Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

THE BIZARRE AND CHARMING

? dd title but, still - bear with me. 1883, then. What's… 'goin' down', as they say in the trendy world of dropped letters? Well,?? tell you what's 'goin' down'. Skyscrapers, that's what's goin' down. Or up, should I say. In Chicago, to be precise. The first ever. Not exactly huge by today's standards, but still, there it was, up there, and, well, doing what skyscrapers do, just… scraping the sky. Well. Good.

Also, Paul Kruger has become President of South Africa; the Orient Express has had its first run - Paris to Istanbul: slight delays in Strasbourg - seasonal manpower shortages, but otherwise a cracking start. What else 'gives', in 1883? Well, Nietszche writes Also Spmch Zarathustra, no doubt giving the then nineteen-year-old Richard Strauss something to think about; Renoir paints Les Parapluies, and, to be honest, we lose a bunch of heavyweights. Turgenev, Manet, Karl Marx and, saddest of all, just one year after Parsifal, Wagner.

One minute's silence, please. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60.

At the risk of going immediately from the sublime to the ridiculous, 1883 is also the year that the Comte de Chambord died - wait for this one! It's a belter. Here goes. 'That's God proving tliat, while he may be omnipotent and all powerful, he is a little impolite because…'

…it's coming, it's coming… '…because HE TOOK THE LAST BOURBON!' Oh, come on, it wasn't that bad.