Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

CHANGE THE WORLD,

re you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin. Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there was an awful lot of war going on, and thousands of people were being killed. No, not exactly a fairy story is it? Descriptive enough of 1 §04, though. Russia and Japan were the main ones, this year, to be fair, with Port Arthur besieged, Seoul occupied and what have you. In the field of science, Rutherford and Soddy had just postulated their general theory of relativity, the first ultraviolet lamps had appeared, and - well I imagine it counts as science -Rolls-Royce had been founded. Also, Freud had published a little light bedtime reading in the form of The Psychopatholqgy of Everyday Life. Lovely! Bet it was flying off the shelves as people read it with their cocoa, the world over. What else? Jean Jaures issued the Socialist paper, L'Humanite, Helen Keller graduated from Radcliffe College, and the first radio transmission of music occurred in Graz in Austria. As for Anton Chekhov, well, he's only gone and died, hasn't he! Teh! Not before issuing The Cherry Orchard, though. Add to all this Picasso's Two Sisters, Rousseau's The Wedding and the death of Dvorak, and well, that's nearly the end of 1904. But not quite! Oh no.

No. Before 1904 can finish, the London Symphony Orchestra give their first ever concert. Still going strong today, despite a close shave in 1912, when they cancelled their crossing to New York aboard the Titanic. Lucky, really. Still. All's well that end's well.

Musically, there's such a lot going on, so it might be a good idea if I just illustrated two pieces back to back, by way of saying 'Gosh, weren't there a lot of crazy different styles going on, back then,' and also by way of skipping the rest out. Yes, why don't I do that.

Charles Ives. It's a very nice name, very placid, I always think. But it conceals a wonderful life, that placid name. Mr Ives was originally a Connecticut businessman and a very successful one, too. He made millions. From insurance, would you believe. But when he had to leave his business through ill health, he turned to what had up until then been his hobby - his music. His dad had been a band leader, and I think it's fair to say that he was not a typical late-nineteenth-century example of the species. He'd have his son sing in one key while he played piano in another, just for fun. (This is one area where I feel I'm at a distinct advantage compared to even some of the best musicians in that I've been able to sing in anything BUT the key being played ever since I was little.) With an upbringing like that, something was always going to stick, and Ives went on to experiment with 'bi-tonality' (as they call it in boffinland, literally 'two keys') in his more serious mature pieces. So, in Three Places in New England, from 1904, he features two bands playing different music at different speeds. It was said to have been inspired partly, too, by an occasion where he witnessed something similar in the street, with two marching bands approaching the same point, playing different stuff. Great fun.

This was also the Year of the Butterfly for the forty-six-year-old Giacomo Puccini. Puccini was born into a time in Italy when a man with a gift for heartfelt music and a love of opera could only ever do well. By the time Puccini was twenty-six, Verdi had been on a self-imposed musical silence for some eleven years - hadn't produced a note, opera or otherwise. And he wouldn't for a good few years yet. A Verdi-less period, in the end, of some thirteen years! A gap had opened up in Italian opera. Puccini entered a one-act opera, Le Villi - The Witches, in a local publisher's opera competition. Totally brushing aside that it was not even mentioned in despatches, he managed to get die work staged and it was a big success. By 1904, Puccini had already written three truly great operas - Manon Lesctmt, La Boheme and Tosca, with La Boheme entering many folks' books as one of the greatest operas ever written. This year, though, produced what Puccini would go on to call his own favourite from his entire collection of operas. It concerns a young geisha called Cio-Cio San and her tragic love for die BASTARD! US naval officer, Lieutenant Pinkerton. He left the opera with the same tide as the original play on which it was based. Madame Butterfly.

Puccini opera isn't everybody's cup of tea. Indeed, as I confessed earlier, there was a time when I wouldn't go near it with a bargepole -well, have you ever tried to check a bargepole into the ROH cloakroom? It's lush stuff, it's raw stuff, too, in the sense that Puccini is shameless in using material that other composers might shy away from, for want of being called 'cheesy' or 'louche'. ('Jejune', even.) But Puccini says, no, if that's what tugs at the heartstrings, then that's what I'm going to write - and he does. It's shameless stuff- 'vulgar', I remember being a buzzword, one season, at the Opera House's production of Turandot - but it's quite simply FAB. Un bel di». You bet it is.

And you see, that's what I love about 'classical' music - how can you ever think you'll tire of it when it can mean Charles Ives's Three Places in New England, but it can also mean 'Dolce notte' from Puccini's Madame Butterfly) Is there any more varied thing on the planet?