OF CLASSICAL MUSIC

by Stephen Fry

  Ah, to be young again. For now, though, let's see in the new year of 1913.

  Can you imagine it? The countdown - 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1… at which point the band break into those cataclysmic bars from Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. People look up nervously from their merry, cross-arm clinches. A couple try to form some kind of dance steps around the those chords that sound like the warning of the end of the world. Amazing, not so much off-beat chords as no-beat chords, each one like nail in the coffin of the halcyon years. Nobody was expecting that. That's not exactly the music of party hats and Snowballs, is it? But, to be fair, Stravinsky is really only reflecting what's going on. Two Balkan wars, Gandhi arrested, Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence, Death in Venice from Thomas Mann, but, possibly most fittingly, Du Cote de chez Swann, the first part of? la Recherche du temps perdu by Proust, written from within the cosy silence of his cork-lined Paris flat.

  Elsewhere in 1913, the first Charlie Chaplin movies are beginning to appear and Benjamin Britten was born. In perhaps the most jarring juxtaposition, though, the hit song of the year becomes 'It's a Long Way to Tipperary'. So, on the one hand, you have The Rite of Spring, on the other 'It's a Long Way to Tipperary'. Fab. I guess that would make for a pretty difficult round of'Singing the words of one song to the tune of another'. Bags not me, Humph.

  You'd be forgiven for thinking, considering the big music of 1913 - The Rite of Spring, that is, not 'Tipperary' - that when war did finally break out a year later, the heady, noisy world of music would get even headier and noisier. Well, as I say, you're forgiven for thinking that. 1914 goes on to produce two of the softest, sweetest moments in all this music we call classical - The Banks of Green Willow and The Lark Ascending, both pieces that could only have been written by Englishmen.

  Both pieces are very much products of their time. Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending is a glorious piece of picture painting, with a solo violin taking the part of the eponymous bird, swooping, soaring and hovering, yet all time preserving the inner integrity of the music. The Banks of Green Willow was die product of VW's friend, George Butterworth, and, indirectiy, the product of Eton, Oxford and die Royal College of Music. George Sainton Kaye Butterworth, to give him his glorious full name, was twenty-nine when he wrote his most famous piece. At die outbreak of the war, he immediately signed up. Almost as soon as he got to die front, he was decorated for bravery, but was then killed on die Somme. He received his Military Cross posthumously. The age of innocence is over. Let's get to 1915.

  OH, WHAT A LOVELY…

  O

  bviously, in terms of context, war dominates. Last year, battle-wise, it was Menur, Mons, Tanneburg, Marne and die first battle of Ypres. This year, again, it's Ypres, die four battles of Isonzo, die landings at Gallipoli, die first zeppelin attacks on London and die submarine attack on Le Havre. Keeping people sane or occupied or botli were films like The Lamb widi Douglas Fairbanks, The Tramp witii Charlie Chaplin and even Birth of a Nation by DW Griffith. Ivor Novello does his bit with the hit song 'Keep the Home Fires Burning', while die big books of '15 are John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps and Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage. In art, Raoul Dufy paints his Homage to Mozart, Chagall paints The Birthday, and Marcel Duchamp comes up with the first canvases of what comes to be called Dada. In fact, just to digress for a moment,

  [Editor's warning - joke approaching:] /…I've always felt that… [Yes, definitely joke on way]

  …if I were ever to paint… [locked on…]

  …I'd be like Duchamp… [ramming speed]

  … because… because… [going into cinema slow-mo]

  …because…MY ART BELONGS TO DADA! [there she blows] Sorry, I'm OK now. One final thing, diough, on 1915. Actually a couple of things. First, Einstein publishes his General Theory of Relativity. This isn't the cute one, die E =mc2 one. This one is a twist on die concept of space-time, as it were. If I could explain briefly - ad libbing wildly here - you see, he basically said diat, well, its geometrical properties were to be conceived as modified locally by die presence of a body…WITH MASS. Yeah? And that a planet's orbit round the sun, as observed in three-dimensional space, arises from its natural trajectory in modified time (obviously!) and tiiat diere is no need -NO NEED - to invoke gravity. Er, as Newton did. From the sun. Acting on a planet. Simple really, huh? And worth every penny of Einstein for Dummies.

  Secondly, diough, and perhaps more pertinentiy to this book, die otiier big thing about 1915 comes from Finland. Here, a fifty-year-old Sibelius is struggling to overcome his creative block. The war has stopped him travelling - he'd been touring Europe and America - and it appears also to have stopped him composing. Well, a little. He would eventually finish only one piece during die whole of the First World War. But then again… what a piece!

  People who love dieir labels have called it 'his Eroica (As I've said before, why does everybody have to have an Eroicd» Which reminds me, I must write mine.) The final movement is simply majestic. In fact, forgive me for going all American on you here but the final movement is awesome. Just, like, kinda, you know - awesome. Not just tiiat intractable tune, but also that ending. That Victor Meldrew of an ending, so mind-boggling it makes me short of breath, clipping die words '7 don't believe if even on die umpteentii hearing. The ending has been called 'Thor swinging his hammer'. It has also been called 'frigging difficult to get everyone playing together' by many a fledgling conductor, but best not get into that. This whole symphony is resolute, staunch, unbending, inexorable and ultimately fine, in the best sense of the word.

