by Stephen Fry
PC WORLD
W
ould you believe we're up to 1901? It only seems like yesterday that it was the day before. We are well and truly nearing our completeness, not to mention our… our… utterance. As it were. So, while I'm here, let me take in the sights and sounds of MCMI.
Actually, just looking back over my shoulder and peering into last year, I can see the unlikely debut pairing of Uncle Vanya and Lord Jim, as well as Cezanne's superbly titled Still Life with Onions. Also, following last year's relief of Ladysmith and Mafeking, Britain has now annexed the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. The Man with the Huge Handlebar Moustache - Elgar - revealed his Dream of Gerontius, something about which Sigmund Freud would no doubt have had something to say in his big book of last year, The Interpretation of Dreams. Elsewhere, The Man with the Huge Handlebar Moustache - WG Grace - has retired, having scored around 55,000 runs in a career spanning forty-five years. As for The Man with the Huge Handlebar Moustache - Sir Arthur Sullivan - er, well, he has died. Oh dear. Jolly popular things, these 'handlebar moustache' thingies. But anyway, back to 1901.
The big news of 1901, of course, was that Queen Victoria died. Yes, the Woman with the Huge Handlebar… actually, no, I'd better not. Just in case. The longest reigning British monarch has finally fi OK, so not true. In fact, a cheap shot. Schoenberg is, clearly, hard to listen to, but it can be very rewarding. There's a choral work, just to take one example, called Friede auf Erden - Peace on Earth- which is just too beautiful for words. That's odd, really, considering it's full of them. gone to be with her consort, and is succeeded by her son, Edward VII. In other news, the Peace of Peking ends the Boxer Uprising, Theodore Roosevelt succeeds the assassinated William McKinley, and the building of the Panama Canal is finally agreed and sealed into a treaty. Great things, treaties. I have this idea that they were the historical version of the office sales conference. I can just imagine people talking about them, in much the same way: 'Hejy, / went on a great treaty last month!' 'Yeah? Where?' 'Oh, only Frankfurt.' Sighs. 'Yeah, last year it was
Washington!' 'Fantastic!' 'It wasn't half. You should have seen the boss signing! It was awful!' 'No-o-o!' 'Oh, yeah!' Pause. 'Mm. Hoping to get 'em to stump up for
Versailles, next time.' '???!' What else? Well, on the whole, much as we passed - officially at least -from the late romantic to the modern age, well so we have passed from the century of steam to the century of electricity. I mean, more or less. In fact, it's a good way of highlighting the 'music' thing - as well as this 'age' thing - because these labels, 'late romantic' and 'modern', or whatever - well, they are just that. Labels. Nothing more. And, just as nobody changed from the century of steam to the century of electricity overnight, so nobody downed romantic tools and took up modern ones. Quite the opposite, in fact. The Romantics would continue being romantic for a good few years yet. In fact, you could argue that they never died out, but we'll get on to that later.
Back in 1901, as ragtime becomes the big thing in the US, over in Paris, Picasso has got the blues - big-time, and he would stay 'blue' for the next four years. (Obviously didn't know about St John's wort back then.) Over in Italy, Verdi has died and left much of Italy heartbroken. Hundreds of thousands turn out to see him to his final resting place in the grounds of the home for retired musicians in Milan - a home he himself founded with the proceeds from his many successful operas. Dvorak is still doing well, though, coming up with many beautiful works from the comfort of an old age where he was celebrated as a living legend. In 1901, he gave us the opera Rusalka, with its stunning aria, 'Song to the Moon'. It's inspired a lot of good music, the moon, when you think - Dvorak, Debussy, sort of Beethoven (even though it wasn't his title). Over in Russia, though, it was doing nothing to inspire the twenty-eight-year-old Sergei Rachmaninov.
1901 was a turning-point year for Rach. He was, generally, doing well. He'd got one piano concerto under his belt, as well as his opera, Aleko, and the ubiquitous 'Prelude in? sharp minor'. The latter was already becoming a bit of a millstone round his neck, and, while he still thought it was a great piece, he resented being asked to play it absolutely everywhere he went. What he needed was another PC. But there was a problem.
