by Stephen Fry
Over in the US, two important composers were brushing shoulders. Aaron Copland had, by 1942, found his voice, as they say in composerland. He had been through a period of experimentation but, at the age of forty-two, was now at home with some of the more Native American folk sounds that found their way into music. He had also done the double - that is, achieved that rare thing of critical acclaim and popular acclaim. In addition, he had also pointed the way for film composers for years to come, who would imitate his 'grand canyon' chords and soaring tunes - more of this later.
Just leaving America in 1942, after a stay of a few years, was twenty-nine-year-old Benjamin Britten, who had gone back to face the Tribunal for Conscientious Objectors and do his part in the war effort - by taking part in official concerts. This he did and, not long after his return, he had come up with one of his most beautiful pieces to date, the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. It is, in effect, a song cycle setting a selection of poems by, among others, Blake, Keats and Tennyson to sometimes sublime, sometimes searing Britten music. It is also, in a way, war music.
J never forget a quote I heard about the great jazz trombonist, Jack Teagarden. It was basically along the lines of how he was able to play the tune of virtually any jazz standard and make it sound like it was the way the composer had intended it should be played. I often think of this when I hear Copland's Appalachian Spring. It isn't so much that it sounds the way the composer intended - for that we have recordings conducted by the man himself. No, it's more that Appalachian Spring sounds as if it has been around for ever, a bit like the way I've heard Sir Paul McCartney talk about his song 'Yesterday'. It's said he dreamt the tune one night, and, when he woke the next day, he wandered round with it in his head. Occasionally, he would ask someone, 'Have you heard of this tune?' and hum a few bars. No one he asked seemed to know the tune. After a while, and somewhat reluctantly, he came to realize that the tune was his, and that it had come to him in a dream. Again, forgive me for harping on, but various parts of Appalachian Spring seem like that. Yes, I know it has a Shaker tune -or the 'Lord of the Dance', as we used to call it - in the middle, but it's not that. It just feels like Copland almost wrote down the notes to a great piece, that somehow gives the impression it has been around for centuries.
He did all this, of course, in 1944. Yes, I really have hopped, skipped, jumped and taken away the first number I thought of and, well, jumped on ahead.
It's the year of the D-Day landings, the Battle of the Bulge and the VI flying bombs in London. It's also the year Marechal Petain is imprisoned at Belfort, and Hitler's generals try, but fail, to assassinate him. Elsewhere, there's TS Eliot's Four Quartets, The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, and No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre. And, briefly, in the art world, there's the loss of Mondrian and Kandinsky, but Picasso and Braque have gone all, well, organic, I suppose, as they produce The Tomato Plant and The Slice of Pumpkin, respectively. Sod the Turner Prize, just enter them for Best in Show (Section 1, small garden produce). Now, I really need to take a leap, here, so stay with me, if you will. I want to end up in 1957, so I'm going to have to take you on something of a magical mystery tour.
FRY'S TOURS: INAUGURAL JOURNEY
M
ove in, down the bus, please. Pill all the seats. Thank you. A few rules first: no food or drink, please - this is a bus, not a refectory. No standing in the aisles, no talking to the driver - that's me - and no sticking your tongue out at the composers. In fact, no rude gestures of any kind. OK, there'll be a whipround for the driver - that's me - at the end, large notes only, please. OK, we're off.
Over to your left, way over to your left, in fact, is Benjamin Britten in 1945. He's busy on his opera - are you hearing me at the back? -on his opera Peter Grimes. Also, you may notice Evelyn Waugh, just behind him, waving a copy of Brideshead Revisited - don't wave back, please, it only encourages them - as well as Frank Lloyd Wright's new Guggenheim Museum. If you're thinking it's a bit peaceful, then well done. Yes, the war has ended.
On your right, in 1946 - please don't get out of your seats - you'll see David Lean filming Great Expectations, Eugene O'Neill signing copies of The Iceman Cometh - available from the driver at the end of your journey - as well as what appears to be the sleeping figure of John Logie Baird. In fact, he is… dead. Any minute now, wait a mo- yes, there he is. Benjamin Britten again - gosh, he is busy, isn't he, ladies and gentlemen. Obviously hit a purple patch - and this year he's finishing off The Toung Person's Guiie to the Orchestra, using a little tune by our old friend, the composer Henry Purcell. Keith, can you not do that with the skylights, you wouldn't do it at home! I know you don't have skylights at home, but stop it anyway.
