Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

RECKANKREUZUNGS KLANGKEWERKZEUGE!

W

ell, as good a tide as any for a section that bridges three years. It's 1859 that we need to jump from, the year that a fifty-year-old naturalist really puts the cat among the pigeons when he finally writes up the notes from his trip on die HMS Beagle some twenty-three years earlier. Clearly a one-finger typist. He calls his finished opus On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Very nice. Caused quite a stir, I would imagine. Elsewhere, in 1860, a soldier and one-time member of Giuseppe Mazzini's Young Italy Society, marched on Palermo and Naples with 1,000 men, dressed in red shirts, and claimed them for Victor Emmanuel II. Not the red shirts, you understand - Palermo and Naples, I mean. He then proclaims Victor Emmanuel 'King of Italy' after the seizure of the Papal States. Garibaldi and 'I mille' - the thousand - as it comes to be known.

Across the pond, Abraham Lincoln is inaugurated as the sixteenth president of the US and, immediately, South Carolina secedes from the union. What a gorgeous phrase, 'secedes from the union', isn't it? A beautiful and almost poetic way of saying 'goes off in a sulk'. I wish I'd tried it when I was young. Imagine it. [Scene - somewhere in Norfolk.] Where's Stephen?' cOh, I told him he couldn't have one of my liquorice allsorts, so he said he was seceding from the union.' 'Not again.' Well, it might have worked. Who knows? Anyway, 1861 now, and it's not only South Carolina, it's Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana and Texas - the Confederate States, as they were known -and America has itself a civil war. In the UK, Queen Victoria goes into an age-long period of mourning, and begins to contemplate living the next forty years without her consort and companion. And so to 1862, then, and Abraham Lincoln makes his 'Emancipation Proclamation', which win, in just a short while, bring about the freedom of slaves. What else? Of course. Prussia gets a new PM, one Otto Eduard Leopold Bismarck.

Artistically speaking, it's been a good few years too: George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, Dickens's Great Expectations, Dostoevsky's House of the Dead, Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, new stuff from Manet and Degas - all of them since 1859. Also worth mentioning is the debut of Sarah Bernhardt - went down a storm in Racine's Iphigenie. Also in 1862 a forty-nine-year-old Giuseppe Verdi makes the long trip to St Petersburg, to the Imperial Opera, the august body who had commissioned his latest opera, La Forza del Destine: The Force of Destiny. Verdi, like Wagner, was advancing from work to work, although maybe not quite as dramatically as Little Richard. The harmony and orchestration in The Force of Destiny are steps up from his last work, Un Ballo in Maschera - The Masked Ball - and that was a step up, itself, on the previous La Traviata/Il Trovatore. Oddly enough, it's considered by some to be the opera equivalent to Macbeth, in that its name is not meant to be mentioned in the theatre or opera house. Don't know why. It just is. Personally, I think it's gorgeous, even if I can't prevent myself thinking of Stella Artois every time I hear it. And, if you're into connections, then it was written the same year that Bizet offered up his classic opera The Pearl Fishers, with its hit duet, 'Au fond du temple saint'.