OF CLASSICAL MUSIC

by Stephen Fry

  Now obscenely wealthy and feeling that he was writing the best stuff he'd ever written, he finished his second Paris opera - William Tell, his grand masterpiece. Even the overture was, almost, the culmination of everything he'd been trying to do witii all the other overtures, up to that point. It all just came right. Everything came together in this overture. So much so that it is now played separately from its opera probably more than any other. And, of course, it was at one time - still is for some, me included - inextricably linked to the Lone Ranger, the masked man who had a strange 'Morecambe and Wise' type relationship with his sidekick, Tonto (although, I've got to be honest, I never saw the episode where they are in bed, with Tonto working on his latest play). And this is OK- the link to the Lone Ranger, I mean. At least, I think so. It used to be said that the sign of an intellectual was someone who could hear the William Tell Overture and not think of the Masked Man. Well, personally, I don't mind people linking it. To me it just says classical music is getting out there, people are hearing it, whereas, were you to get all precious about it, then many of them wouldn't be hearing it. And how is that better? Exactly. These days you might say the same about the Hamlet cigar ad. Some people only know Bach's Orchestral Suite No 3 because of the Hamlet ad. But is that a bad tiling? If the alternative - and it almost certainly would be the alternative - is that they don't know die Orchestral Suite No 3 at all, then give me the former, any day. Good. There we are, then. Now, somebody help me down off this soapbox, please.

  The opera William Tell is, sadly, less known in its entirety than its near-perfect overture. (But then again, it would be, wouldn't it. You're not really going to find someone using an entire opera as the theme to a Toilet Duck ad, are you?) Maybe this has something to do with the story, though, which, if you're a fruitarian, is highly disturbing, telling as it does the tragic story of Granny Smith, who is cruelly slain, her body cut in half by the evil Tell.

  The other big thing about the opera William Tell is that it marks the point at which Rossini simply shut up shop. Stopped composing. Finito. Kaput. The End. Everybody go home. Yes, he simply stopped writing. Apart from a couple of little corkers, right at the last minute of his life, some thirty-four years later, that was it. From then on, he concentrated on becoming the nineteenth-century version of Nigella Lawson, only with a somewhat less attractive figure.

  CH-CH-CH-CHANGES

  JL

  ? paraphrase the great Robbie of Williams, let me edutain you.

  Uggh. Sorry. Sorry I ever said that. Edutainment - supposedly a cross between education and entertainment - was a bit of a buzzword, recendy, but, thankfully, has fallen on hard times, as my English teacher used to say. Despite the ughism, though, let me just catch up with myself for a moment. It's hard, you see, whizzing through an entire 6000 years in just 304 pages - that means I have to average about twenty years per page. You try that, some time. In fact, I've just spent seven whole lines saying that I'm about to tell you something. Seven lines! In seven lines I should have advanced a full four years. Onward, I think.

  What's happening? Who's composing, who's decomposing, to borrow a line from Monty Python? Who's leading the pack, who's following like sheep? Plus, of course, the perennial question, Who's sorry now? Well, much like any other time in history, change is the key word. Everything always has, everything always will, change. But in die early nineteenth century, the sheer rate of change was bordering on the mind-blowing. Railways, for example. They now start to pop up all over the place. In just under twenty years, die amount of rail being laid in the UK goes from a couple of hundred miles' worth to more dian 2,000. A change is gonna come, as Viscount Sam of Cooke apdy stated. Change, in die words of Lord Tears of Fears.

  Ch-ch-ch-changes, to quote Earl David of Bowie. If you were to stick a pin anywhere in the map of 1831, and stick your head above die parapet, what would greet you would have been a mass of change. After the obligatory revolution in Paris last year, this year has seen a huge slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia. Lots of the change is 'social', as people are beginning to refer to it, with new groups forming the world over: Joseph Smith's Latterday Saints, for example, or Mormons, get under way in Fayett, New York State, and almost immediately commence foreign missions as far afield as Europe. It was also around this time that a twenty-three-year-old Charles Darwin got the job of naturalist on board the LLMS Beagle, setting sail for South America, New Zealand and Australia. It would be a very different mission from tiiat of Joseph Smith and his followers, and it would be one that simply wouldn't stop repercussing. There were also experiments galore: Faraday, widi light and electromagnetics, for example. It's a big time for change, you see. Hope it was wearing clean underwear.