Straight ahead of me, you should be able to see the smiling face of John Cage. Can you all see him? It's 1952, you see, and if I just stop speaking for a moment, and let you… I / / X ?? / / I
… did you hear that?
That was nothing. Niente, as they say in Dewsbury. Bugger all. Pas une sausage. Odd one, really. John Cage, the forty-year-old modern composer, decides that music is all around us. You know. The birds, the trees, the traffic, even. So he writes a piece - IN THREE MOVEMENTS - which has directions to remain 'Tacet'. Silent. So, if you can imagine the first 'performance', in inverted commas: someone came out on to a concert platform - pianist I think it was, complete with page turner, and proceeded to play nothing. For 4 minutes 33 seconds. Of course, Cage has had the windows opened, so that you can hear the noise from outside, everything. THAT's the MUSIC, in the eyes of John Cage. What goes on around you. I believe the music on the first night consisted of a fair few fortissimo 'You've got to be jokings' and the odd largo hand clap. Even a sforzando cry of 'CRAP!' And do you want to know the best bit? People record it! They do. In fact, I can recommend the Frank Zappa version. I don't know what it is, there's just something about the performance.
On your left again is 1953 - Coronation Year. The music you can hear is William Walton's Orb and Sceptre, written especially. The couple outside are still Waiting for Godot- have been since last year. Please don't throw them food. The gravestone on my left is that of Dylan Thomas, who died this year, although it is partially obscured by the sculpture in the foreground, which is entitled King and Queen by Henry Moore. Sorry? Yes, Janice, the curvy bit of rock with the hole in the middle. Yes, it is finished.
Just passing out of view, behind us, there is a Spanish-looking gentleman in safari shorts with a net. That is Joseph Canteloube. He's very much the Gallic version of Vaughan Williams. He collects French folk tunes the way you and I might collect famous people's mortuary photographs. Or is that just me? Anyway, Mr Canteloube is very happy this year because his new piece, Songs of the Auvergne, is a big hit. It contains tunes he collected on his travels up and down the volcanic peaks of the Auvergne - surprisingly enough. On the wall behind him, you can see a poster for one of the big movies of this year - 1955 - The Seven Tear Itch.
Putting music into contect can really throw up seeming anomolies, like The Seven Tear Itch and Songs of the Auvergne, which just don't seem to gel. On the other hand, it can shed more light on certain pieces too. Take the next year, 1956. If you can look to your right, you might catch the Catherine Wheel hips of Elvis Presley, only pardy obscured by Leonard Bernstein's operetta, Candide, which is situated to the rear of the year. A far more fitting pair, Elvis and Leonard, I think. Candide has suffered somewhat from having a showstopping overture. As a result, a lot of people don't ever get to hear the rest of it.
Finally, we are now just pulling into 1957, so can I just answer two questions I had earlier: yes, this is the place for a loo break, and yes, Eden has indeed given way to Macmillan. Behind Mr Macmillan, who is sat on the park bench, are representatives of The Six, the six countries who sign the Treaty of Rome, and thus start us on the inexorable trail to the prosecution of people selling bananas by the pound. The beginnings of the Common Market, in other words. There are desegregation riots in America - in Arkansas die paras are c
alled in - and Jack Kerouac coins the phrase 'beat' or 'beatnik' in the cult book from '57, On the Road. All that, plus The King and F. What more could you want? As it is now 6.30, some of you may want to take a wash in your rooms, before going on to flie concert of two new works from 1957 - Shostakovich's Second Piano Concerto and Bernstein's new one. I'm reliably informed they are both lovely, although my mum did tell me you might want to bring a book, or at least a good magazine, for the Shostakovich outer movements.
