OF CLASSICAL MUSIC

by Stephen Fry

  If you were to ask anyone to name a piece by Bizet, they would probably say… well, actually, let's find out what they'd say. You there! Yes, you. The one reading this. Name a piece by Bizet.

  Good, yes, Carmen. Exactly my point. But then if you ask them to name any other piece by Bizet, you're likely to get no answer, becau-

  Right. OK. The Pearl Fishers, yes, that's true. Well done. OK. Well, ask them to name another after that and you really get an embarrassing si-

  Yes, all right, all right, LArlesienne, yes. Look, no one likes a smart arse. UArlesienne, yes. But ask anyone to name a fourth and-

  OK, OK, The Fair Maid of Perth. But ask absolutely anyone to name a fifth-

  …?

  HAH! THOUGHT SO! RIGHT. Good. Right, let me start that again. Ask anybody to name just FIVE pieces by Bizet, and you'd probably draw a blank. And, well, it might come as a bit of a shock, then -although not to some of you bloody clever clogs - that he actually wrote, what, 150 piano pieces, alone. He'd won the coveted Prix de Rome composition prize in 1857 - but was never, as far as I can gather, tempted to dress up as a French maid and run after a soprano - and then went on, over the next few years, to write suites, overtures, even the odd symphony. But it was OPERA that he really wanted to crack.

  Bizet was said to have a fantastic ear for a tune and an awful eye for a libretto. Take The Pearl Fishers - despite its famous 'Au fond du temple saint' (literally 'Vmfond of Simon????1??'? it's pretty ropey as far as the words go. With his 1866 attempt, The Fair Maid of Perth (literally, 'the fair maid of Perth') well, he would have probably been better setting the original book by Sir Walter Scott, so bad was the adaptation. BUT THEN… THEN, IN 1872, HE WROTE THE OPERA DJAMILEm

  This, too, was an unmitigated pile of pants. Well, actually, that's not totally fair - there were some great tunes in it. I forget their names, now, but, well, Mahler liked it. Having said that, Mahler was only twelve, so he was probably very easily pleased at the time. Anyhow, some three years later - 1875 - he had a minor triumph with The Old Woman of Aries. That's not a bit of gossip, it's the title of the opera - The Old Woman of Aries, or LArlesienne, as he, himself, would have said.

  Buoyed somewhat by this, he set to work on a new commission from the Paris 'Opera-Comique'. He chose a book by Prosper Merimee (you'd think someone with his track record in librettos would stay well away from someone with a name like that, wouldn't you?). It was a story of depraved young girls, gypsies, thieves and cigarette makers - I think there's even the odd estate agent. Sadly, Paris opera-goers found it all a little hard to take, and, on the night of the thirty-first performance, having himself pronounced it a failure, Bizet died of cancer of the throat, at the age of thirty-six. If he had lasted just a few performances more? Well, he would have lived to see his new work declared a masterpiece, and hailed as a total work of genius. Nowadays? Well, nowadays, it's probably the most famous, most popular opera EVER. It is, of course, Carmen.

  For the life of me, I can't see how it wasn't an immediate success. It has fantastic, immediate tunes; gripping, almost '3D' scoring, and it just grabs you between the earlobes and shouts 'LOVE ME!' Er, as it were. And yet they didn't like it. Well, at first. Poor George. Poor 'his bidet'.

  Still, life must go on, though, as artists say, so let's forge ahead. And if Bruckner was the 'sleeping giant' of the 1860s, prepare to meet the 'sleeping giant' of the 1870s.

  COMPLETELY

  GESELLESCHAFTED!

  ( ??. Imagine, if you will, that it's 1876. Are you there? Good. J Right. OK. Alexander Graham Bell has just, one moment ago, invented the telephone. In fact, as far as I know, he's still on hold to Directory Enquiries. Heinrich Schliemann has excavated Mycenae, Disraeli has been made Earl of Beaconsfield and, most importantly, London has a sewerage system. Also, in 1876, another pseudonym has shuffled off. Amandine Aurora, or should I say George Sand. Or should I say Lucie Dupin, Baronne Dedevant, if you know what I mean?

