Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

COMPLETELY

( ??. Imagine, if you will, that it's 1876. Are you there? Good. J Right. OK. Alexander Graham Bell has just, one moment ago, invented the telephone. In fact, as far as I know, he's still on hold to Directory Enquiries. Heinrich Schliemann has excavated Mycenae, Disraeli has been made Earl of Beaconsfield and, most importantly, London has a sewerage system. Also, in 1876, another pseudonym has shuffled off. Amandine Aurora, or should I say George Sand. Or should I say Lucie Dupin, Baronne Dedevant, if you know what I mean?

Over in Bavaria, Wagner has opened his huge cathedral of opera, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus - an amazing place, built exacdy to die composer's own specifications (is mere nothing this man can't turn his hand to? Did he grout his own bathroom?), with no visible orchestra or conductor. It also has no side boxes or galleries and no prompter's box. Most importantly of all, what it has got, though, is it has an acoustic to die for. If you look at a picture of it - because, let's face it, most people are unlikely ever to go there, unless they take a serious wrong turn driving down to Tuscany - it's not unlike seeing an opera 'in widescreen'. Your entire attention is focused on the 'band' of drama in front of you. Hence the reason for no prompter's box and no visible musicians or conductor - there are no distractions, nothing to put you off concentrating on the music drama unfolding in front of you. There is, though, a perfect sound coming from… well, that's the point. You're never quite sure. In fact, the more I think of it, the more it is like a good, modern TV. You know how, in some movies done in Dolby stereo, you sometimes hear a background noise or effect that seems to come from almost behind you, or to the side? WeU, it's a bit like that in Wagner's Bayreuth. With the orchestra totally hidden, and the conductor too, you sometimes get a sense of the music simply enveloping you, coming from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Remarkable place. Regardless of any personal view of Wagner, he achieved something special with Bayreuth.

Over in Austria, though, a forty-three-year-old Johannes Brahms was, much like Bruckner had not long before him, wresding to overcome a personal hurdle. Having made Vienna his home some four years ago, he had taken on the job of Conductor at the very well-thought-of Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna - literally the 'company of friends of music', a sort of Royal Philharmonic Society, only with the ability to lead in a waltz - and in 1875, he resigned the job. The reason? Not enough time to compose. So he gave it all up and started to concentrate on the dots. The composer version of an MP's 'spending more time with his family'. Thankfully, it paid off. Refreshed, rejuvenated and refocused/ he came up with a whole series of major works, including, eventually, the absolutely yumerous Academic Festival Overture. He wrote it for the University of Bremen, who were cute enough to give him an honorary degree. As a result, he worked some college songs into the score and it's said that there was general uproar and throwing-in-the-air-of-hatsJ,ja when the orchestra got to the bit which had a grand, triumphal arrangement of 'Gaudeamus Igitur'. It was also, in this 'roll', as it were, that he wrote both the Tragic Overture AND…

…and something a whole lot more interesting. You see, not only did he have ample time, now, to compose, he probably also had time to sort something out in his head. He was, as I mentioned earlier/^ another one of those composers who felt forever in the shadow of Beethoven, certainly as far as the symphony was concerned. Let's face it, he's forty-three, and hasn't produced one yet - and if anyone was destined to, it was him. So, maybe the release from the nine-to-five of the Gesellschaft meant that he could finally get a grip on all that. Because, only one year later, the musical stork arrived chez Brahms, and he found himself the proud father of a finished manuscript - 'It's a symphony!' he cried. And it was: big and bouncing and weighing in at four movements. When you hear it live for the first time, there's always that bit in the fi Which the more astute among you will know is the title of an early, ultimately discarded draft of a Richard Rodgers song.© fifi Again, the more astute of you will recognize the ancient quote here: 'And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth and tearing out of hair, verily much in contrast to thine earlier throwing in the air of hats\ And they were sore. Not sore afraid, just sore!'from the obscure The Song of Wensleydale,