  But what about music? Is all this res novae reflected in the world of black dots and baton waving?

  THE LONG AND THE SHORT OF IT - ONLY NOT IN THAT ORDER

  s ? is it? Is it reflected in the world of music? Well, if you want die short answer, yes. Of course, if you want the long answer, then: Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss. In fact, tell you what: let me go into a little more detail, in just a moment. But first, I want to keep you posted on two old friends. Mendelssohn is the first, and the strange netherworld that is opera the second.

  Mendelssohn first. If you can imagine that Roger Hargreaves had written the history of classical music, then, for example, Handel would be Mr Greedy. Schoenberg might be Mr Topsy-Turvy, and maybe Wagner could be Mr Bossy. Whatever. Some of them are open to discussion. One that isn't in question, though, is Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn, without a shadow of a doubt, is Mr Happy. His music is rarely, if ever, too taxing. It's almost always beautiful, or, if not beautiful, chipper, or if not chipper, then relaxed. The world according to Felix - and remember, his name even means 'happy'. Never really wanted for money, was quite happily married, was recognized as a great composer while he was still alive - something that doesn't always happen - and generally was the sort of person who took his library books back and 'rallied round'.

  Anyway, the reason I want to catch up with Mendelssohn relates to the fragment of paper that was recently uncovered during an exhibition entitled 'More than just a Big Circle and a Line Down -Composers and their Minims' at the University of Baaden Blackschiep. It appears to be a scrap of the minutes of a meeting, attended by FM-B, during the latter half of 1832. Chairman spoke: "This week we have a new member of Bachaholics Anonymous, and his name is

  Felix.' General murmurs. Chairman spoke again: 'Hello, Felix. Is there anything youd like to tell us?' More general murmuring and chairman calls for quiet. Chairman spoke: 'Felix?' Murmurs die down. FM-B speaks. 'Hello. My name is… is Felix, and, well, I love the music of Bach. I am a Bachaholic. THERE!' Murmurs from crowd. Chairman spoke: 'Well done Felix That's the first step!' Yes, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy is about to do what no one has been able to do for almost a hundred years, and that is to single-handedly start a Bach revival.

  Despite the fact that we take Bach very much for granted these days, as one of the staple parts of the classical music diet, it was not always thus. Bach's output had been more or less forgotten after he'd died in 1750, and it was going to take someone with a fortunate mix of passion and clout to make people sit up and take notice of it again. Such a man was FM-B. He was, remember, a 'great composer' in his own lifetime. He was, also, the boss of a music academy, the Berlin Singakademie. Under his guidance, the academy had put on, just two years ago, the first performance in recent memory of Bach's St Matthew Passion. Combined with a significant championing of the great man's music, this was enough to relight the Bach fire, a fire that has not gone out to this day.

  Around the same time he embarked on his love affair with Johann Sebastian, he also embarked on a second love affair to run alongside it, namely a love of Britain. By 1831, he'd made the first of a long line of trips to the land of the knotted hankie, and was being hailed as a bit of a celeb.

  He took in Scodand, and came over all Celtic, not only w
ith a Scottish Symphony but also with a piece of 'programme music' too, as it was known - that is, music with an unspoken story or picture attached, which the composer is trying to depict in the music. It was an overture called The Hebrides, or Fingal's Hohle {Fingal's Cave), and was prompted by an actual excursion to the cave itself in 1829.

