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

by Howard Goodall

  Bruckner aside, most of Wagner’s contemporaries, while quick to assert his musical brilliance, were as at sea with the whole Wagner-and-the-future-of-all-art project as they were with the cultural agendas of his dramas. Tchaikovsky described Parsifal as ‘inconceivable nonsense’, Wagner’s services to opera ‘of a negative kind’ and, commenting on the overall impact of his works, ‘as regards the dramatic interest of his operas, I find them very poor, often childishly naive’. Debussy had this to say on his legacy: ‘All that remains will be beautiful ruins in whose shadows our grandchildren will dream of the former greatness of this man who was under-endowed only in humanity to be truly great.’

  After Wagner’s death, Verdi, now in his seventies, produced two final operatic triumphs, both based on Shakespeare plays: Otello (1887) and his only comedy, Falstaff (1893). As with Elgar, it is as if Wagner had never existed. Perhaps it is even more remarkable in Verdi’s case, since his was the field of musical theatre, so transformed, or so it was claimed, by the Bayreuth ‘revolution’. The two composers, both born in 1813, had pursued parallel but quite separate careers in opera. Wagner’s attitude to his Italian rival can be ascertained by his writing a four-hundred-page survey of the state of their chosen art, Opera and Drama, in 1851, without once mentioning the most famous living composer in the form at the time. For his part, Verdi spoke nothing but praise about his acid-tongued contemporary, writing that Tristan und Isolde was ‘one of the finest creations that has ever issued from a human mind’.

  Wagner apart, there was certainly no evidence that Verdi’s style had become unfashionable or was deemed old-fashioned by opera lovers in the sixteen-year gap between Aida (1871) and Otello, nor in the six further years before the unveiling of Falstaff. Falstaff’s première at Milan’s La Scala in February 1893 was particularly successful, and was followed within months by equally rapturous openings in Vienna (conducted by Gustav Mahler), Paris, Hamburg, London and New York. Its sparkling score has a light-hearted family resemblance to the Italian-style operas of Mozart, fond nods and winks to his own colourful back catalogue, and even – I venture – a trace of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Yeomen of the Guard of five years earlier, doubtless in tongue-in-cheek recognition of the opera’s subject matter. But what there is not is an echo of anything remotely Wagnerian. Old Giuseppe was doubtless heeding the advice of his lead character Sir John Falstaff, ‘Va, vecchio John, va, va per la tua via’ (Go, old Jack, go your own way).

  It was understandable that Wagner might want to speculate about the art world of the future, one that would encompass within it all the arts, centred on human dramas of love, death and destiny. But it wasn’t to be his vision that fulfilled the promise. Motion pictures were to be the artwork of the future, a technological breakthrough that stuttered into life just after his death, the first ever moving picture, Louis Le Prince’s Roundhay Garden Scene, dating from 1888.

  No. Wagner’s main contribution to the music that followed him was that all the key composers of the next thirty years, particularly in France, Russia and the New World, were inspired not to emulate him, but to contradict, repudiate and sidestep him. These negative responses to his legacy were to blow music apart. An age of revolution, as radical and savage as anything he might have imagined, was just around the corner.

  1 Translation from Humphrey Searle’s book The Music of Liszt (London: Williams & Norgate, 1954).

  2 See also: Simpson, Anne Key, Hard Trials: The Life and Music of Harry T. Burleigh (The Scarecrow Press, 1990).

  6

  The Age of Rebellion

  1890–1918

  IN THE THIRTY-ONE YEARS between the death of Richard Wagner in 1883 and the outbreak of the First World War, music was shaken by a series of gigantic convulsions, fundamentally reshaping its sound, its function and its attitude. Much of the impetus for these changes came from places and people whose voices had not yet been heard on the world stage. For all their pre-eminence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, composers from Austria and Germany would soon be competing for attention with a kaleidoscope of musical stars from elsewhere, notably Russia, France and the USA.

