on to call his own favourite from his entire collection of operas. It concerns a young geisha called Cio-Cio San and her tragic love for die BASTARD! US naval officer, Lieutenant Pinkerton. He left the opera with the same tide as the original play on which it was based. Madame Butterfly.
Puccini opera isn't everybody's cup of tea. Indeed, as I confessed earlier, there was a time when I wouldn't go near it with a bargepole -well, have you ever tried to check a bargepole into the ROH cloakroom? It's lush stuff, it's raw stuff, too, in the sense that Puccini is shameless in using material that other composers might shy away from, for want of being called 'cheesy' or 'louche'. ('Jejune', even.) But Puccini says, no, if that's what tugs at the heartstrings, then that's what I'm going to write - and he does. It's shameless stuff- 'vulgar', I remember being a buzzword, one season, at the Opera House's production of Turandot - but it's quite simply FAB. Un bel di». You bet it is.
And you see, that's what I love about 'classical' music - how can you ever think you'll tire of it when it can mean Charles Ives's Three Places in New England, but it can also mean 'Dolce notte' from Puccini's Madame Butterfly) Is there any more varied thing on the planet?
SYMPHONY OF A THOUSAND DAYS
T
? be strictiy accurate, or should that be 'inaccurate', that headline should read Symphony of a Thousand Or So Days, but, well, it didn't read quite as well. The Thousand (Or So) Days are the ones between the dawn of 1907 and the dusk of 1910, and they just happen to be The Thousand (Or So) Days within which Mahler wrote one of his biggies. The one that would send the orchestra manager in Munich apoplectic, with its demands for an extended set of musicians of up to a thousand people. (Poor man, probably had a nervous twitch for the rest of his life, like Herbert Lom in the Pink Panther movies.) 1907, then. The Russo-Japanese war ended with the, wait for it, Treaty of Portsmouth. The Treaty of Portsmouth! Wow, I bet they were all a bit sore about that. Portsmouth! And they'd been hoping to have it in Barbados! Also, Norway has separated from Sweden (Norway got the CDs), the Sinn Fein Party is now founded and Albert Einstein has, by this point: a) formulated the special theory of relativity, b) formulated the law of mass energy, c) created the Brownian theory of motion, and d) formulated the photon theory of light. It's no doubt at this point that someone taps him on the shoulder and says, 'Hey, Albert, love. Look, nobody likes a smartarse. OK?' Elsewhere, Oscar Wilde has published De Profundis- from the grave, Picasso has moved from blue to a healthy pink, while Cezanne and Ibsen have, in turn, moved from a healthy pink to a less healthy composty brown. Er, that is, they died. Sorry. Tried to break it to you gendy. In 1907 too, the recendy created Nobel Prize for Literature goes to Kipling, while, in the 'arty' world, Cubism is the big noise, as proven by Pablo 'Pink' Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon - which loosely translates as 'Ooh, I don't fancy yours much!' As for the divine world of music, well it is probably blissfully unaware of the latest trick up Gustav Mahler's sleeve.
Mahler's world had been rocked of late. When one of his daughters died from scarlet fever, he partly blamed himself for having 'tempted fate', as it were, in writing the Kindertotenlieder - the 'Songs of the Death of Children'. So, he moved away from Vienna to America, where he would eventually conduct the Rachmaninov I mentioned earlier. So by 1907, he was at the Metropolitan Opera House, sparring with the conductor Arturo Toscanini and not having too good a time of it. He did, though, find time to finish his Symphony No 8, the aforementioned GIGANTIC 'Symphony of a Thousand'. It is in two simply GARGANTUAN sections. When it was finally premiered, in Munich in 1910, it would set its first-night audience alight and the rest of the world would eventually follow on behind, too. It is, in many ways, the ultimate resting place of the symphony. Just as Wagner had shown people the ultimate resting place of opera, so Mahler gives them the direction for 'where symphonies go to die'. It calls for virtually all the forces that Mahler could fit on the page - a double-sized chorus, extra boys' chorus, seven soloists and five times the number of woodwind. What would symphony composers do after this one? Actually, I'll tell you what they'd do. They'd shut up shop and go home. That's what they'd do! Now, let me duck and dive round 1908 and come to rest on 1909 and 1910. Doesn't that typeface make those words look fantastic? I bet it could make any writing look fantastic. As an experiment: See? It even makes my shopping fist look great, doesn't it? Great thing, typefaces. Anyway, let me miss out 1908 - apologies, but I've got a book to end - and go straight to 1909.
