Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

THREE FAT LADIES. ER,

(WITH A FUNNY HEAD) 1888. It was a very good year. Let's just focus, gradually, on what was hap- actually, 'and flat feet'. That tide should read 'with flat feet'. Can we correct that?

L

ovely. Sorry, but Neville is in the Retail, as theysay. 1888, then. A very good year. And to focus in, as I said, well, there was rather a lot going on.

Germany gets through two bosses: William I dies, as does his successor, Fred III. Fred Ill's place is taken by William II - sounds like a very odd game of chess, doesn't it? William II, of course, is now more commonly known as The Kaiser or Kaiser Bill, Kaiser being simply a Germanic version of the original for emperor, Caesar, much like the Russian word Tsar. In London, Jack the Ripper has started his reign of terror, the Football League has been founded and the -FT has commenced publication. It would be only a matter of time before someone cracks one of my favourite jokes: What's pink and hard in the morning?^ Lovely. Only last year, '87, LL Zamenhof had devised Esperanto, the international language, and supposedly 'extras tre facile lernabla lingvo? And if you understood that sentence, then it must be true. Back to '88, and Emile Zola publishes La Terre, not in Esperanto, but in French, while Oscar Wilde brings forth The Happy Prince, and other tales. Elsewhere, the twenty-eight-year-old Mahler becomes Music Director of the Budapest Opera; Kipling writes Plain Tales from the Hills, and Van Gogh paints The Yellow Chair - nothing like a spot of DIY, is there?

Focusing in a little further still, on Russia, in fact, we find Peter Tchaikovsky, writing up his diary. He has had to go to some rather elaborate lengths to hide his sexuality, although some say his periods of heavy drinking were more simply symptomatic of a generally tormented soul. His journals contain many cryptic references to something he terms 'Sensation Z' - his homosexuality - so, set in the Russia of the 1880s, it's not surprising that his inspiration had, for most of the last seven years, all but dried up. 1888, then, must have seemed like a fantastic year for Tchaik - no doubt he underlined it in red and looked back on it with a smile. It was the year he got back on course. It was the year of his Fifth Symphony.

There's something about fifth symphonies, don't you think? Mahler. Beethoven. Shostakovich? And, here and now, or rather there and then, Tchaikovsky. To me, this beautiful 'Circle of Fifths', to purloin a phrase, is more than enough to keep me going on a desert island. While I would miss other music if I didn't have it, to have this happy band of brothers would certainly fill a mass of different spots, musically speaking.

Tchaikovsky's is probably the easiest, in a way, out of the bunch. It has one minor problem attached to it, though. Someone, somewhere - own up, whoever it was - once taught me slightly rude words to virtually every movement and, ever since, I haven't been able to get them out of my head. Occasionally, if you can't shake them, it can get the better of you and spoil the entire thing. I remember sitting in on an open rehearsal of it once, and fully expecting the conductor, when he stopped and started the band, to say things like, 'OK, let's go from three bars after the Key to the Shithouse… everybody got three bars after "Shithouse"? Good. AND…' Strangely enough, he didn't.

Tchaik 5 - as I'm reliably told it is known in music orchestral circles - is, to me, absolutely glorious. Of course, if you were the critic of the Musical Courier at the British premiere, it was 'a disappointment… a farce… musical padding… commonplace to a degree!' I think he also went on to add that the Beatles were crap, too. Still -you can't win them all. Now, though, let me leave 'Tchaik 5' behind, and, by way of a quick aside, have a look at what it means to be 'romantic' in 1888. What I mean is, what is everybody writing? What does it all sound like? Does it all add up? Well? Follow me as I take a quick cross-section of the Romantic tree in 1888.