  Aside from developments in music, the spotlight of history would shift dramatically towards Russia as the new century dawned, and to the growing industrial might and territorial expansion of the USA, which in the same period added over a dozen new states to its size. Though the period saw the high-water mark of the oversized, increasingly ungovernable European colonial empires (British, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and, to a lesser extent, German, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch), and for many (white) citizens of these empires life had never been more luxurious, pleasurable or decadent – fertile conditions for the blossoming of musical activity – cracks were beginning to show. The Pax Britannica, for example, was maintained by the fighting of multiple colonial campaigns in South Africa, Bechuanaland (Botswana), Nigeria, Sudan, Zanzibar, Ashanti (Ghana), Afghanistan, the Indian North-West Frontier, Burma, Tibet, China and Venezuela, and all European cities were liable to terrorist outrages perpetrated by anarchists and separatists whose catalogue of assassinations would eventually trigger the First World War. The rebellions that were to shake music, however, were almost entirely divorced from political realities. Even the October Revolution in Russia in 1905, an event with thunderously far-reaching implications for society at large, had minimal impact on the contemporaneous upheavals in music.

  Music’s battles were about direction of travel. Where could Western music go once – as it seemed at the end of the nineteenth century – all possibilities of the existing system of twelve notes and key-families had reached saturation point? Though composers were divided on whether to follow the ‘total art-form’ experiment of Richard Wagner, or the extreme chromaticism of parts of Parsifal, or his building of large musical structures by the manipulation of small cell ‘motifs’, all were agreed that his Bayreuth revolution was a watershed that had to be responded to one way or another.

  Russian composers like Tchaikovsky mostly treated the brouhaha surrounding Wagner’s music dramas with disdain. César Cui wrote to fellow composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, ‘Wagner is a man devoid of all talent. His melodies, where they are found at all, are in worse taste than Verdi… All this is covered up with a thick layer of rot. His orchestra is decorative, but coarse. The violins squeal throughout on the highest notes and throw the listener into a state of extreme nervousness. I left without waiting for the concert to end, and I assure you that had I stayed longer, both I and my wife would have had a fit of hysterics.’3 Stravinsky’s view, having seen Parsifal, was equally scathing: ‘What I find revolting in the whole affair is the underlying conception which dictated it – the principle of putting a work of art on the same level as the sacred and symbolic ritual which institutes a religious service. And, indeed, is not all this comedy of Bayreuth, with its ridiculous formalities, simply an unconscious aping of a religious rite?’4

  The most extreme response to Wagner’s music, though, came from France, where it became for many musicians a matter of patriotic duty to spurn the musical fruits of the country that had humiliated them in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, and where an entirely alternative musical approach was developing. The Société Nationale de Musique, a club with the motto ‘Ars Gallica’, was symbolically launched during the German bombardment of Paris with the express aim of promoting a French style that would carve out a non-German identity. Even without the provocation of his German flag-waving, most French composers took a dim view of Wagner – and in any case they had their own pacesetters to follow: Camille Saint-Saëns and César Franck, two of the co-founders of the Société Nationale de Musique, and between them mentors to virtually all the post-Wagner generation of French composers. Despite attempting opera, not very successfully, and composing a symphony that reasserted the possibilities of the form in France (where it had become neglected in favour of grand opera), Belgian-born Franck’s main contribution to French music was in the field of chamber music. H
ere, the delicacy and economy of his style, in sharp contrast to the grandiose scale of so much of the music of the second half of the nineteenth century, was to be an inspiration to his pupils and protégés.

  If the French revered any German composer, it wasn’t Wagner but Bach. When they began to tire of the excesses and sentimentality of their own nineteenth-century grand operas, never mind everyone else’s, they went back to Bach for inspiration. They loved his clarity, his neatness and his formal discipline. When the crowd-pulling Charles-Marie Widor played his new organ Symphony no. 5 (from which the celebrated ‘Toccata’ comes) at the Palais du Trocadéro as part of the great Parisian World Fair of 1889, the only other composer on the programme was Bach. Like Widor, Franck and Saint-Saëns were both expert organists, and learning the organ, then as now, meant learning Bach inside out. Saint-Saëns’s music is particularly Bachian, parts of his piano concerto no. 2 (1868) being at times close to pastiche.

