Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

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Late Romantic (it always helps, having a sibling in an older year) Good, and any minute now, I'll have Modern. Marvellous, the complete set. I haven't felt this happy since I got my full series of original GWR rolling stock pictures, signed by the drivers. Priceless! Enough of that, though, because I wanted to zoom in on England, as I said, and, in particular, on Malvern in Worcestershire. Bit of a giveaway, really, for yes, I am heading for the home of England's finest, one Eddie 'The Eagle' Elgar.

Yes, the man in the handlebar moustache - or, as someone once said, 'Not so much a handlebar, more die whole bike!' - is the saviour of English music, Elgar. But where is he? Not geographically, I mean, but in 'the great scheme of things', as they say on a monsters' housing estate. It may help, actually, if we try one of those either/or sets of questions on him, the sort of the thing that have become very popular as small space-fillers in the Saturday and Sunday papers. Try this: Beatles or Rolling Stones? Big or small? Roger Moore or Sean Connery? k amp;'4 IVVIL fl«rwf Avifrft-??^4^!?^ e*f*#»w«j. / Brahms or Wagner? Upstairs or downstairs??^??^ /ffcpn-ifc/rf What was your most embarrassing experience? Where or when were you at your happiest? How would you like to be remembered? i»efii~iiel*f wb bh-it*mt»VJRV |fe???-?????? Has that helped? No? Sorry. Worth a try.

Elgar was the first important English composer, at least on the world stage, since Purcell back in 1695. In fact, England, in between these two giants, was dubbed 'the land without music'. But Elgar changed all that. Elgar was the first British composer in years who was not only recognized as 'great', but whose music could be traced back to its land of origin. It didn't sound like any other country - not colourful and vibrant Russian, not delicate, pointillist French, not even severe, iron-clad German. It sounded ENGLISH. Not surprising, really, when you look at Elgar himself.

In 1899, Elgar was forty-two. He was born in Broadheath, near Worcester, the son of the local organist and music shopkeeper, a man very much at the centre of musical life in the town. 'A stream of music flowed through our house and the shop and I was all the time bathing in it,' he once said. His early hits were cantatas - The Light of Life, King Olaf and Caractacus. They were delightful, 'of their period' choral works, but destined to be eclipsed by what came in 1899 and beyond. It was in this year that he put together a set of pieces based on a single, short theme. He called them the Variations on an Original Theme - the Enigma, or The Enigma Variations for short.

To be fair, there were two enigmas involved. The first was that each piece was a musical picture of one of Elgar's friends but bore only the initials or the nickname of that friend. So 1899 society had to work out who it was being portrayed in each movement. So, for example, the most famous movement, 'Nimrod', could be worked back to Elgar's publisher. How? Nimrod was 'the mighty hunter' in the Bible - the German for hunter is jaeger - August Jaeger was Elgar's publisher. See? It's not quite Araucaria, but it was good enough. But it's the second enigma which is possibly more interesting and it is simply this: what was the theme? Was it just a totally original theme, written by Elgar -end of story? Or was it, as rumour came to have it, hiding another well-known tune? Some say it is totally original, some say it is 'Auld Lang Syne' - messed around a bit - while others say it is 'Rule Britannia' or the theme to Are??? Being Served?"® There is even one school of fi To be fair, that's actually my own personal theory. thought - yes, this has, over the years, occupied many waking thoughts of the musical cognoscenti (or should we say in this case in-cognoscenti?) - that the theme isn't the theme at all, and that it is merely a tune that 'fits round' another tune, this second tune left unplayed. Are you with me? No? Never mind. It doesn't really matter. As for Elgar himself, well, in true English schoolboy style, when asked to reveal the theme, he more or less replied 'Shan't! Can't make me!' Sorry, let me rephrase that: he retained an impressive level of decorum by maintaining a healthy silence on the matter all his life, eventually taking the secret of the Enigma to his grave. The Enigma Variations, though, thankfully will remain with us for ever. 1899 was also the year that the young Viennese composer S g wrote his work for string orchestra, Verklarte Nacht. Sorry about disguising the man's name, but I don't want to frighten the horses. It's a name that can discomfort people, you see, and often necessitates the use of a supporting helpline, to run during the credits.-13 His full name is printed in the footnote at the bottom of this page. S g would have been twenty when Elgar wrote his Enigma Variations and he, too, was a shopkeeper's son - a shoe shop, though, not a music shop. His dad died when he was sixteen, and he immediately went out to earn money to support his family - often walking a fine line between living and barely just existing. As a result, he had virtually no proper musical training, although he had already, by then, taken up violin and cello. He put his innate musical talents to good use, though, by conducting theatre orchestras and taking in other people's music, which he would orchestrate for money. His early fi Arnold Schoenberg was the first great exponent of a style of music known as 'twelve-tone', or, if you're writing a posh academic paper, dodecaphony. It sounds complex but it's really quite simple. If you look at a piano keyboard, you will notice that there are twelve different notes between any two notes of the same name. So, between middle? and the? above, there are twelve notes; between D and the D above, twelve again, and so on. Basically, the whole of music is made up of twelve notes repeated over and over again at different registers. All Schoenberg did was invent a set of rules that said you couldn't play any one note again… untilyou had played all the remaining eleven first. Does that make sense? So, if you wrote an E, say, you couldn't just write another E straight after it. You had to wait till you'd played each of the other eleven notes - (C, C#, D, E«», F, F#, G, A?, A, B? and B, in this instance) before the E could sound again. Of course, most people think this somewhat arbitrary rule results in music that sounds like the devil clearing out his garage. It is for this reason that I will spare you the name Schoenberg except in small print. music, such as the aforementioned Verklarte Nacht, is very much in the style of Wagner or even Richard Strauss, so, if you see it on the bill of a concert, the composer's name alone should not make you run for the hills. It was only after this, and, to be fair, after the epic Gurrelieder (the 'Songs of Gurre', the Danish castle, home to the song-cycle's hero, King Waldemar), that someone accidentally left S g out in an overheated room, and he, sadly, detuned himself. Schoecking, but true/©