  But where to from 1915? Well, 1916 would seem like the most obvious place. I would concur, and posit that there is no better place to start than with Parry. If you get my thrust. I think it's fair to say that Hubert Parry had the big hit of 1916, unless you count Chu Chin Chow, and, I have to say, I don't. Parry was a Professor of Music at Oxford when he came up with what is somewhat unfairly interpreted as his 'one hit', 'Jerusalem'. I mean, have people simply forgotten the incidental music to Ogilvy's Hypatia? Well, yes, frankly, they have. Despite the fact that our Hubert went on to complete a massive range of songs, cantatas and even symphonies, today he seems to be judged on just 'Jerusalem' and the occasional choral concert outing of 'I Was Glad' or 'Blessed Pair of Sirens' (known when I was a lad as 'Blessed Pair of Nylons', I don't know if it still is). True, 'Dear Lord and Father of Mankind' is still sung on Sundays, but lots of people don't even know it's him. It's a crying shame, and one which I insist on doing something about RIGHT NOW. OK, maybe later.

  Sorry. That's life. Haven't got time to sit around feeling sorry for a Victorian country gent. Besides, give it a couple of years - to 1918, in fact - and the 'Votes for Women' campaign takes rather a shine to old 'Jerusalem'. It's hardly surprising, considering Mrs Parry was one of the campaign's leading lights. Give it a few decades, and you'll have every Women's Institute using it as their very own 'music to get your kit off to' as they try to whip up interest in their glossy calendars and broccoli lectures.

  Back to the war, and it's getting hard to keep up. There was Verdun, the Somme, and - over and over again - Isonzo. The war just keeps on keeping on, and, along with it, the first theories of the idea of 'sheU shock', postulated by FW Mott. Elsewhere, James Joyce has published the semi-autobiographical Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dada is now HUGE - particularly in Zurich - and jazz has broken free of New Orleans and is sweeping the USA. All that and Yehudi Menuhin was born. It's said the doctor slapped him on the backside and he didn't cry - he just asked for an A. 1917, now, and let's go to the twenty-six-year-old composer who appears to have looked like a goldfish. Er, smoking a cigar. True, honest! Take a look at a picture.

  They say he forgot what music he was writing every three and a half seconds.© (OK, so that's not true.) The man in question is Sergei Prokofiev, and this year, 1917, he produced his first big work, confusingly called the Classical Symphony. This delicately drawn piece was, despite its reflective nature, the music of revolution
- the October Revolution, to be precise. Actually, to be more precise, I should say the November Revolution, because the October Revolution happened in November, the 7th, in fact. The reason it was called the October Revolution was that, by the terms of the old Russian calendar, it was still only October 26th. (Is that perfectly clear?)

  What else from the year of revolution? War, of course, raged on, with the US having entered the fray. As the English royals renounce their German names, the battles of Passchendaele and Cambrai take their toll, and it must have become very hard to link this Cambrai with the Cambrai that was once the centre of the musical universe. Away from the sword, the pen of Siegfried Sassoon is busy adding the final flourish to 'The Old Huntsman' and Jung has completed his Psychology of the Unconscious. In Paris, Picasso has gone all surreal when asked to come up with the set designs for the Erik Satie-Jean Cocteau-That Man Diaghilev ballet, Parade. To be fair, Picasso is probably only mirroring Satie's somewhat individual score. If you are mainly used to the calming Satie tones of a Gymnopedie or a Gnossienne, then a healthy blast of Parade would certainly show you a different if related side to this most idiosyncratic of composers. The score calls for some very odd instruments indeed, namely a gun, a typewriter and, of course, a police siren.fi So nothing out of the ordinary there, then. Actually, while we're on the subject of Satie, can I call time out, please.

  SATIE TIME OUT

  T

  his won't take a minute. I just want to say, while we're on the subject of Loopy Erik, I think it's fair to say that Satie was keeping up his reputation for coming up with the best tides EVER for pieces of music. The man who would have given his publishers sleepless nights because of his tendency to write his scores in red ink without bar lines was also the man who came up with some names for classical music pieces that just haven't been bettered. I've mentioned Limp Preludes for a Dog, for example, but there's also The Bureaucratic Sonata and, my personal favourite, Trois Pieces in the Shape of a Pear. Delicious. Just what the doctor ordered. Right, time in again.

  1917 TIME IN

  1917 was an up and down sort of year for art. The Old Guard were doing what the Old Guard did best, namely dying. Rodin, Degas, both of them gone in 1917. (Special mention to Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas, one of the best names in French art. Lovely.) At the same time, though, the new lot were really enjoying being a part of one of the golden periods in art: Modigliani's Crouching Female Nude s» In fact, it is largely unknown that Mozart's Musical Joke calls for a police siren in the score, although it is always played at a section when the horns are playing too loud for it to be heard. As I say, this is largely unknown, because it is largely untrue. was from 1917. So was Pierre Bonnard's Nude at the Fireplace as well as the lithographs by Georg Grosz, The Face of the Ruling Classes. Good year, huh?