  Saint-Saëns’s most distinguished student was Gabriel Fauré, who, as well as being exposed by his mentor to what was then considered the modern work of Schumann and Liszt, had a thorough grounding in plainchant and sacred choral music. The simple but meandering melodic lines of plainsong were to exert a considerable influence on his composing style as he matured. Above all, Fauré had the confidence to turn his antipathy towards the many-layered complexity of Wagner’s music dramas into a much purer, emotionally restrained sound. Even his student compositions, such as the ravishing Cantique de Jean Racine (1865) for choir and organ, served notice of an unequivocal change of direction away from lush excess, paving the way for the effortlessly tranquil beauty of his Requiem, completed twenty-three years later. Listening to Fauré after Brahms, Liszt, Wagner or Tchaikovsky is comparable to someone spring-cleaning and redecorating a teenage boy’s bedroom. Gone are the posters of death, psychological torment, superheroes and tragedy. The augmented piles of clothes have been put away, and the windows have been opened to dispel the diminished air. Fauré’s exquisite, modest music, from his lilting Pavane for small orchestra (1887) to the song cycle La Bonne chanson (1894), composed to express his secret love for Emma Bardac (they were both married at the time), sounds as if it might have been written on a different planet from the one that housed Wagner’s Bayreuth. Which was, of course, the idea.

  An even more radical rejection of complexity can be heard in the piano miniatures of Erik Satie, Fauré’s eccentric, half-English contemporary. His first Gymnopédie of 1888, as well as sounding like a long, hot afternoon in the Midi after a liquid lunch, can be seen as a deliberate attempt to debunk pomposity and de-clutter music. Described (rather unfairly) by his tutors at the Paris Conservatoire as the ‘laziest student ever’, Satie was a free-thinking intellectual whose obsessions ranged from Ancient Greece to the novels of Gustave Flaubert, and who preferred to spend his time with painters and poets in Montmartre than among other musicians. His intense fascination with the straight lines of Gothic architecture may also have contributed to the ultra-simple structures of his Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes of the following year.

  No one tried harder than Satie to puncture the pretension of Bayreuth, even if his rejection of the Wagner legacy may have been at times rather puerile. In 1891 he announced the première of his new opera, Tristan’s Bastard, poking fun at Wagner. It was a hoax. Two years later he founded his own church, Eglise Métropolitaine d’Art de Jésus Conducteur (The Metropolitan Church of Art of Christ the Leader), appointing himself as its only priest. (He was also its only member.) But Wagner wasn’t the only composer who was guilty of creating unnecessary clutter in the eyes of an iconoclast like Satie. French composers of the melodramatic grand opera school –Jules Massenet and Charles Gounod, for example – were just as much a target for his often facetious pen. In 1916 Satie concocted a baldly insulting parody of themes from Gounod’s opera Mireille, and several of his cabaret songs make fun of Massenet’s supposed sentimentality.

  All in all, French composers’ attitudes to the vainglorious ritual of the Wagnerian spectacle, whether it was frivolous like Satie’s, or philosophical like Fauré’s, led to a new spirit in their music, soon to be dominated by the sensuous modernity of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Francis Poulenc neatly summed up the prevailing French ambivalence towards Wagner by saying that, after listening to him, it was necessary to cleanse one’s spirit and ears by listening to Mozart.

  Wagner might have expected the French, whose opera he despised, to rebel against his stylistic leadership; he would have been far more disturbed by the betrayal of German cultural supremacy embarked upon by the most distinguished Director of Music of the Vienna State Opera in its history, Gustav Mahler.