Actually, tour Time Out. Thanks. A quick Bernstein moment, if you will. Bernstein was born in 1918 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, but of Russian descent. After studying piano and composition at Harvard, he pursued a career in conducting, first as assistant to the legendary Serge Koussevitzky at Boston, and then, in his own right, with the New York Philharmonic. In much the same way as Mahler before him, the conducting was just one side of the coin for Bernstein, allowing him, as it did, to compose at the same time. Thus it was that in 1957 he got together with Stephen Sondheim to write his biggest hit. Based on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet - West Side Story. It is still, today, a totally exuberant score, with - quite simply - some fantastic tunes. Well, it's got to be said. OK. Your Time In.
And that just about brings us to the end of my very first tour. Thank you for travelling with Fry's Tours. I would remind you that there is a collection for the driver - that's me - on the way out, and, also, could someone remember to take with them the sickbag that's on the back seat. Thank you.
THE YOUNG ONES
I
f I could be so rude, could I just ask you to put a bookmark in this page for just a moment. Remember which line you're on, if you would, close the book, and look at the front cover.
Are you back? Right, well you will have noticed that the words on the front said 'Stephen Fry's INCOMPLETE and utter history of classical music'. And, in my view, incomplete is such a beautiful word, isn't it? It's a perfect dectet of letters, a divine decimal delight which deliciously describes the nature of the next section. In… complete. Innnnnn… complete. Gorgeous, isn't it? Makes me want to jump on a chair and sing it to the tune of Fingerbobs. 'In… complete… In complete…' Stunning, isn't it?
I guess what I'm trying to say in the previous paragraph is that we are about to zoom, lickety-spit, through a full three decades, not even stopping to spare the horses. So do forgive me. Here we go. With the possible exception of Cliff and the Shadows, the other young ones of 1982 were Benjamin Britten and the Sunday Times Colour Supplement. (OK, so Benjamin Britten was forty-nine, which is stretching it a little to call him a young one, but the Sunday Times Colour Supplement was brand new this year.) Britten's incredibly moving War Requiem is a moving mixture of Latin Mass and the poems of Wilfred Owen. Well, I did say some of the effect of the war would take a while in coming. It was premiered just a year after the Bay of Pigs became the temporary centre of the world, and the same year that 3,000 US soldiers and marshals had to accompany James Meredith on his first day at college, to stop riots happening round him. Why? Simply because he was black.
Two years later and possibly one of the most famous 'What Were You Doing When…' events, ever. The year will forever be etched in the brain to many - certainly for me, I know - mainly for the question: 'Do you remember what you were doing the day… the day Deryke Cooke thwarted Mahler's ambition to write the same number of symphonies as Beethoven?' At least, that's how I remember it. Yes, it's amazing, isn't it? Some musicologist finds Mahler's last sketches, and just goes and finishes them off. So you have… Mahler Ten. In 1964. Very odd. Someone would eventually do it to Beethoven, too, but not for a good twenty-four years yet. What else has happened? Well, "65 saw Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, commissioned by the Dean of Chichester, oddly enough, and premiered the same year as Lyndon B. Johnson was. Well, to be accurate, he wasn't premiered, he was presi-dented, I suppose. Still. Onward. No time to lose.
1967 becomes the year of Jeremy Thorpe leading the Liberal Party; of the Six Day War; of Martin Luther King leading marches against Vietnam; and of both the US and Soviet space programmes in crisis following deaths on launch and re-entry, respectively. Elsewhere, at Cape Town's Grooote Schuur Hospital, Christiaan Barnard performed the world's first heart transplant. Oh, and here's a fine couple of statistics to put alongside 1967 in your brain's filing system: Iff 1967, 5.3 BILLION CANS OF SOFT DRINKS
WERE SOLD IN THE US ALONE. (5.3 BILLION!!!)
Also, do you remember that quote from Alexander Graham Bell, about his telephone - T firmly believe that, one day, every city will have a telephone!' Well, according to statistics from 1967, there were already, by then, 100 million telephones in the US alone. Would you Adam and Eve it. All that and we lost Dorothy Parker. 'This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.' Marvellous, but I don't know. Does it all fit with this music from 1967? I mean, Aram Khachaturian, the Armenian composer who was by then well into his sixties, brought out Spartacus in '67. Play the Love Theme from Spartacus and Phrygia in your head - or The Onedin Line, if you prefer - and tell me if it fits 1967. I'm not sure.