In Britain, Asquith is PM and Lloyd George is his Chancellor. Louis Bleriot has just made the crossing from Calais to Dover in thirty-seven minutes, and the age of electricity has, sort of, gained a sibling. Following the first ever production of Bakelite, some people are saying the 'plastic age' has started. In London, HG Selfridge sets out his department store - although yes, he doesn't actually sell fridges - while in Vienna, Freud sets out his thoughts on psychoanalysis, and in France, Diaghilev's Ballet Russe have set out to capture the hearts of Paris. The artist Utrillo sees Picasso's blue and pink periods and raises him a white, and Vassily Kandinsky starts to produce the first truly abstract art. What else? Well, the Girl Guide Association is established, and no doubt lots of me new recruits are simply desperate to have the latest 'in' hairstyle -the strange, new permanent waves. Oh, darling, it's so YOU!
So there we are: girl guides and perms. That's the important stuff from 1909 covered. But what about 'la musique', as they say in Ilkley and Otley?
Music was busy still figuring out where it wanted to go. Mahler has already written the last romantic symphony, more or less. Yes, Rachmaninov and Puccini will continue writing Rachmaninov and Puccini for as long as they have air left to breathe - nothing would have stopped them, the dyed-in-the-wool romantics. And, of course, there were others. Others like Delius, a sort of English Debussy - in a school of his own, as it were. Whereas someone like Wagner had triggered off a whole religion of disciples, Delius was a one-off. He was a rogue player,
following no one and leaving no trail. He eventually found his voice in pieces like Sea Drift and Brigg Fair, not to mention the breathtaking A Mass of Life. A Mass of Life is a vast swirl of Nietzsche's words and Delius's dreamlike, soul-stirring music, and is another of those pieces that should be 'experienced' in a live setting. Actually, what am I on about - ALL music should be experienced in a live setting, that's the name of the game. But pieces like A Mass of Life can prove simply too big for even the best CD system. If you hear a movement like 'O Mensch, gib acht…' or whatever, for the first time on CD, there's always a chance that you will hear it in the same way you might play a computer game for the first time. You can enjoy it, you can go to lots of places with it, but you might only ever get to the first level. Hear it live, and all sorts of different levels open up, levels you can get on to via doors and nuances you just didn't find the first time. It's obvious, I know, but music IS live. It's written in the small print. It has to be. MLUISVIEC. Look at the word. It's been there all along.
As well as Delius, there were also people like the thirty-eight-year-old Ralph 'Rhymes with Safe' Vaughan Williams and Igor 'Rhymes with Nothing' Stravinsky.
Vaughan Williams was another individual composer, although one who'd had more of a standard schooling than Delius, some of it under Max Bruch and some of it under Maurice Ravel (of whom more later). The combination of Bruch and Ravel teaching and the rarefied Charterhouse-Cambridge-Royal College of Music upbringing produced a unique blend in VW. I'm reminded of that feeling you get when you see a picture of the baby of a couple you know. Often, as obvious as it sounds to say it, the baby does look like a combination of the two parents, only with its own 'new baby' uniqueness. I know, I know, it's obvious, but it's just that it never ceases to amaze me. Well, VW is a bit like that. You can hear the German of Bruch in his music. You can hear the delicate 'francais' of Ravel. It all comes out, though, with the particularly conservative Englishness of a Cotswold village. It's delicious, too, a musical creamy tea, only the jam's got schnapps or absinthe in it.
