The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization

by Howard Goodall

  The author imagines that a young musician, afflicted by the moral sickness which a well-known writer [François René de Chateaubriand] has called ‘the wave of passions’ [la vague des passions], sees his perfect, idealised woman, and falls desperately in love with her. Curiously, the image of his beloved only ever comes into his mind associated with a musical theme, which – passionately – reminds him of her nobility and shyness. Both the melodic image and its model pursue him incessantly like a double idée fixe. That is the reason for the constant appearance, in every movement of the symphony, of the melody that begins the first. The transitions from this state of dreamy melancholy, interrupted by fits of inexplicable joy, to delirious passion, with its outbursts of fury and jealousy, its returns of tenderness, its tears, its religious consolations – all this forms the subject of the first movement.

  I feel emotionally wrung out already. It is worth pointing out, since we have met her already, that the woman Berlioz himself was dreaming about when he wrote this was the object of his obsession, the Irish actress Harriet Smithson, but also that the big tune, his so-called idée fixe, he had already composed a year previously as part of a cantata he had entered into a competition. In the cantata the tune represented a tragic Muslim Princess, Erminia, during the Crusades. Not for the first or last time, a composer recycled a good tune that had not yet found its audience. The Symphonie fantastique’s musical narrative moves on to a Ball (or, as Berlioz describes it, ‘a festive orgy’), a gentler scene in the countryside involving shepherds that is reminiscent of Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony, then two movements that descend into Hammer-Horror-style darkness. The first is a ‘March to the Scaffold’, in which our hero poisons himself with opium, falls into a fevered, comatose state, sees himself murder the object of his infatuation, is duly apprehended and becomes onlooker to his own execution by guillotine – with a semi-comic musical effect depicting his head being chopped off. The innocent, late beloved has further torment in store in the afterlife, since the finale is a nightmare ‘Witches’ Sabbath’, ostensibly convened to mark the (presumably) headless artist’s funeral ceremony, though really its purpose is to escort the hapless girl to hell in a Breughelesque frenzy, a grotesque, diabolical grind show.

  It would appear that this latter vision of semi-erotic infernal punishment was Berlioz’s revenge on Harriet Smithson, who would not answer his letters of lovesick longing, nor agree to meet him, and was rumoured to be having an affair with her manager, though it could easily have been one of her other celebrity admirers, an impressive list that included Victor Hugo, Eugène Delacroix, Théophile Gautier and Alexandre Dumas. Heaven knows what the poor woman thought when she eventually heard the Berlioz piece at a Paris concert and read the programme notes, although it didn’t prevent her from marrying him three years later.

  The fusion of doomed love, nightmarish pandemonium and illustrative orchestral narrative that characterises the Symphonie fantastique lit a fuse in the imaginations of many other composers of the period, as we shall see, but it was inevitable that Berlioz, now smitten beyond sanity with Ms Smithson, would turn to arguably the greatest of all doomed-love romantic tragedies, that of Romeo and Juliet. Indeed it was seeing her in Shakespeare’s play at the Paris Odéon that detonated the infatuation in the first place. Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette (1839) was a large-scale dramatic choral symphony – Beethoven’s ninth with a story and cast of characters.

  Berlioz was not alone in his obsession with this tragic love story. Romeo and Juliet’s agonising predicament acts like wallpaper to nineteenth-century music: almost wherever you look it is lurking in the background, provoking decade-by-decade settings of many shapes, sizes and formats. The powerful chemistry of teenage innocence and sexual awakening, desperate longing against the odds, warring families, inevitable calamity, suicide and, finally, union in death more or less summed up the ingredients of the perfect nineteenth-century plot. Berlioz himself was encouraged in his endeavours after reviewing a performance in Florence of Vincenzo Bellini’s opera I Capuleti e I Montecchi in 1834, one of several operatic treatments of the story that century, the most conspicuously successful being Charles François Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette of 1867, which had three momentous openings that year, in Paris, New York and London. The latter production, at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, caused a sensation that rocked Victorian London when its two leads, Adelina Patti and Ernesto Nicolini, both married to other people, did in fact fall in love, kissing on the lips twenty-nine times during the balcony scene. They later settled down together at her splendid neo-Gothic castle in Wales, Craig-y-Nos, where she built her own opera house, and which is rumoured to be haunted by the spirits of Patti, Nicolini, composer Gioachino Rossini (next to whose grave in Paris Patti requested to be buried) and the children who died of TB there when the castle was used as a hospital between 1922 and 1986. The person most haunted by Berlioz’s symphonic setting of Romeo and Juliet, on the other hand, was Richard Wagner, who used it as a stylistic template for his opera Tristan und Isolde in 1865.