  Over in Bavaria, Wagner has opened his huge cathedral of opera, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus - an amazing place, built exacdy to die composer's own specifications (is mere nothing this man can't turn his hand to? Did he grout his own bathroom?), with no visible orchestra or conductor. It also has no side boxes or galleries and no prompter's box. Most importantly of all, what it has got, though, is it has an acoustic to die for. If you look at a picture of it - because, let's face it, most people are unlikely ever to go there, unless they take a serious wrong turn driving down to Tuscany - it's not unlike seeing an opera 'in widescreen'. Your entire attention is focused on the 'band' of drama in front of you. Hence the reason for no prompter's box and no visible musicians or conductor - there are no distractions, nothing to put you off concentrating on the music drama unfolding in front of you. There is, though, a perfect sound coming from… well, that's the point. You're never quite sure. In fact, the more I think of it, the more it is like a good, modern TV. You know how, in some movies done in Dolby stereo, you sometimes hear a background noise or effect that seems to come from almost behind you, or to the side? WeU, it's a bit like that in Wagner's Bayreuth. With the orchestra totally hidden, and the conductor too, you sometimes get a sense of the music simply enveloping you, coming from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Remarkable place. Regardless of any personal view of Wagner, he achieved something special with Bayreuth.

  Over in Austria, though, a forty-three-year-old Johannes Brahms was, much like Bruckner had not long before him, wresding to overcome a personal hurdle. Having made Vienna his home some four years ago, he had taken on the job of Conductor at the very well-thought-of Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna - literally the 'company of friends of music', a sort of Royal Philharmonic Society, only with the ability to lead in a waltz - and in 1875, he resigned the job. The reason? Not enough time to compose. So he gave it all up and started to concentrate on the dots. The composer version of an MP's 'spending more time with his family'. Thankfully, it paid off. Refreshed, rejuvenated and refocused/ he came up with a whole series of major works, including, eventually, the absolutely yumerous Academic Festival Overture. He wrote it for the University of Bremen, who were cute enough to give him an honorary degree. As a result, he worked some college songs into the score and it's said that there was general uproar and throwing-in-the-air-of-hatsJ,ja when the orchestra got to the bit which had a grand, triumphal arrangement of 'Gaudeamus Igitur'. It was also, in this 'roll', as it were, that he wrote both the Tragic Overture AND…

  …and something a whole lot more interesting. You see, not only did he have ample time, now, to compose, he probably also had time to sort something out in his head. He was, as I mentioned earlier/^ another one of those composers who felt forever in the shadow of Beethoven, certainly as far as the symphony was concerned. Let's face it, he's forty-three, and hasn't produced one yet - and if anyone was destined to, it was him. So, maybe the release from the nine-to-five of the Gesellschaft meant that he could finally get a grip on all that. Because, only one year later, the musical stork arrived chez Brahms, and he found himself the proud father of a finished manuscript - 'It's a symphony!' he cried. And it was: big and bouncing and weighing in at four movements. When you hear it live for the first time, there's always that bit in the fi Which the more astute among you will know is the title of an early, ultimately discarded draft of a Richard Rodgers song.© fifi Again, the more astute of you will recognize the ancient quote here: 'And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth and tearing out of hair, verily much in contrast to thine earlier throwing in the air of hats And they were sore. Not sore afraid, just sore!'from the obscure The Song of Wensleydale,

  Chapter 7, Verses 9-21. Out of print.©

  fififil refer the honourable gentleman to the section headed 'Brahms and THE MANy on page 185 of this very publication. last movement when you think, 'Is that… it is, isn't it?', because there's a bit in the finale where the composer, probably quite deliberately, writes a tune which is reminiscent of Beethoven's Ninth. In fact, Brahms himse
lf was said to get rather prickly if anyone pointed it out, and so, no doubt, had done it deliberately. Odd decision, if I might quote from Four Weddings and a Funeral- to feel forever in the shade of someone else when it comes to symphonic writing, and to then almost put a quote in your first piece from the very same, said composer. It was no doubt the final link that that would lead critics for years after to dub the work 'Beethoven's Tenth'. Still. At least he's got number one under his belt. What next? Well, the world's his lobster. Hughes'? Who he? Ed., as it were. You can't move for microphones, in some shape or form, these days, but has anyone ever heard of David Hughes? No. Well, not as far as I can tell, or to any great extent. There's certainly no 'David Hughes Sunday' falling on the third Sunday in April, upon which children give themselves candy microphones and everyone has a communal 'loudhail' at precisely midday. No! I think someone should do something about it. Anyway, back down from my box, before Matron sees me, and back to the reason we're here - the music.

  SAX AND VIOLINS

  ??-iime now to grab 1878 with both hands, turn it upside-down, JL give it a good shake and see what falls out of the pockets. Let me talk you through the contents.