Stravinsky - Russia's finest. Wow, the name alone fires me up. It was one of those names that I had to have opened up for me. I refused to do it myself. Someone had to physically sit me down in front of a crummy school record player, perched precariously on its specially built hardwood ledge in the corner of the room, and force-feed me the early ballets. Even then, I wouldn't ingest it. It took a liquidized Symphony of Psalms before my eyes widened and I thought 'OH… MY… GIDDY AUNT!' And that was it. From then on, I listened differently to Igor Stravinsky. Sometimes, he painted pictures for me in his music, sometimes he just gave me a series of building blocks and seemed to be saying, 'Here, you assemble these. Make what you want out of them.' One of the occasions I most remember as being the former was with The Firebird -1 know, amazing that it wasn't The Rite of Spring. Someone played me the Finale from the suite of The Firebird and I was just gone. It seemed to be modern music meets Hollywood ending. I was hearing all sorts of things - I could hear someone splashing bucket after bucket of paint everywhere across a wall-sized canvas, as if they were creating a Pollock-type painting. I know, I know - mixing my eras, but that's what the music seemed to be saying. But the overriding image that stuck in my head was when the orchestra settle in to those last chords. The J. Arthur Rank-type procession has finished, and these oscillating chords start, the beginning of the end. Every time - EVERY TIME - I hear a magic carpet. EVERY TIME. As soon as they start, I'm on this flat, exotic magic carpet, and we're levitating a little, then a little more, then we reach out the height of a tall room: then we descend a little, then a little more, until finally we touch down again. We haven't gone on a trip anywhere - even though it may sound like I have! - we've just… tried it out. Levitated on the spot, gone up, gone up again, then lowered, lowered again and then finally come to rest. That is exactly what is happening for me towards the end of the finale of the Firebird suite. One day, I'll go and see a performance and see just exactly what DOES happen at this point in the ballet.
Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was born at the right time and in the right place. After a fairly musical upbringing at the hands of his father - a bass in the Imperial Opera - he was lucky enough to meet Rimsky-Korsakov. He was just twenty-one at the time while Rimsky, at fifty-nine, was very much the grand ageing, if not old, man of Russian music. Stravinsky played through some of his early pieces to R-K and, just three years later, became a fully fledged pupil. The two became good friends, with Stravinsky going on to provide both music for Rimsky's daughter's wedding, and, eventually, a death chant for his own funeral. It wasn't long before he came to the attention of the big thing in ballet choreography at the time, Serge Diaghilev, and, before long, he would be shocking the music world with his dance music. But more of that in a moment.
THE TIME OF THE KINGFISHER
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he time of the kingfisher or, put another way, the halcyon time.
The golden years, that 'oooh' bit in history - call it what you will, just don't call it Keith. It's the time after which things would never be the same again. I prefer to label them '1911 to 1914'. So come with me, if you would, and we will walk through the halcyon years together.
In 1911, Stravinsky was stirring it up again with his music to the ballet Petrushka. It was strong stuff, too. I know everyone goes on about the riots at the first night of The Rite of Spring, but just take a listen to Petrushka some time. It's amazing, and it must have sounded so weird in 1911. If you know it, think of the Russian Dance from Petrushka. Got it in your head? Now think of 1911. It's the year King George V was crowned. Now think back to that music - does that sound like die music? Now King George V, again. Now the music. Honesdy, does that music sound like King George V? No! And I bet it sounded even less like King George V back then, too. Am I making sense? What I mean is that they don't seem to go together, do they? And that's the point. Stravinsky was…
CLICHE ALERT! CLICHE ALERT! CLICHE ALERT! CLICHE ALERT!
…'writing out of his time'. Sorry about that, but it's true. Petrushka was arguably more out of its time than The Rite of Spring, but it was the Rite that caused a riot and, as a result, gets the billing above the tide.
1911, by the way, is the year that the Kaiser was speaking, rather ominously, about Germany's 'place in the sun' - the same year, thank goodness, that thirty-seven-year-old Winston Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty. In China, the Manchu dynasty fell, having been in power since 1644. WOW and then some. 1644. You see?! You see?! Yes, things always change, yes, agreed. (Have you still got Petrushka in your head?) But around this time they seemed to be changing in giant leaps, sea-changing, so to speak. Aircraft were used in a war offensive for the first time in 1911, the Italy-Turkey war, in fact. Sounds sort of 'Mmm' now, a bit 'Oh, really?' now. But think back to then. Aircraft in war must have seemed like something from another world - it must have been so frightening, so different, so weird. THIS is the world Stravinsky was reflecting, not the 'little-finger-poised-with-cucumber-sandwich-and-George-V' world. That doesn't fit Stravinsky and his Petrushka at all. No. He's writing music that can see through that to beyond. He's writing music that says…well, it says Braques, the cubist painter. Its says…Paul Klee, it says Jacob Epstein - all of whom were producing great stuff in 1911: Braques and his Man with a Guitar, Klee with his Self Portrait and Epstein with his tomb of Oscar Wilde, actually. And if you think back, one final time, to the Russian Dance, from Petrushka, then it might also be saying… 'Mahler is dead!' And, indeed, both symbolically and physically, he was. OR WAS HE? Mmmm? Mmmm???