To be fair, it was a little cocktail of a problem, one part the critics and public to four parts the composer Glazunov. Glazunov had been entrusted with the premiere of Rach's First Symphony, but had not really done the composer any favours. The performance was an unmitigated disaster, with many people saying that Glazunov was three sheets to the wind. The critics and public slated it, and a sensitive Sergei went into emotional meltdown. He burned the score of the offending symphony - possibly something of a luwie gesture, as the orchestral parts survived - and suffered a crisis of self-confidence and depression. The answer was a much-documented series of consultations with a hypnotherapist, Dr Nikolai Dahl, or 'Tarka'© to his friends. Some say it was 'positive suggestion', or the hypnotherapy, which brought back his muse, some say it had only been a temporary writer's block anyway, and it would always have cleared with a man like Rachmaninov. Whatever the method, the result was, in 1901,. his most enduring work, even now, and it bore the dedication 'To Monsieur N. Dahl'. It was, of course, his Second Piano Concerto. ??? me, the PC2, and indeed, to be fair, most of the Rachmaninov oeuvre, is a taste I have only relatively recently acquired. My innate, immediate reaction to such PURE romanticism was always to put the defences up. I like less 'over the top' works, so I thought, music that didn't give you a piggy-back as it waded through treacle and delighted in its own slush. This was the case right up until my late twenties, when, all of a sudden, I just fell into it, in much the same way as some people inadvertently fall into an entire career. I let myself go, let down my guard, first with Puccini, who we'll come on to soon, and then with Mr Rachmaninov himself. Now, of course, I couldn't live without him, just as I couldn't live without virtually any of my favourite composers you'd care to mention. To me, listening to Rachmaninov is like filling a bath with rich, warm, chocolate sauce and allowing yourself to bathe in it, drink it in, lie in it and lick it all off afterwards. Something I do fairly regularly, now. Musically speaking, of course.
Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto illustrates perfectly what I was banging on about earlier - about the 'periods' or 'eras' being just labels. It was 1901 when he wrote it, a full year after the bell for the so-called Modern Period had gone, and there he was, gaily writing the full-monty, 100 per cent luwie, romantic gush, and so he would continue to do. Three cheers for him.
Incidentally, while we're on the subject of former East German goalkeepers - in my head, at least, I was - let's just try and plot the size of Rachmaninov's hands. To get some idea of the size of those famous paws, try this. Draw a line 10 inches long. Better still, allow me. Now put dots at either end. That's how far his left hand could span, from thumb to little finger. Fair enough, you might say. But now, put dots at 1, 3 and 6 inches along the line. These were the points where his fourth, third and second fingers could go. (Or Ruby Ring, Toby Tall and Peter Pointer, as Rachmaninov used to say.) That changes things a little, doesn't it? And remember, this wasn't just something he could stretch, at pain. This was the kind of chord he could throw in IN PASSING in the middle of pieces. And his right hand? Well, that's on the next page. Look at that.
PARIS AND VIENNA -A TWO-CENTRE BREAK
1902. The Boer War had just ended. With a treaty, of course. Everyone took themselves off to, let's see… Vereeniging. Not too bad, I suppose. It certainly could have been worse - Hunstanton was available due to a late cancellation, I understand. The final casualty statistics were something like Boers 4,000, Brits 5,800, which says it all, really. Other stuff? The Aswan Dam opens, Portugal is declared bankrupt - it only finds out when its card is refused at the supermarket, which is embarrassing - and Charles Richet, the French physician, discovers the whole scenario of anaphylaxis (extreme allergic reaction to antigens). In the arts, Kipling and Conan Doyle are probably the biggest writers of the year
with the Just So Stories and The Hound of the Baskervilles respectively, and, alas, zut alors, bofet honi soit qui maly pense, we've lost Zola. Shame. But, looking on the bright side, we have gained Peter Rabbit, courtesy of Beatrix Potter. Not sure it's entirely a fair swap,? great-one-upstairs, but still.