  Berlioz’s temperament was, to be sure, suited to the fascinations of nineteenth-century opera – doomed love, death and destiny – even if it was not so well suited to the patient, collaborative process of putting on operas. His operatic Everest was the epic ‘lyric tragedy’ Les Troyens (The Trojans), a sumptuously passionate retelling of the fall of Troy and the suicidal liaison between Trojan hero Aeneas and the Queen of Carthage, Dido. The actual affair may not have lasted as long as the opera itself, its incredible five-and-a-half-hour length being one of the many obstacles to its being mounted in its entirety during Berlioz’s lifetime. It was eventually performed whole for the first time in 1921, fifty-two years after his death.

  In between revolutions, communes, epidemics and wars, Paris was the Vegas of the nineteenth century, and the grandeur of its opera productions stood at the pinnacle of a glittering high-society scene. Opera composers from all over Europe were drawn to its glitz and glamour, and the prospect of getting rich from musical tragedy. Luigi Cherubini was one such composer, born in Florence but able to flourish in Paris by tiptoeing deftly between opposing camps as political power changed hands before, during and after the Revolution. In all, he produced eighteen operas there, including some that, daringly, had a topically political flavour, such as Les Deux journées, ou Le porteur d’eau, which was a thinly veiled re-imagining of a contemporary political controversy. He was followed to Paris by Gaspare Spontini, favourite of the Empress Joséphine, whose La Vestale (The Vestal Virgin) of 1807 was the best-received of his eight Parisian premières. Italian-born Gioachino Rossini, already famous, moved to Paris in 1824 and presented five operas there, including William Tell. Giacomo Meyerbeer and Jacques Offenbach – the noms de plume, in fact, of two German Jews originally named Jacob – took the Paris opera world by storm in the 1830s and ’40s. Meyerbeer’s grand spectacles, particularly Robert le diable (1831), Les Huguenots (1836) and Le Prophète (1849), turned him into a wealthy and much-decorated celebrity – they were the most regularly performed new operas in the world during the nineteenth century. Offenbach, meanwhile, composed no fewer than ninety-eight operettas in Paris before his death in 1880, some of which, like Orpheus in the Underworld, La Belle Hélène and La Vie Parisienne, were outrageously popular, even among the not so well off.

  Notwithstanding the universal admiration for Offenbach’s comic operettas, the opulence of the Parisian experience of opera and its position in society still meant it was a luxury. But the relationship between opera and the populace could not have been more different in Italy, where opera was a popular art form. By ‘popular’ I don’t mean some people quite liked it; I mean almost all city dwellers would have known the songs from the latest operas. If you lived in Turin or Milan or Naples in 1850, opera was your iTunes or your TV. This seems strange to us, aware as we are that even subsidised seats in modern-day opera houses cost upwards of £100, but in nineteenth-century Italy, opera was entertainment.

&n
bsp; In his immaculately researched study of music and its audiences, The Triumph of Music, Tim Blanning sums up the scale of Italian operaphilia and the pivotal role of it in every community thus:

  the opera house… often included not just a stage and auditorium but also cafés, restaurants, gambling casinos and public spaces where people could just meet and socialise. Many people went four or five times a week. Nowhere else in Europe and at no other time in European history has so much opera been performed as in Italy between 1815 and 1860. In Milan there were six theatres in which opera was performed regularly; in Naples there were five plus one more occasional venue.

  Opera was the soul of the Italian people as well as its chief off-duty pastime. The hummable operas of three composers, Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini, dominated the first half of the nineteenth century but no one captured the hearts of all Italians more completely than Giuseppe Verdi, whose first hit was Nabucco in 1842. He reigned supreme for half a century and his early offerings, Nabucco included, had plots carefully chosen to whip up the Italian people’s desire for self-government, the movement known as the Risorgimento. Thanks to this, Verdi became a political as well as a cultural icon.

  Like his crowd-pleasing predecessor Donizetti, Verdi’s first dozen or so operas were concerned mostly with giving the audience a series of show-stopping solos and choruses hung on a stirring plot from history or legend, generally involving heroism, self-sacrifice, defiance of neighbouring powers, bandits, brigands, highwaymen and dastardly villains. They were not so very different from Hollywood movies of the 1930s to ’60s. Battles were big, especially if they involved bullies being trounced by minnows, so Peruvian tribespeople standing up to the Spanish Conquistadors (Alzira, 1845), lowly Joan of Arc against the brutish English (Giovanna d’Arco, 1845) or plucky Lombards taking on all comers (I Lombardi alla prima crociata, 1843, La battaglia di Legnano, 1849) were typical. But then, in around 1850, Verdi’s approach changed gear.