Well, yes, actually, of course he was: died 18th May 1911, if you want the exact date. So, very dead. A lot dead. Dead dead. Dead to the power of dead. He'd 'come over all dead'. (That's enough 'deads', I think. Just wanted to make my point.) So the answer is 'Yes', obviously he is. I just said he was.
But if Mahler is dead, who is it that's writing the lush, romantic music in 1911? Who is it that is not quite writing 'the music of change', a
la Stravinsky? Indeed, Stravinsky, himself, called this composer 'cheap and poor'. Well, step forward, with score in hand, one Richard Strauss. The score in question was that of his opera, Der Rosenkavalier. To put it back into context, it was the music of change for Strauss - it was very much his way of going forward.
Richard Strauss had been born into a very musical family - his father being a very famous horn player, who played in orchestras conducted by Wagner. Having shown a ridiculously early and well-formed talent for composing - his Festival March is from when he was ten - he studied at university in Munich, before becoming an assistant conductor to Hans von Bulow. Looking back, he's rather like one of those people who wrap cars up in clingfilm and save them, in pristine condition, in a garage, for years. Then, they bring them out, aeons later and unwrap them. While they appear bright and shiny, they don't really appear new, if you know what I mean. They have all the trappings of new, but they're not… new. In addition, you have to take everything Stravinsky says with a pinch of salt, too. Given time, 'Rudd' Igor would often change his mind on most subjects, eventually going on to give you a quote that totally contradicted everything he'd previously said on a given subject. Nevertheless, Stravinsky's bons mots notwithstanding, whichever way you look at it, Strauss was holding on for dear life to an era and style that all around him were saying was dead.
HEAR THE WORLD UNRAVEL
O
ne year later, 1912, and Maurice Ravel would have been thirty-seven - a great age for a composer, I would imagine, if you had your health and a good twenty-five years left in you. And this seems true of Ravel, who did his first work for Diaghilev's Ballet Russe company in 1912, thus highlighting a pattern. Diaghilev's company is a rather forward-looking dance troupe, working out of Paris, and counting the great Nijinsky - the dancer, not the horse - among their number. It was the same company who had inspired Stravinsky to greatness a year earlier. This is one of the most gratifying parts of the entire 'great' artistic process - generally speaking, greatness breeds greatness. Up until his ballet music, Stravinsky had produced nothing more interesting than the Symphony in Eflat - a good piece, but not monumental. The combination of Diaghilev, Nijinsky, the Ballet Russe and, it must be said, Paris itself - the capital of the Modernist movement - and, well, it seemed to make people raise their game. Certainly it did with Ravel. Despite having some great work under his belt already - Pavane pour une Infante defunte, Jeux d'eau and Sheherazade - in 1912 he produced what a lot of people see as his greatest work, Daphnis and Chloe. Oddly enough, Diaghilev hated it. And, indeed, the first-night audience hated it. No change there, then. Imagine you were playing 'May I?'. You know, the game where you are given an instruction and you have to say 'May I' before you do it. Only, in this instance, you're playing it in 1912. You're given the instruction, 'Take two cavernous nostril breaths.' So, you clear the lungs, and breathe in, through your nose, two massive cavernous nostril breaths. What would you scent? Well, I'm getting… hints of… Lenin and Stalin in Pravda: I'm smelling Woolworths opening… I'm… I'm getting a rumour of… the first parachute jump… yes, and I'm getting… is that Picasso's The Violin) I think it is. There's also a frisson of Modigliani… maybe the Stone Head… or is it Woman with Long Neck) No, it's definitely Stone Head. Mmm, I'm also getting… what is that? A strange… afterscent… it's… oh, it's the Titanic. Sinking. My word, what a year. That really was something. All that and Delius comes up with On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, an orchestral tone poem which seems to capture the essence of this period - a dusky, deliquescent time, when God was in his heaven and all was still right with the world. Of course, if you were playing 'May I?' then you would just have had to go right back to the start, because you didn't say 'May P.
