Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

THE SLEDGEHAMMER AND THE NUT

D

espite the fact that William Ewart Gladstone is elected as Liberal PM, for the fourth time, in 1892, the year is more famous for giving the original spin to the words New Labour. Keir Hardie becomes the first Labour MP ever, timing his arrival in Parliament more or less to coincide with Mr Diesel patenting his internal combustion engine. In the twilight world of the arts, it seems that if you have a woman in the tide, you flourish. Grievous Bodily Shaw follows up Cashel Byron's Profession with this year's Mrs Warren's Profession, while Oscar Wilde comes up with the evergreen Lady Windermere's Fan. Elsewhere, Monet has started a series of pictures of Rouen Cathedral while Toulouse-Lautrec has focused his attention on the Moulin Rouge. The newspaper obit columns record the deaths of Walt 'Don't Call Me Slim' Whitman and Alfred 'Do Call Me Lord' Tennyson, whereas the foreign news pages mention that fifty-one-year-old Antonin Dvorak has been appointed Director of the New York Conservatory of Music - for full story, see arts pages.

If the same arts pages had featured a brief resume of the life and career of Dvorak, it might have read something like the following. fi He of the two smoking barrels. Dvorak was born in the fairly humble village of Nelahozeves, just north of Prague. His dad was the village innkeeper as well as the butcher, and any music that he heard early on must have been fairly simple stuff - folk music, mainly. At the age of sixteen, he was sent to organ college, which, to be fair, is an awful thing to do to anyone. He went on to learn violin, though, as well as viola, and eventually ended up playing in the band of the Czech National Theatre, where his musical director was none other than Smetana. At the age of thirty-two, he married, and, at thirty-three, won an Austrian composing competition. This was the big break, albeit, by great composers' standards, a little late. On the board of the composition prize jury sat Brahms, who was clearly impressed with Dvorak's work. The two became firm friends, and Brahms introduced the younger composer to his publisher, an important step on the road to becoming musically solvent. From here on in, things fell into place for Dvorak. It wasn't long before he had been made Professor of Music at the Prague Conservatoire, and, to bring us up to date, director of the new music school in New York. In the further worldlymode of musibold, as Lord Stanley of Unwin might have said, deep joy.

Tchaikovsky - a year older than Dvorak - has managed to brush aside his melancholia. He'd been touring America and had been cheered to be regaled as something of a living legend. In the end, though, he would miss Russia too much, and end up going home. The short-lived mood of optimism, though, led to a light, frisky new ballet score. It was based on a little fairy story by Estimated Time of Arrival Hoffman, and was packed to bursting with cute, fluffy tunes that make your teeth 'PING' with brilliance and your Christmas jumper GLOW with fuzziness. Luckily for us, the scenery for this little bundle of joy - The Nutcracker-is pulled out of the stores every year around Christmas and New Year, and its joy seems as if it will never stop. Of course, sadly for Tchaikovsky, its jolJiness was but a brief respite from his tortured and morbid depression, and his friends began to wonder how long he would be able to survive.

In Vienna, the same year, the cognoscenti are all awhirl over the premiere of Bruckner's new symphony, his eighth. Ironically, despite his age - he's now nearly seventy - it's only been since his seventh that he's been considered a true master. Sadly, too, he's only got four years left. His Eighth is, as those in the know had now come to expect, a mammoth work, running to nearly an hour and a half unless the conductor has somewhere to get to. Coming after the slow movement of his Seventh, written in honour of his late idol, Wagner, the Eighth still shows Bruckner as a huge disciple, with its quartet of Wagner tubas and a scherzo that is virtually perfection.

Stand the two pieces back to back, and they are chalk and cheese; north and south; hairy and smooth (not sure about that one, but still) - the Bruckner a mighty sledgehammer of a piece, with the Tchaikovsky the nut. As concert-going spectacles go, they need a different frame of mind. The Nutcracker is a tight, pleasure cruiser of a piece, a sort of hop-on, hop-off of perfect little tunes, while Bruckner Eight is more an ocean-going liner - once you're on board, you're on board. There's no getting off for quite a while, but there's plenty of luxurious, sophisticated entertainment to keep you ecstatically happy all the way. My word, don't I talk bollocks? But you know what I mean.