  Mendelssohn was evidendy totally overwhelmed by Scodand, and the small Hebridean island of Staffa in particular. It's said that he wrote down the opening bars of his now famous overture the day before his trip to Staffa, and that it was some time before he eventually gave the overture he had written the name 'Fingal's Cave'. Indeed, despite the romantic notion that you 'can hear the waves lapping in the cave', it probably wasn't quite as hunky-dory as that. There's even a case for arguing that Mendelssohn would have liked to get Staffa out of his mind. Indeed, his travelling companion in Scodand, one Carl Klingemann - reported that Mendelssohn 'is on better terms with the sea as a composer than he is as an individual or a stomach.' Mendelssohn himself wrote, from the comfort of dry land some days later, 'How much has happened since my last letter and this! The most fearful sickness, Staffa, scenery, travels and people…' So, you see. Next time you're waiting for lights to die down in a concert featuring the Hebrides overture, and the smartarse next to you offers to point out the musical depiction of 'the waves lapping gently and ever, so beautifully into the cave', just tell them: 'Actually, you're mistaken. I'm pretty sure that's meant to portray Mendelssohn with his head down the loo, doing a Technicolor yawn.' I'm sure they'll thank you for it. Whatever the reality of the situation, Mendelssohn managed to produce a work that simply reeks of Scotiand - it's music with a kilt on, music that says 'CELTIC, music that says 'I'll never win the World Cup.'

  OPERA III - THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD

  Ђ K, you may think, judging from that title, that I've got a bit of a./downer on opera, but nothing could be further from the truth. True, the people who attend opera on a regular basis are, on the whole, a strange, often slightly paranoid breed, who tend to be either over-animated or shy to the point of torture. Some say they are, like organists, a breed apart, but I prefer to give them a chance. After all, some of my best friends are regular opera-goers, and, let's face it, weU under 50 per cent of them have ever been a cause for concern. Admittedly, most of them smile a little too much and look over their shoulder a lot, but that should not be borne against them. Besides, I, myself, like nothing better occasionally than to sit back and let Don Giovanni wash over me. So I don't want you to think I'm anti-opera. Far from it.

  Anyway, it's 1831 and more or less three people are upholding the interests of opera. Rossini is one, as we saw earlier; Donizetti, as we'll see soon; and Bellini, as we'll see now.

  Bellini was the classic opera composer. In fact, you could say he was the classic composer, period. He wrote only a handful of master- pieces, then died young and left a beautiful corpse. In the gospel according to Roger Hargreaves, again, he would be, what, Mr Tragedy? Or Mr Consumption, perhaps. In fact, gosh, what a jolly little book that would have made - just right for the first book for your god-daughter: 'Mr Consumption went to the door. "Oh look," he cried, weakly, "it's Little Miss Tuberculosis, come to cough!'" Best leave that one there, I think. Anyway, Bellini it was who put more feeling than you could shake a stick at back into opera. Whereas Rossini and Donizetti would rattle off a couple of operas over lunch, Bellini would take around a year to produce just one, wrenching the notes from his very soul. Or whatever. He also decided to move away from big, vocal displays for their own sake, and went instead for sheer intensity. So gone were the 'stand and deliver' arias, which showed off just what a singer could do, simply because they could do it. In their place were bywords like passion and feeling, and all that malarkey. It frequently left his audiences in tears.

  Take his offering from 1831, for example; 'a work of genius', according to Richard 'Just you wait' Wagner, 'a great score that speaks to the heart'. It was called Norma, set in Roman France (Gaul), and, today, the title role is still considered one of the most important roles for a soprano, not least because it's exceedingly hard to sing. But it's also because it contains one of the, if not the, most beautiful soprano arias EVER- 'Casta Diva' - divine in every way and best, in my view, in the version recorded by Maria Callas. Sorry, not exactly a revolutionary view, but, nevertheless, a heartfelt one. In terms of plot, it lives up to the prerequisite rules of opera that all plots must be (a) hard to work out without reading the programme notes, and (b) complete bollocks. Norma is both. If I remember rightly, there's druids, Roman soldiers, a pet rabbit, and extras in togas. Actually, better check the rabbit.

  FRENCH POLISH?