  Whether he sensed his audiences were hungry for something different or the impulse came from his own shifting priorities, the result was a direction of attention to more contemporary issues and plot lines, even those that were ostensibly set in the past. This new attitude, at least initially, scandalised as much as it excited: Stiffelio, first performed in Trieste in November 1850, provoked official condemnation and substantial censoring, telling as it does the tale of a married Protestant minister learning to forgive his adulterous wife. It was based on a play that had been published only the previous year and was set in recent times rather than in the safely distant past. His next project, Rigoletto, was also based on a recent (banned) play by Victor Hugo, Le Roi s’amuse, which lampooned an immoral, corrupt king – Hugo had had Louis Philippe I, last king of France, in mind – and accordingly encountered further difficulties with the authorities, in this case Venetian, who insisted scenes be removed and the period and setting be changed. A tragic melodrama of fate and revenge, Il Trovatore, followed in January 1853, immediately becoming one of the most popular operas in history, but even this did not prepare Verdi’s now thronging admirers for the shock of La Traviata, which was put in front of an astonished public just three months later, in Venice.

  La Traviata is about a doomed love affair and parental interference in a young couple’s unlikely liaison – once again echoing Romeo and Juliet – climaxing in the agonising and symbolic death, from TB, of the once-promiscuous female protagonist, Violetta. The opera’s title translates approximately as ‘the woman who went astray’, though a modern colloquial translation might be ‘The Slut’. Based on a recently published bestseller, The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas, La Traviata was met at first with moral outrage. To death and destiny Verdi had now added sex. The Venetian authorities demanded that the opera’s present-day setting be put back a hundred and fifty years, to reduce its potential to shock, while Queen Victoria was advised not to attend the London première three years later for fear of being seen to endorse its ‘immorality’. But though its birth was controversial, La Traviata eventually swept (nearly) all before it. To date there have been over twenty film adaptations and it is the second-most-performed opera of all time, after Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

  Of course, stories like The Lady of the Camellias allowed nineteenth-century audiences to have their cake and eat it – to enjoy being spectators of what they thought of as lewd behaviour, and then to have their hypocritical morals endorsed by seeing the naughty woman who indulged in it die a horrible death. Violetta does not expire, mind, before she has broken the audience’s defenceless hearts with an adieu of choking beauty, the aria ‘Addio, del passato bei sogni ridenti’ (Farewell, lovely, happy dreams of the past).

  It is no coincidence that the figure of the Fallen Woman stalks through so many operas, novels and paintings of the second half of the nineteenth century. With increased male middle-class spending power came astonishing levels of prostitution. Social historian Judith Walkowitz calculated in her authoritative Prostitution and Victorian Society (1980) that nineteenth-century industrialised cities had on average a staggering ratio of one prostitute per twelve adult males. La Traviata confronts this sexual hypocrisy: that every woman had her price, and yet should be condemned for it. The death of Violetta was meant to strike shame into Verdi’s audiences’ hearts, as it did the meddling father of her lover in the final scene. It was a bold attempt to change prevailing social attitudes by a man who was second only to Garibaldi, hero of the struggle for Italian independence, in fame. And Verdi understood that opera was at its most powerful when attempting to impart universal truths through emotionally engaging morality fables. By making his fellow countrymen and women confront their double standards, their prejudices and insecurities through his accessible, sweeping melodramas, he arguably did do as much to better the lives and self-esteem of Italians in the nineteenth century as Garibaldi.

  Throughout his gloriously successful career of twenty-eight operas, Verdi managed to convey emotions, stories and often layered concepts of deeply felt intensity without disappearing into a private world of musical complexity that only other musicians could appreciate – an alarmingly common tendency that crept into opera as the decades rolled on. His tunes were firmly rooted in an easy-to-grasp, enchanting-to-sing Italian vocal style, so that ordinary folk really could leave the theatre humming. Those who couldn’t afford a ticket need not have missed out, either. Barrel organists and other itinerant musicians would hang around the theatres, learn the tunes and make a living busking them in the street the next day.

