Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

EIGHT MINUTES TO SEVEN

? ne year on from Kigoletto, and, my, what a lot has happened. Louis Napoleon is now more or less a king - or at least has given himself the powers of a monarch, in much the same way I gave myself the powers of an Emperor, earlier. Got to be honest, it hasn't changed me. I still eat in the staff canteen, park in the staff car park - everything. Louis N, however, is still calling himself President. Again, much like me - I don't make a big thing of insisting everyone calls me Emperor. Obviously, if they do, I do tip more. Along some of the same lines, the Iron Duke has died at the grand old age of eighty-four, living just long enough to witness the very first England Cricket Eleven. Presumably, that means he lived long enough to see the very first England Cricket Eleven Batting Collapse, too. Charles Dickens seems able to write no wrong, so to speak, and the blockbusters keep on coming - this year, it's Bleak House, which is competing for shelf space alongside Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Artistically speaking, William Holman Hunt's The Light of the World and Millais's Ophelia are probably the most important works. As regards 'the music' in 1852, the big noise is still Richard Wagner.

In 1852, Wagner was still in exile in Zurich. Although Liszt had kindly premiered Lohengrin in Weimar, Richard was, as he himself used to say, still one of the few Germans not to have seen it. And yet it had made him the most famous composer in his own land. You can see why, putting all this together, he might one day have the desire to build his own opera house, can't you? That would solve the problem of not being able to mount your own work.

RW is, however, by no means wasting his time out there in the land of cows and chocolate. He is hard at work on his grandest project yet -well, to be honest, would you expect me to say anything else? I mean, I can hardly imagine myself writing the line 'He had decided to tone things down a bit, go smaller-scale, maybe only write in his spare time when he wasn't committing to his love of insurance underwriting!' No. Richard was clearly one of life's 'bigger, better, grander' people, and this next idea is not just an opera, but a huge CYCLE of operas. Four, in fact, which would form one huge opera-event, and which were going to tower over all opera before or since, from the very moment they were first heard. Wagner gave his project the title The King of the Nibelung, and it was conceived in much the same way as the Star Wars films were. First of all, he wrote the words - the libretto - to something that he called 'Siegfried's Death'. Siegfried is the hero - so, if it helps, picture him as the nineteenth-century Luke Skywalker. He was then about to set out on the music to go with his words when he thought that, in fact, he really should explain the story that led up to it. So he wrote the words to the 'prequel', as it were, which he called 'The Young Siegfried' - a sort of 'Siegfried, the Phantom Menace', if you like. Then, he wrote the words to another prequel to that - 'The Valkyrie' - and then yet another prequel - 'The Rhine Gold'. Wow -one book and three prequels. So you see: Star Wars, then Star Wars -the Phantom Menace, then Star Wars- Attack of the Clones, etc - it was all more or less done by Wagner some 150 years earlier.

Finally, after all that writing of just the words, he sat down and set about writing the music to it all. And by 1853, he had finished the first two parts: 'Siegfried's Death', which he'd now changed to Twilight of the Gods, and the first prequel, 'Young Siegfried', which he was now calling Siegfried. Phew. Hope you're understanding all this. If you are, could you by any chance explain it to me, because I haven't a bloody clue.

Of course, he wouldn't finish all the music until 1874, so you get some idea of quite how mammoth an undertaking this all was. In their finished form, they take a full four nights to perform, a full fifteen hours of opera. If you ever happen to walk past an opera house and see people entering in full dickie-bows and DJs at 3.30 in the afternoon, you can probably bet that either (a) they are students, on their way home, lost and pissed from the night before's May Ball, or (b) The Ring is on.

The Ring is definitely an acquired taste, but nevertheless it is one which can be as hugely rewarding to the inspiration as it is challenging to the bladder. Lots of it is utterly GORGEOUS music, music you can quite honestly get lost in. That having been said, not everyone agrees. It's known that Rossini wasn't a fan. Neither was Friedrich Nietzsche.

'Is Wagner a human being at all?' he wrote. 'Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches - he has made music sick. I postulate this viewpoint: Wagner's art is diseased.' Don't hold back, Fred.

Let me move on now, not even one year, but to just January and March of 1853.1 only mention it because it will help focus on the two dominant styles prevailing in music, and indeed opera, around this time.