Monet's utterly gorgeous Waterloo Bridge captures, forever, the Thames crossing with, even today, the finest views in the capital, give or take a huge wheel. Also, as Elgar works on his first Pomp and Circumstance march and Fred Delius dictates the notes of his Appalachia to his scribe, Eric Fenby, the heart-throb tenor Enrico Caruso cuts his very first phonograph record. Which sort of reminds me, let's get back to the music.
Let me take that two-centre break, as it were, and see what was happening in Paris and Vienna. In Paris, first, there's Thoroughly Modern Claude Debussy. This frisky forty-year-old was someone who, no doubt, would not have minded the label 'modern' in the slightest. He found Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Beethoven simply dull, and wanted his music to follow a totally different route. Living in Paris, the centre of the visual art world at the time, he was probably more up-to-date than most with new forms and ideas. He'd even been able to hear things like the sounds of a gamelanj5 orchestra He'd come across them at one of the grand exhibitions that were so popular around the turn of the century, and he'd been awestruck. It must have sounded different from any other music he'd ever heard and he wanted his music to be different - to sound different. A few years back, he'd managed to get tongues wagging with his Prelude a I'Apres-midi d'unfaune, in which he'd tried to soften the focus of his music, if you know what I mean. What I'm trying to say is that he'd tried to do exactly what seemed to be happening in painting at the time. In a Monet picture, you often see a subject in soft focus, as it were, and not sharp and photographic like the artists filfyou, like me, thought that gamelan' was a song by the bay City Rollers, then you should try and get to experience them. They are little Javanese percussion instruments, tuned and varying in size, which make one of the most delirious sounds imaginable. London's Royal Festival Hall used to - think it may still - have agamelan room so, if you're ever in town, pop in. Loosen your tie, leave your brain at the door, and visit a parallel musical universe. of old. Debussy had done more or less the same with PAL'AD'UF." Now he wanted to go a step further. So he wrote an opera, ironically a variation of the Tristan and Isolde story, and he did it in a pretty new and different way. There was no huge, big-tune aria; there was no real dramatic role for the orchestra; and there were almost natural speech rhythms for the voices. It would probably have sounded 'not right' to the opera-going public of 1902 - not worthy of a riot, as such, but, well, simply 'not right'. Dull, even, forgive me for saying so. They maybe wouldn't have got it. They could have been shouting for the big tunes, but wouldn't have really been disgusted by what was on offer. I'd love to have been there, just to see, for sure, what the reactions were. I get the feeling it would have been a case of a short, polite silence, followed by the word iEt…?
As for Vienna, well, Mahler's new symphony would probably have got more or less the same reaction, even though it was completely different. Since we last came across Mahler, he's converted to Catholicism, chiefly to become boss of music at the Vienna Opera House. In 1902, some five years into his tenure, he'd managed to finish his latest symphony. And here's where we put him up against Debussy.
Mahler and Debussy in 1902. Two very, very different composers indeed. Mahler was no innovator, really. He was a symphonist. Despite the work of Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner, he felt that he could take the symphony further - and he was right. He wanted to take the symphony to its height, a sort of 'Romantic Symphony, the Final Reductions, EVERYTHING MUST GO', as it were. He'd gone down a totally different avenue from that trodden by Debussy and, not surprisingly - and sorry to state the obvious, but I have to - he'd ended up somewhere totally different. Both works are masterpieces with the Mahler maybe giving up its treasures a little easier than the Debussy - and it's not often you hear that said about old Gustav. Mahler's Fifth Symphony - for it is he! - centred on the majestic Adagfietto, is a brown, autumnal, rolling sea of a piece, whereas Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande is a fine, idyllic work which somehow steals from bar to bar like a ballerina on pointe. fi What a gnat acronym - Debussy's Paladuf. Lave it.
A 'MUSIC IN FINLAND'?**?*?**?5???? PARAGRAPH
w e get to Finland just in time for the New Year. Of 1903, that is, and, as the famous Lord Monty of Python so rightly sang, 'Finland, Finland, Finland, the country where I quite want to be, eating breakfast or dinner, or snack lunch in the hall!' Ah yes, true words. Words of wisdom. And as they went on to say, so sadly neglected, and often ignored. Well, back in 1903, a man called Jean was going some way to repairing that.
