Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

THE DAVID HUGHES MEMORIAL PARAGRAPHS

(A small gesture, I know, but every movement has to start somewhere!) Before we close on 1878, a quick profile of the many-headed beast that is music in the latter half of the nineteenth century. And to get such a profile, we need to answer the following questions: (a) Where is the Church as a musical influence? (b) What is the latest 'technology', musically speaking? (c) How does your skin stay looking so young, Mummy? Let me have a go at all three.

If you imagine music as being like a polo game, only with more breaks, then we are nearing the end of the romantic chukka. 1878 -it's not far from the end for this luwie, emotional lot. Coming through now, or soon at least, are what many people have termed the 'neo-romantics' or new romantics. People like Mahler, Scriabin, the later Bruckner - people who wrung the last drops of heart-wrenching angst from their compositional sponges, as well as wearing strange ruffs round their necks and humming along to Antmusic. From then on, after that, where would people go? It's a bit like saying, 'What do you give the man who has everything?' What do you do, if you're a composer, and everything feels like it's been done?

As for the Church, well, other than in the odd corner of Europe, it casts no shadow across all music, any longer. Those composers who do write religious music - and, indeed, many still use the idioms and structures - do so out of a personal devotion or, as in the case of Verdi and his Requiem, are inspired directly by events or people.

And the instruments of the romantics? Well, they are pretty much stabilizing from here on in. Berlioz and Meyerbeer had more or less used everything at their disposal and, apart from the addition of the odd flash of colour - like when Adolphe Sax invented his saxophone some thirty-odd years previously, or even people such as Wagner, who invented himself a specially designed tuba so he could write more notes for his brass players in The King - then that was mainly that.

Oh, and lastly, it's because I have a solid daily moisturising regime. Glad to have cleared that up.

The main 'players' in this world are Brahms, then, and Tchaikovsky. Both late romantics, but very different types. Mr T was a real lush tune addict - he loved a big tune - even at the expense, occasionally, of the development of the music around it. HUGE TUNES, he had, and no doubt that's the main reason for his success. Rule 1 - everyone likes a nice tune, even the ones who say they don't. Brahms, too, could write a nine that you found yourself humming even before it had finished, but he was still a very, shall we say, conservative romantic. Actually, no, that's not quite right. He was, to be fair, a real, dyed-in-the-wool Romantic, but well, that's as far as it went. He didn't move things on at all. He was more than happy to find his own voice - in fact, he was probably overjoyed, considering how long it had taken - and from then on in, stick with it - permanently. Wagner? Well, he simply didn't appeal to Brahms. Brahms's favourite composer was, wait for it, Strauss II. Johann Strauss II. And he made no apologies for it.

'I let the world go the way it pleases!' he once said, and he too went his. Interestingly enough, just as Brahms had no time for Wagner, so Tchaikovsky had no time for Brahms, either. 'What a giftless bastard,' Tchaikovsky once wrote of JB. And there's not much to say about that. Call me a fence-sitter if you like but, personally, I've got time for them all. I mean, compare their violin concertos, Brahms and Tchaikovsky's, both of which were from this very year, 1878.

Both violin concertos are now firmly a part of the Fantastic Four -the big four concertos that have become the first call of violin virtuosi the world over: the Brahms, the Tchaikovsky, the Mendelssohn and the Beethoven. But, from there on in, the similarities more or less end. Brahms's was more of a symphony with a great solo violin part, and it is well known that the first-night audience were more than a little disappointed by the fact that it was not a big virtuoso warhorse for its first soloist, the famous fiddler Joseph Joachim. The Tchaikovsky, on the other hand, was immediately declared 'unplayable' by the soloist who was meant to premiere it - Leopold Auer - and is generally considered a bit more of a test than the Brahms. But both did eventually catch on, and are now the romantic violin equivalent of jazz standards, each year seeing another crop of recordings. Again, excusez-moi pendant je m'assieds sur le fence, mais I love them both to death. You can call me many-sided, you can call me easy to please, you can even wrap me up in clingfilm and call me Muriel. I don't mind.

Nationalism, too, is still running deep, and, just as we edge into 1879, a word about Smetana. Bedrich Smetana - again, can't fault him on the name front, he simply had to be a composer with that one - was a native of what is now called the Czech Republic, formerly Czechoslovakia, and, in Bedrich's day, the much more romantic - no pun intended - Bohemia, a part of the Austrian empire. Smetana was, like many a composer of the day, as we've seen, a bit of a patriot. He'd been there on the front line during the Prague Uprising of 1848 and, after a spell in Sweden, had gone on to become the music director of the Prague Provisional Theatre. It was from here on in, and under a much more favourable political climate than a few years previously, that Smetana would develop not only his, but more or less Bohemia's, musical voice. In doing so, he would also pave the way for people like Dvorak and Janacek, later on.

And so it was, in 1879, as Tchaikovsky was putting the finishing touches to Eugene Onegin and Brahms finds himself on a 'symphony' roll - he was working on a third - that Smetana pressed his blotter a final time on the still wet ink of an epic cycle of Czech tone poems/ He called it Md Vlast or 'My Country'. In effect, it was six tone poems in one: 'Blanik' (the mountain), 'Tabor' (the city), 'From Bohemia's fiA tone poem, or symphonic poem as it's sometimes called, is simply a big orchestral piece of programme music - music that tells a story or describes a particular scene or person or feeling. Fields and Groves', 'Sarka' (a sort of Czech Amazon), 'Vysehrad' (die citadel of Prague) and, probably die most well known, 'Vltava', which tells the musical story of the river running from its very source, gaining in speed and size, dirough Prague - even past a dancing wedding party, camped out on die bank - till it flows majestically into die sea. This particular piece was clearly designed to leave not a Bohemian eye unmoistened, despite die fact that its central tune is not native at all, but Swedish, no doubt from his spell in the land of Konungariket Sverige, as they say in Stockholm.