  Mahler was born into a Bohemian corner of the Austrian Empire, into a German-speaking Jewish community of about a thousand souls whose existence was entirely wiped from the map during the Holocaust. It is a painful irony that, as Europe’s leading opera conductor in the late-nineteenth century, this most Jewish of composers should have been such a fervent champion of the works of music’s most notorious anti-Semite, Richard Wagner. Indeed, his own music, to some extent, takes over from where Wagner’s Parsifal left off – although, like Liszt, Mahler had a thoroughly cosmopolitan, non-nationalistic outlook and career.

  As a Bohemian subject of the Austrian Empire, as a poor boy in a profession full of the privileged, as a Jew working in an overwhelmingly Catholic culture, it’s not surprising that Mahler should have sought comfort by identifying with the folklore and sounds of his childhood, flavours he liberally sprinkled throughout his ten completed symphonies. These include strolling klezmer (Jewish folk band) musicians, passing military bands and lusty children’s choruses.

  Though he was inevitably drawn to the musical metropolis of Vienna, and there is more than a little of the gemtülich charm of the Viennese in Mahler’s music, occasional whiffs of marzipan cake and the swish of the waltz alongside rustic mountain dances, what Mahler did was absorb influences from just about the whole continent. He was a sort of musical embodiment of Ellis Island, with all Europe’s exhausted, oppressed cultures finding refuge and a new start in his symphonic embrace. Mahler’s symphonies were a new start all right: he is music’s gateway to the twentieth century

  But it is not just his pan-European style that make Mahler such a paradigm for twentieth-century composers; he is also notable for the directness of his musical expression. This is encountered most conspicuously in a set of orchestral songs he composed between 1901 and 1904, the Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the death of children).

  Even in the most heartfelt of previous composers’ works – the Funeral March of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, for example, or the songs and piano pieces Robert Schumann wrote for love of his wife Clara – euphemism and generic description allowed there to be a degree of detachment between the creator and listener. Thus Chopin would entitle a piano work ‘Mazurka’ or ‘Nocturne’, which might have some deep, personal emotional relevance to him as a composer – connected with a memory, a person, an atmosphere, a place in his life – but which can only be guessed at by the listener. Even the most intimate songs of Schubert, Schumann and Mendelssohn soften raw emotion with a poetic image – rejection being portrayed as an iced-up lake, or happiness as a bird singing. In the lovely, deservedly famous Schumann song ‘Ich grolle nicht’ (I bear no grudge) of 1840, for example, the details of the broken love affair it refers to are oblique: there is mention of diamonds unable to illuminate the lover’s dark heart, and a poisonous snake with an addictive sting, and the protagonist says he will not complain even if the rupture is final. Added to the language of metaphor present in so many musical settings of art songs like ‘Ich grolle nicht’ was a tendency, often admittedly at the request of censors, to remove the issues and conflicts tackled in operas to a previous era or location, or to retreat into the shady world of myths and fables, gods and goddesses. In his Ring cycle, Wagner tackles the subjects of incest, or the abuse of power, or greed – all pertinent to nineteenth-cen
tury Europe – but transports the action to the distant mists of prehistory. It is as if his operas carry the familiar film disclaimer ‘Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental’.

  Mahler, on the other hand, abandoned the smokescreen of euphemism and tried to address difficult issues head-on. He did not flinch from addressing, musically, his darkest fears. The five poems by the German poet Friedrich Rückert that Mahler compiled into the Kindertotenlieder cycle confront any parent’s most unspeakable nightmares. Rückert had written over four hundred poems in the wake of the death of his own children from scarlet fever. His appalling loss bleeds off every line of the poems and Mahler’s music accordingly ranges from utterly bleak numbness, as in ‘Nun will die Sonn’ so hell aufgeh’n’ (Now the sun wants to rise as brightly as if nothing terrible had happened during the night), to unbearable sadness, as in ‘Nun seh’ ich wohl, warum so dunkle Flammen’, in which the dying child challenges the parent to look into her eyes, to frantic distress, as in the frighteningly turbulent ‘In diesem Wetter’ (In this weather, in this windy storm/ I would never have sent the children out/ They have been carried off,/ I wasn’t able to warn them).