  Puccini came up with a little corker in 1918, an aria called 'O mio babbino caro'. Gorgeous stuff. To be fair, it is more or less the highlight of three one-act operas called The Triptych, or II Trittico - just to prove that the Italians can make anything sound fantastic. 'O mio babbino caro' - or 'O my beloved Daddy', to give it its proper translation - is from the third of the operas, Gianni Schicchi, with the other two, The Cloak and Sister Angelica, barely ever getting a look in. In March 1918, the world lost Debussy, too. Sadly, I imagine it had more pressing things on its mind, at the time, because the West was still firmly in the grip of world war. But, following the second battle of Marne, the German retreat to their own territory, the conference of Versailles and the declaration of a German republic, the world witnesses the Armistice of November 11th.

  IF YOU WANT TO GET A THREE-CORNERED HEAD…

  1919 and here comes that man again. No, not him. Our man in the tight pants, Diaghilev. Turning out to be quite an important bloke, this Diaghilev - constantly coming up with requests for his Ballet Russe that resulted in some of the best work being drawn out of his coterie of composer friends. He's just commissioned the sound of 1919, the music for a ballet called The Three-Cornered Hat, from Manuel de Falla - or to give it its far superior authentic title, El Sombrero de tres picos. FANTASTIC! De Falla had been one of the troupe of artisans all living in Paris at this fantastic time, but had now gone back to his native Spain, where he'd produced what were to be the three big works of his life: another ballet, Love the Magician ('Oh, darling, love the magician! Mwah, mwah!'), the exotic piano and orchestra piece Nights in the Gardens of Spain, and, of course, this year's Hatty Town Suite.

  Haven't got time to dwell on him, though. I have to keep moving because it's a really big year. Teddy Roosevelt has died - probably a blessing, really, because he had one eye missing, his fur was worn and bis stuffing was coming out. It's the year of the League of Nations in Paris, of the Hapsburgs in exile, and of the Red Army in the Crimea. Jan Smuts has been made PM in South Africa and Lady Astor has been made MP in Britain. All fairly crucial stuff, in one way or another. The Bauhaus, too, has been founded and built - in that order - by Walter Gropius. Kandinksy, Picasso and??? are producing simply stunning, world-class stuff, and, instead of a novel, tbis year, Thomas Hardy has opted to publish his Collected Poems. Oh, and in the US, Mr AD Juillard has left a cool $20 million to found a new music school which would not only eventually bear his name but also give rise to the rather unfortunate TV series, Fame, in the mid-80s. Good on him. So, on to 1920, and… do I hear La Valsei

  THE DARK SIDE OF THE TUNE

  T

  he answer is probably no, you don't hear La Valse, unless, of course, you're one of those… 'special people'. Hmm? No, of course you're not. Anyway, La Valse, by Ravel. Again, a commission from that man Diaghilev. SEE! Clever little sausage, our Serge. Still getting the best out of people. In this instance, he got Ravel while it was still good to get Ravel. You see, Maurice Ravel had been, for much of the previous four years, an ambulance driver on the Front. Verdun, mainly. I know - it seems odd to think of someone like Ravel, out there on the Front, ferrying the sick and wounded. The war had really knocked the stuffing out of him, as you might imagine it would do to a seven-stone, sensitive soul like him. The conflict is said to have virtually broken him, and he ended up retiring, shattered both physically and emotionally, and suffering from insomnia and bad nerves. Afterwards, he went into more or less complete seclusion in his beloved home, thirty miles outside Paris. He did continue to produce great music - La Valse being a case in point -but, with his nervous problems and his awful memories, the inspiration came far less often. It also can't have helped that Diaghilev didn't like the final score to La Valse, either, and his refusal to use it must have come as a bit of a blow to a man just two years out of battle. No such problems seemed to be afflicting Theodore Gustavus von I lolst, who, by now - 1920 - had changed his name to simply Gustav Hoist, to lessen suspicions of German sympathies. In 1920, he suddenly found himself with a hit on his hands, when he gave the first performance of the piece he'd been writing during the war, namely The Planets. This mild-mannered, Cheltenham-born teacher would never better this work, and so the wait of six years or so to hear it premiered was well worth it.

  Now, bless me, Father, for I'm skipping forty-eight months to get to Gershwin's blue period.

  BLUE IS THE COLOUR…

  R

  hapsody in Blue, I mean, because… well, it's important, isn't it. The first really successful attempt to take the new music, jazz, into the classical concert hall. And there's that word again. Classical. Still sticking as the name for this sort of music despite the fact that it really means the music of the time from 1750 to around 1820. Never mind. If that's the biggest of our worries, then we're doing well. But of course… it isn't. Let me mention some of the other things that are bothering me about music right now, if I may.