  So solid was the foundation Verdi created for populist Italian opera that even when, in the early twentieth century, classical music became convulsed in turmoil and discord, he was able to hand over seamlessly to composers like Leoncavallo and Mascagni. But without doubt Verdi’s greatest successor was Puccini, whose death-and-destiny-heavy masterpieces belong to the mindset of the nineteenth century even though they were written at the turn of the twentieth, their generously melodic melodramas bucking the trend of modernism. In all art, there are few more poignant critiques of the abuse of power than Puccini’s Tosca of 1900, or of rapacious imperialism than Madama Butterfly of 1904, both of which were presented, then as now, as mass-market commodities without pretension or snobbery.

  If it had been left to the Italians, classical music would have made it to the modern age without so much as a scratch, still completely mainstream, still loved by everyone. As late as 1936 La Scala in Milan could still première such enthusiastically received comedies as Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s delightfully tuneful and quaint Il Campiello, based on a play written for the Venetian Carnival of 1756, and which would not have been stylistically out of place had it opened a whole century earlier – rather than in the same year as the BBC began television transmissions. North of the Alps, though, things had been developing very differently indeed.

  If instrumental and symphonic music of the first half of the nineteenth century was totally dominated by Beethoven, music in the second half belon
ged to a French-speaking Hungarian born in what is now Austria: Franz Liszt. What is odd about this statement is that virtually everyone has heard of Beethoven and can probably recall some piece of music by him, but very few can name a piece by Liszt, even if they have heard of him. He was a genius other composers slavishly followed for well over half a century, yet to most modern listeners he is just a name, alongside his colleague Brahms. But Liszt was a trailblazer, an experimenter, a pacesetter. To do justice to the increased obsession with death and destiny, someone needed to turbocharge music’s engine. Liszt was that man.

  Disturbing emotions were conjured up in Liszt’s harmonies; flashy set pieces thrilled and terrified a sensation-seeking public. Liszt, Mr Trick or Treat, was the composer who, more than anyone else in the mid-nineteenth century, recalibrated music’s forces, so it is worth looking in detail at some of the many innovations he brought to fruition.

  First, he kick-started a craze for extravagant, Hallowe’en-style music, full of dark, deep, crashingly loud chords and abrasive strings. It is a craze that has yet to abate. His theatre of the macabre, as seen in his scary Totentanz (Death-dance) of 1849, for solo piano and orchestra, didn’t inspire just composers of his own period, like Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre (1874), or Grieg’s ‘March of the Trolls’ (1891), or Liyadov’s Baba Yaga (1904), but also film composers of our own time, including the chillingly ingenious Danny Elfman. Elfman’s Lisztian score for Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, for example, gives edge-of-the-seat action sequences an undercurrent of avenging menace.

  Second, Liszt was a spectacular pianist who more or less single-handedly – or indeed two-handedly – forced piano builders to adopt iron frames to replace wood ones, because they simply broke under the hammering he gave them on stage. His use of the piano as fairground of effects bedazzled audiences at his live concerts. One of his party-piece show-stoppers was a Grand Chromatic Galop, composed in 1838, which can be seen as the template for Offenbach’s hallmark cancans of twenty years later (for example, the ‘Galop infernal’ from Orpheus in the Underworld). Showy, circus-like turns, though, were only a tiny part of what he could do at the piano in his ‘recitals’ – a term he coined for a solo piano concert. In his thirties, Liszt became music’s first international star, embarking on a merry-go-round of European tours, where he was known, and treated, as ‘The King of the Piano’. According to contemporary reports, some female fans became ‘hysterical’ at the mere sight of him on stage. (This aspect of his celebrity was, I fear, rather overhyped in the late-twentieth century in an attempt by classical record companies to make him more relevant to a younger generation in the pop era. Although the term ‘Lisztomania’ was first used in 1844 by the German writer Heinrich Heine in his review of a series of recitals in Berlin, the 1975 film by Ken Russell, Lisztomania, unsubtly likened the adoration of Liszt’s female fans to the phenomenon of Beatlemania and subsequent similar manias. Ever since the film, a lazy identification of Liszt as ‘the first rock star’ has developed. Granted, he inspired unprecedented levels of dedicated fandom for his day, but a few anecdotes about female concert-goers swooning or hoping to take away some memento from a live Liszt appearance – a handkerchief or, in one report, a discarded cigar – hardly measures up to the Fab Four arriving in a helicopter to perform at the open-air Shea Stadium in August 1965 in front of 55,600 screaming, weeping, fainting fans whose noise deafened the hundreds of NYPD officers deployed to protect the artists and totally overwhelmed the stadium’s PA system.)