  First up is an obituary of Victor Emmanuel II of Italy, who passed control of the country to his son, Humbert. There's also a now rather knackered old piece of Karl Benz's new motorized tricycle, which was capable of some rather hair-raising speeds, for 1878: 0-7 miles per hour in only ten minutes. This odd, Elgar-shaped object is actually a bike handlebar - A. A. Pope having just begun manufacturing the first bicycles in Britain. Also, London had just had brand-new electric street lighting put in. What else is here? There's a copy of the new Thomas Hardy novel, The Return of the Native, and there's George Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians - how did people survive before it was published? - as well as Rodin's The Age of Bronze and this. A birth certificate. For one Herman Hesse. From last year. And that appears to be it.

  Oh, apart from one little thing. Well, I say 'little', it's actually something that luwies like myself would not be able to live without. Because, would you believe it, in 1878, David Hughes invented the microphone. Amazing - 126 years ago! I'd always just presumed it was much more recent than that, don't know why. And 'David

  THE DAVID HUGHES MEMORIAL PARAGRAPHS

  (A small gesture, I know, but every movement has to start somewhere!) Before we close on 1878, a quick profile of the many-headed beast that is music in the latter half of the nineteenth century. And to get such a profile, we need to answer the following questions: (a) Where is the Church as a musical influence? (b) What is the latest 'technology', musically speaking? (c) How does your skin stay looking so young, Mummy? Let me have a go at all three.

  If you imagine music as being like a polo game, only with more breaks, then we are nearing the end of the romantic chukka. 1878 -it's not far from the end for this luwie, emotional lot. Coming through now, or soon at least, are what many people have termed the 'neo-romantics' or new romantics. People like Mahler, Scriabin, the later Bruckner - people who wrung the last drops of heart-wrenching angst from their compositional sponges, as well as wearing strange ruffs round their necks and humming along to Antmusic. From then on, after that, where would people go? It's a bit like saying, 'What do you give the man who has everything?' What do you do, if you're a composer, and everything feels like it's been done?

  As for the Church, well, other than in the odd corner of Europe, it casts no shadow across all music, any longer. Those composers who do write religious music - and, indeed, many still use the idioms and structures - do so out of a personal devotion or, as in the case of Verdi and his Requiem, are inspired directly by events or people.

  And the instruments of the romantics? Well, they are pretty much stabilizing from here on in. Berlioz and Meyerbeer had more or less used everything at their disposal and, apart from the addition of the odd flash of colour - like when Adolphe Sax invented his saxophone some thirty-odd years previously, or even people such as Wagner, who invented himself a specially designed tuba so he could write more notes for his brass players in The King - then that was mainly that.

  Oh, and lastly, it's because I have a solid daily moisturising regime. Glad to have cleared that up.

  The main 'players' in this world are Brahms, then, and Tchaikovsky. Both late romantics, but very different types. Mr T was a real lush tune addict - he loved a big tune - even at the expense, occasionally, of the development of the music around it. HUGE TUNES, he had, and no doubt that's the main reason for his success. Rule 1 - everyone likes a nice tune, even the ones who say they don't. Brahms, too, could write a nine that you found yourself humming even before it had finished, but he was still a very, shall we say, conservative romantic. Actually, no, that's not quite right. He was, to be fair, a real, dyed-in-the-wool Romantic, but well, that's as far as it went. He didn't move things on at all. He was more than happy to find his own voice - in fact, he was probably overjoyed, considering how long it had taken - and from then on in, stick with it - permanently. Wagner? Well, he simply didn't appeal to Brahms. Brahms's favourite composer was, wait for it, Strauss II. Johann Strauss II. And he made no apologies for it.

  'I let the world go the way it pleases!' he once said, and he too went his. Interestingly enough, just as Brahms had no time for Wagner, so Tchaikovsky had no time for Brahms, either. 'What a giftless bastard,' Tchaikovsky once wrote of JB. And there's not much to say about that. Call me a fence-sitter if you like but, personally, I've got time for them all. I mean, compare their violin concertos, Brahms and Tchaikovsky's, both of which were from this very year, 1878.

  Both violin concertos are now firmly a part of the Fantastic Four -the big four concertos that have become the first call of violin virtuosi the world over: the Brahms, the Tchaikovsky, the Mendelssohn and the Beethoven. But, from there on in, the similarities more or less end. Brahms's was more of a symphony with a great solo violin part, and it is well known that the first-night audience were more than a little disappointed by the fact that it was not a big virtuoso warhorse for its first soloist, the famous fiddler Joseph Joachim. The Tchaikovsky, on the other hand, was immediately declared 'unplayable' by the soloist who was meant to premiere it - Leopold Auer - and is generally considered a bit more of a test than the Brahms. But both did eventually catch on, and are now the romantic violin equivalent of jazz standards, each year seeing another crop of recordings. Again, excusez-moi pendant je m'assieds sur le fence, mais I love them both to death. You can call me many-sided, you can call me easy to please, you can even wrap me up in clingfilm and call me Muriel. I don't mind.

