Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

SEAL OF THE CENTURY

W

ow, this seems like a huge leap, but, well, I refer the honourable gentleman to the title on the front of the book cover that I gave, a few moments ago. Incomplete! JNcomplete! OK? Good. Now, I want to cut, mercilessly, to 1897, so let me lift up the edge of the carpet and show you a few years that I swept underneath.

I've got to mention 1896, without whom this film would never have been made. Sorry, I was reading from the wrong set of notes, there. I've got to mention 1896, because of Richard Strauss, and a piece of music he composed therein. It's more or less a symphony - a three-movement symphonic poem, to be precise - the first two minutes of which are a sort of 'The Big Bang for orchestra', and make one of the best uses, ever, of the organ as an orchestral instrument. It was called, after the Nietszche book, Also Sprach Zamthustm, and part of it went on to fame and probably no fortune when it was featured in the Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was also the year that gave us the last Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, as well as a whole lot of stuff going on in South Africa - far too complicated to get into one line. It is, of course, also the year that a host of countries unite in the first modern Olympic Games. All that and one of the greatest, most romantic (in the 'slush' use of the word, I mean) operas ever written. The thing of beauty that is… La Boheme. (Wipes tear from eye.) But, sadly, we haven't got time for that right now - maybe later. We've got to crack on and seal the century.

Yes, it's 1897 - what about that for sleight of hand? - and we really are skating. Very soon, there would be a new century, and then where would we be, eh? Indeed. But for now, it's fin de Steele', as they say in Leeds - the nineteenth-century's autumn years. Queen Vic was having her Diamond Jubilee and HG Wells is the author of the moment. This year, he had starded everyone with The Invisible Man and, a couple of years back, it was The Time Machine - he's on a roll. Also, JJ Thomson has discovered the electron. In fact, I have a transcript, here, of the precise moment he did: '…Bloody hell, that's small!' Wow. It's as if you were there, isn't it? Added to that, there was a famine in India, die remains of a Gold Rush in Canada's Klondyke, and, well, you can almost feel the new century approaching. The art world, too, is really pulling into another interesting period. Just as Sir Henry Tate donates an art gallery to the British people, figures such as Matisse and Pissarro are really beginning to produce amazing work. This year, it's The Dinner Table from Matisse, and the Boulevard des Italiens from Pissarro. Rodin is also still knocking 'em out - a bronze of Victor Hugo in 1897. In music, sadly Brahms has died, and Mahler has taken over as MD of the Vienna Opera House. Good and bad, I suppose, depending on your point of view. Yes, he did produce wonderful things with the Viennese Opera, but it is said that he didn't suffer fools gladly - a bit of an acid tongue, old Gus, by all accounts. Of music in general, though, in 1897? Well, it's still such a mix! It's not just a mix of styles now, either, it's a mix of out and out languages too. That Spike Milligan bit I was talking about. It's not that people don't agree on the styles o? the sounds to make any more, or on the feel of the music. No. Very soon, if not already, they will start to disagree on the very ESSENCE of music - the syntaxes, the languages, the rules on what even constitutes music. In much the same way as it happens in literature and in art, music will look in on itself and say, 'Well, no, actually - I don't take that as understood at all. I want to go right back to the basics and question how we think of, and what we think of as, music' And let's face it, once you start doing that, there's no stopping.

But for now, we're safe. No one has split the atom, no one has split the tone. Er, as it were. Indeed, if you wanted to be assured that 'music' is still intact, so to speak, and that it would always be there if everything went wrong, then you need look no further than what John Philip Sousa was putting out in 1897.

It was called The Stars and Stripes Forever, and it felt like pure, botded Uncle Sam, scored for military band. It would do Sousa's bank balance no harm at all, with the royalties making him better off to the tune of some 300 grand, during his lifetime alone. The clever little sausage. For now, though, let's nip back to Blighty, with a stop-off in Paris.