Back then, the words 'Finland' and 'music' were beginning to be used together, most commonly, to talk about the man called Jean. He was once called Johann, but, by 1903, he'd long since changed his name.
People were now (then) saying that Jean Sibelius WAS Finnish music. To be fair, it's pretty much the same today, for most people anyway. Finnish music was and still is Johann Julius Christian Sibelius. By 1903, aged thirty-eight, he was a bit of a local, national and, pretty much, international hero. His work, Kullervo, had made him a bit of a celeb, some twelve years ago, and The Swan ofTuonela, En Saga and his First Symphony had done nothing to dent his reputation. He was the saviour of Finland's national music. In 1899, he'd produced his tone poem, or symphonic poem, call it what you will, Finlandia. I get the impression that Finlandia more or less sealed the triumphant fate of Sibelius, in 1894, in that, from that moment on, he could do no wrong in his own country. Had he filled his time with nothing more than whittling wood and 'mowing the old lawn' from that point on, he would still have spent his years having his drinks bought, turning down offers from blondes to have his children and seeing his face appear on stamps. Actually, that last bit's true - he did appear on Finnish stamps.
So, if life was so good, what was eating old Jean, because something was? I'll tell you. By 1903, he still hadn't achieved his boyhood dream. In fact, to be fair, he never would. You see, as recendy as 1891, Sibelius had still been applying to the Vienna Philharmonic to be a VIOLIN PLAYER. Not a conductor or composer, but a FIDDLER He'd always wanted to be a fiddler, from as far back as he could remember. He was good, too, but, sadly, not great, and he would never make it. So. How to come to terms with the fact that he was never going to be the greatest concert violin virtuoso the world had ever heard? Apart from consoling himself with fine cognac and great cigars, he did the next best thing. He wrote, arguably, the greatest violin virtuoso concerto the world had ever heard. In 1903.
It's a concerto that takes your breath away. Fierce. Urgent. Celestial. Angry, even, and not surprisingly. The last movement seems to transcend just a concert piece to become a ten minutes or so of music theatre. I have no real practical knowledge of the violin - unless you count picking one up from the transport lost property office, having left it on countless buses while still at school - but I always imagine that you can really attack the last movement of the Sibelius Violin Concerto. It's so aggressive, so 'and furthermore…', it's the violin giving an Arthur Scargill speech, complete with jousting finger. Marvellous work. 'I «©*©*N^ DO WANT TO
CHANGE THE WORLD,
I'M ^0* LOOKING FOR…'
re you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin. Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there was an awful lot of war going on, and thousands of people were being killed. No, not exactly a fairy story is it? Descriptive enough of 1 §04, though. Russia and Japan were the main ones, this year, to be fair, with Port Arthur besieged, Seoul occupied and what have you. In the field of science, Rutherford and Soddy had just postulated their general theory of relativity, the first ultraviolet lamps had appeared, and - well I imagine it counts as science -Rolls-Royce had been founded. Also, Freud had published a little light bedtime reading in the form of The Psychopatholqgy of Everyday Life. Lovely! Bet it was f
lying off the shelves as people read it with their cocoa, the world over. What else? Jean Jaures issued the Socialist paper, L'Humanite, Helen Keller graduated from Radcliffe College, and the first radio transmission of music occurred in Graz in Austria. As for Anton Chekhov, well, he's only gone and died, hasn't he! Teh! Not before issuing The Cherry Orchard, though. Add to all this Picasso's Two Sisters, Rousseau's The Wedding and the death of Dvorak, and well, that's nearly the end of 1904. But not quite! Oh no.
No. Before 1904 can finish, the London Symphony Orchestra give their first ever concert. Still going strong today, despite a close shave in 1912, when they cancelled their crossing to New York aboard the Titanic. Lucky, really. Still. All's well that end's well.
Musically, there's such a lot going on, so it might be a good idea if I just illustrated two pieces back to back, by way of saying 'Gosh, weren't there a lot of crazy different styles going on, back then,' and also by way of skipping the rest out. Yes, why don't I do that.