  1832: a very good year for Paris. Musically speaking, at least. As I said earlier - hope you were paying attention: might not even have been a bad idea to have written it down!! - anyway, as I said earlier, the musical centre of the universe seemed to be shifting towards it, or at least, as you might say, 'in black and white terms'. That is to say, Paris had suddenly become the place to be not only for opera, but also if you happened to be one of the new breed of 'pianist-composers'. And, boy, were there lots of them around! So many, no doubt, that only a handful were bound to survive. And of this handful, the greatest was no doubt Chopin. In 1832, he found himself in Paris, at around the same time as the completely potty Hector Berlioz. But before we get on to the French and the Polish, a brief update.

  MDCCCXXXII. Ah, those were the days. The days that the term 'Socialism' was first used - in England and France, oddly enough -and also the year a twenty-three-year-old William Gladstone started on a distinguished political career as both MP for Newark and handy clasp-type bag. The population of Britain stood at an amazing 13.9 million while the population of the US, wait for this, was an astonishing 12.8 million. Incredible. By the time the year was out, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe would be dead and gone, Sir Walter Scott would be dead and buried, and economist and social reformer Jeremy Bentham would be dead and stuffed. Constable gave the world his view of Waterloo Bridge from Whitehall Stair and the Alcotts, Bronson and Abigail gave the world their little woman, Louisa May.

  Back in France, two very different composers are sharing the same heady Parisian air: Berlioz and Chopin - two very different sides of the Romantic coin. Quick toss and heads, it's Chopin.

  Frederic Chopin was very much the 'sensitive' romantic one, one for whom the word romantic meant pure and subtly intense, reserved even. He was born to French and Polish parents and had studied at the Warsaw Conservatory before leaving his native Poland complete with an urn of genuine Polish earth which he kept with him to remind himself of home. (Indeed, he would end up having his urn buried alongside him when he died.) He was now fitting in perfectly with the polite Hevez votre petit doijj? Parisian salon society. They adopted him as one of their own, albeit after a somewhat shaky debut. He was introduced into the salon of Baron de Rothschild by a count, Count Radziwill, and, from then on, could do no wrong, his every note deemed to be of national importance. As the chalk to his cheese, the craie to his frontage, as it were, there was Mad Hector.

  Louis-Hector Berlioz, to give him his full name, was born in the countryside near Grenoble, which lies around a hundred kilometres south-east of Lyons, on the edge of the French Alps. His father was a doctor, who would have liked nothing more than if Hector himself had signed up to the Hippocratic oath. As a result, Berlioz was shipped off to med school in Paris, but allowed to take music lessons on the side. Of course, after three years, he gave it all up and enrolled himself at the Paris Conservatoire, where he pursued music to its then limit, with all the ferocity of a dog let off the leash.

  Now, Great??? is often referred to as an Arch-Romantic. Interesting, this. All this means is that he was romantic… and bonkers. Not for him the laid-back, effete, 'sketches' of Chopin. Berlioz worked in huge, colourful brushstrokes, the size of Bournemouth. MASSIVE statements that positively screamed 'LOOK AT ME, I'M ROMANTIC AND PROUD!'

  Now, I know what
you're thinking - I'm overdoing the bonkers bit? Well, maybe, but let me just go over the events that led to the second performance, in this year, 1832, of his Symphonie Fantastique. As early as 1827, Berlioz had fallen madly in love with the Irish actress, Harriet Smithson, having seen her as Ophelia in Hamlet. He then went after her, with all the obsession of a stalker. Followed her morning, noon and night. When his advances failed, what did he do? Become a monk? Throw himself into the Seine, while chained to his grand piano? No. He went off and wooed someone else. The someone else was a woman called Camille, and, sadly for her, she was just a pawn in Mad Hector's rather idiosyncratic game of love. He'd decided to do the jealousy thing - going after someone else, in front of the nez of his beloved, in the hope that it would make her see sense. Also, he'd just won the Prix de Rome, which was the big Paris composers' competition, and part of the prize was a stay in Rome. So, he upped and went to Rome, too. Maybe this was all part of the classic, French 'treat them mesquin, keep them tresfin as they say in Leeds.