  Nationalism, too, is still running deep, and, just as we edge into 1879, a word about Smetana. Bedrich Smetana - again, can't fault him on the name front, he simply had to be a composer with that one - was a native of what is now called the Czech Republic, formerly Czechoslovakia, and, in Bedrich's day, the much more romantic - no pun intended - Bohemia, a part of the Austrian empire. Smetana was, like many a composer of the day, as we've seen, a bit of a patriot. He'd been there on the front line during the Prague Uprising of 1848 and, after a spell in Sweden, had gone on to become the music director of the Prague Provisional Theatre. It was from here on in, and under a much more favourable political climate than a few years previously, that Smetana would develop not only his, but more or less Bohemia's, musical voice. In doing so, he would also pave the way for people like Dvorak and Janacek, later on.

  And so it was, in 1879, as Tchaikovsky was putting the finishing touches to Eugene Onegin and Brahms finds himself on a 'symphony' roll - he was working on a third - that Smetana pressed his blotter a final time on the still wet ink of an epic cycle of Czech tone poems/ He called it Md Vlast or 'My Country'. In effect, it was six tone poems in one: 'Blanik' (the mountain), 'Tabor' (the city), 'From Bohemia's fiA tone poem, or symphonic poem as it's sometimes called, is simply a big orchestral piece of programme music - music that tells a story or describes a particular scene or person or feeling. Fields and Grove
s', 'Sarka' (a sort of Czech Amazon), 'Vysehrad' (die citadel of Prague) and, probably die most well known, 'Vltava', which tells the musical story of the river running from its very source, gaining in speed and size, dirough Prague - even past a dancing wedding party, camped out on die bank - till it flows majestically into die sea. This particular piece was clearly designed to leave not a Bohemian eye unmoistened, despite die fact that its central tune is not native at all, but Swedish, no doubt from his spell in the land of Konungariket Sverige, as they say in Stockholm.

  MISS BRAHMS AND MISS OUT!

  JL…?

  h, the days of Are??? Being Served? What heady times. But less. of that and more of the man of die moment, Eduard Marxsen. How so? Bear with me a moment.

  Marxsen was a pianist, organist, teacher and minor composer born in Nienstadten in Germany to musical parents. From an early age, he helped his dad out on the organ at the same time as learning to play it, alongside die piano. I don't mean he would only play die organ if it was situated alongside die piano, I mean merely it was just one of the strings to his bow. He then settled - actually, he didn't play the violin, nor indeed any stringed instrument, so far as I know, so I wouldn't want die 'strings' and 'bow' reference to imply that he did, sorry - he settled in Hamburg as a teacher. It was here - AND FINALLY WE GET TO THE POINT - that one of his pupils was a littie boy called Jo.

  Jo was a good pupil. So good, tiiat when Mendelssohn died in 1847, Mr Marxsen was moved to say, and I quote, 'A master of the art is gone. A greater one arises in…'… Litde Jo. OK, so he didn't say Litde Jo - tiiat's just me, trying to keep you in suspense. He actually said, a full twenty-nine years before Little Jo had written his first symphony, '…a greater one arises in Brahms'. Well, wasn't he a clever litde sausage? There can't be many people who can spot a genius that far in advance, and be prepared to go public with it. So what was Brahms doing to justify the faith diat had been placed in him by his former teacher? As we know, he's now given up work at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde - presumably because he hadn't sold a single gazelle. The plan had been tiiat he would compose full time, and, to be fair, so far it's all been going swimmingly. He spends most summers at Clara Schumann's place in Baden Baden/ In fact, some people were even saying that Litde Jo was in love witii Robert's widow, but, well, I don't think tiiat's strictly true. And even if he was, there's no evidence to suggest that anydiing ever happened. In fact, I don't think he even managed to cop a feel.?"•* They just seem to write to each other a lot, spend lovely summers together, and that's about it. Brahms also does a lot of writing at Ishcl, scene of the Great Vowel Robbery, where Johann Strauss II (just when you thought it was safe to step on die dancefloor) had a villa. What witii tiiat and a love affair with Italy, which results in him going back as often as he could, well, it's not long before a very, very happy Johannes Brahms has another masterpiece on his hands. I say not long - 1882, to be precise - and it's anodier piano concerto, one of the hardest in the concert pianist's repertoire. And, so very cutely, Brahms decides to dedicate it to who else but…? Clara? No. Johann Strauss II? No.