Not quite finished with the Swinging Sixties. I need to just mention that in 1969, while Neil Armstrong was misquoting himself, Karlheinz 'No, but I've trodden in some' Stockhausen was in the middle of the first performance of his vocal classic, Stimmunjj. Now, call me odd, but I've got a recording of Stimmung - on vinyl, if you will! - and I think it's absolutely fab. Perfect music for putting on when you've had more than the odd glass of Chateau Margaux and someone is passing something round. OK that's enough of that. Thank you. Agenda Item 17; Any other business?
Shostakovich is now up to fifteen. Symphonies, that is. By 1972 -yes I said 1972 - he has premiered Number 15 which seems to get past the Communist Party unamended. That's more than could be said for 13. Communist leader Krushchev made him change the words. It seems a world away now, the old Soviet regime, doesn't it, and yet you have to remind yourself, it wasn't long ago, was it? 1972, I mean. Flares, Last Tango in Paris, an Oscar for Liza Minelli in Cabaret - and, just to forever help you to place it, Shostakovich's Fifteenth Symphony. Wow. There was also the death of Picasso, the death of WH Auden, and, one year later, Britten's Death in Venice.
Britten premiered his latest opera, Death in Venice, at his still-thriving festival in beautiful Aldeburgh. Sadly, it was around this time that the composer's health reduced him to doing very little composing at all.
1974. Just to place it for you, it was also the year Harold Wilson became PM again, the year Grenada won its independence, and the year Lord Lucan disappeared after the murder of his children's nanny. No, I haven't seen him. After that, well, musically, the '70s became more of a graveyard than anything else. By the time Thatcher came to power in '79, we had already lost Milhaud in '74, Shostakovich in '75, Britten in '76 and Khachaturian in '78. Add to that the loss in '77 of two of the world's greatest singers - Maria Callas and Elvis Presley - and you might be forgiven for retiring to your room to wrap yourself in your beloved vinyl collection.
True, the Polish composer Gorecki - pronounced Goretski, appar-endy - had come up witli a new symphony just as Concorde came in to service in 1976, but more about that later. The Gorecki, that is, not Concorde. Although, having said that, let me find some time for the Italian composer Luciano Berio. Apart from writing all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff for his wife, the singer Cathy Berberian, and a bunch of solo stamina tests for different instruments, called 'Sequenza's, he also found time in the '70s to revisit a set of folk songs he'd arranged in 1964. He repolished them in '73, and, by the mid to late '70s, they were getting more than a few performances around the world. The reason? Well, probably because they didn't sound like someone tuning a shortwave radio. If you are one of those people who feel they can't really listen to twentieth-century music, then try these, because they are a very easy way in, albeit via some cute old tunes. I may be wrong, but I believe the score calls for two rather large car suspension springs to be struck at var
ious points. Don't let that put you off, though - the Berio Folk Songs are lovely. Anyway. Off we go. Let me nip on to 1980.
To Hoy, in fact, in the Orkney Islands. Very beautiful little place, I'm led to believe, and, by 1980, it had been the home of the English composer Peter, now Sir Peter, Maxwell Davies, for some nine years. He's one of what is often referred to as 'the Manchester group', because they were all making music in Manchester and they no doubt went round in a group. Probably, you know, all chewing gum, wearing shades and looking hard. Maybe not. Anyway, out of a set that included Alexander Goehr and Harrison Birtwistle as well as Elgar Howarth and pianist John Ogdon, Maxwell Davies is probably the one who wrote stuff that you have some vague chance of ever whistling. So, while the SAS stormed the Iranian Embassy on a crisp May morning in 1980, he was peacefully and, I hope, obliviously, putting the final bar line on his new work for solo piano, Farewell to Stromness. It is a delightful piece, written as a composer's protest against the imminent threat of uranium mining.
To be fair, it's a world away from things like his Eight Songs for a Mad King in the late '60s. Having said that, if you see die Songs for a Mad King on the bill anywhere, do try and get along, because they are a great piece of music theatre, if they're done right.
