Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

SYMPHONY OF A THOUSAND DAYS

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? be strictiy accurate, or should that be 'inaccurate', that headline should read Symphony of a Thousand Or So Days, but, well, it didn't read quite as well. The Thousand (Or So) Days are the ones between the dawn of 1907 and the dusk of 1910, and they just happen to be The Thousand (Or So) Days within which Mahler wrote one of his biggies. The one that would send the orchestra manager in Munich apoplectic, with its demands for an extended set of musicians of up to a thousand people. (Poor man, probably had a nervous twitch for the rest of his life, like Herbert Lom in the Pink Panther movies.) 1907, then. The Russo-Japanese war ended with the, wait for it, Treaty of Portsmouth. The Treaty of Portsmouth! Wow, I bet they were all a bit sore about that. Portsmouth! And they'd been hoping to have it in Barbados! Also, Norway has separated from Sweden (Norway got the CDs), the Sinn Fein Party is now founded and Albert Einstein has, by this point: a) formulated the special theory of relativity, b) formulated the law of mass energy, c) created the Brownian theory of motion, and d) formulated the photon theory of light. It's no doubt at this point that someone taps him on the shoulder and says, 'Hey, Albert, love. Look, nobody likes a smartarse. OK?' Elsewhere, Oscar Wilde has published De Profundis- from the grave, Picasso has moved from blue to a healthy pink, while Cezanne and Ibsen have, in turn, moved from a healthy pink to a less healthy composty brown. Er, that is, they died. Sorry. Tried to break it to you gendy. In 1907 too, the recendy created Nobel Prize for Literature goes to Kipling, while, in the 'arty' world, Cubism is the big noise, as proven by Pablo 'Pink' Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon - which loosely translates as 'Ooh, I don't fancy yours much!' As for the divine world of music, well it is probably blissfully unaware of the latest trick up Gustav Mahler's sleeve.

Mahler's world had been rocked of late. When one of his daughters died from scarlet fever, he partly blamed himself for having 'tempted fate', as it were, in writing the Kindertotenlieder - the 'Songs of the Death of Children'. So, he moved away from Vienna to America, where he would eventually conduct the Rachmaninov I mentioned earlier. So by 1907, he was at the Metropolitan Opera House, sparring with the conductor Arturo Toscanini and not having too good a time of it. He did, though, find time to finish his Symphony No 8, the aforementioned GIGANTIC 'Symphony of a Thousand'. It is in two simply GARGANTUAN sections. When it was finally premiered, in Munich in 1910, it would set its first-night audience alight and the rest of the world would eventually follow on behind, too. It is, in many ways, the ultimate resting place of the symphony. Just as Wagner had shown people the ultimate resting place of opera, so Mahler gives them the direction for 'where symphonies go to die'. It calls for virtually all the forces that Mahler could fit on the page - a double-sized chorus, extra boys' chorus, seven soloists and five times the number of woodwind. What would symphony composers do after this one? Actually, I'll tell you what they'd do. They'd shut up shop and go home. That's what they'd do! Now, let me duck and dive round 1908 and come to rest on 1909 and 1910. Doesn't that typeface make those words look fantastic? I bet it could make any writing look fantastic. As an experiment: See? It even makes my shopping fist look great, doesn't it? Great thing, typefaces. Anyway, let me miss out 1908 - apologies, but I've got a book to end - and go straight to 1909.

In Britain, Asquith is PM and Lloyd George is his Chancellor. Louis Bleriot has just made the crossing from Calais to Dover in thirty-seven minutes, and the age of electricity has, sort of, gained a sibling. Following the first ever production of Bakelite, some people are saying the 'plastic age' has started. In London, HG Selfridge sets out his department store - although yes, he doesn't actually sell fridges - while in Vienna, Freud sets out his thoughts on psychoanalysis, and in France, Diaghilev's Ballet Russe have set out to capture the hearts of Paris. The artist Utrillo sees Picasso's blue and pink periods and raises him a white, and Vassily Kandinsky starts to produce the first truly abstract art. What else? Well, the Girl Guide Association is established, and no doubt lots of me new recruits are simply desperate to have the latest 'in' hairstyle -the strange, new permanent waves. Oh, darling, it's so YOU!

So there we are: girl guides and perms. That's the important stuff from 1909 covered. But what about 'la musique', as they say in Ilkley and Otley?

Music was busy still figuring out where it wanted to go. Mahler has already written the last romantic symphony, more or less. Yes, Rachmaninov and Puccini will continue writing Rachmaninov and Puccini for as long as they have air left to breathe - nothing would have stopped them, the dyed-in-the-wool romantics. And, of course, there were others. Others like Delius, a sort of English Debussy - in a school of his own, as it were. Whereas someone like Wagner had triggered off a whole religion of disciples, Delius was a one-off. He was a rogue player, following no one and leaving no trail. He eventually found his voice in pieces like Sea Drift and Brigg Fair, not to mention the breathtaking A Mass of Life. A Mass of Life is a vast swirl of Nietzsche's words and Delius's dreamlike, soul-stirring music, and is another of those pieces that should be 'experienced' in a live setting. Actually, what am I on about - ALL music should be experienced in a live setting, that's the name of the game. But pieces like A Mass of Life can prove simply too big for even the best CD system. If you hear a movement like 'O Mensch, gib acht…' or whatever, for the first time on CD, there's always a chance that you will hear it in the same way you might play a computer game for the first time. You can enjoy it, you can go to lots of places with it, but you might only ever get to the first level. Hear it live, and all sorts of different levels open up, levels you can get on to via doors and nuances you just didn't find the first time. It's obvious, I know, but music IS live. It's written in the small print. It has to be. MLUISVIEC. Look at the word. It's been there all along.

As well as Delius, there were also people like the thirty-eight-year-old Ralph 'Rhymes with Safe' Vaughan Williams and Igor 'Rhymes with Nothing' Stravinsky.

Vaughan Williams was another individual composer, although one who'd had more of a standard schooling than Delius, some of it under Max Bruch and some of it under Maurice Ravel (of whom more later). The combination of Bruch and Ravel teaching and the rarefied Charterhouse-Cambridge-Royal College of Music upbringing produced a unique blend in VW. I'm reminded of that feeling you get when you see a picture of the baby of a couple you know. Often, as obvious as it sounds to say it, the baby does look like a combination of the two parents, only with its own 'new baby' uniqueness. I know, I know, it's obvious, but it's just that it never ceases to amaze me. Well, VW is a bit like that. You can hear the German of Bruch in his music. You can hear the delicate 'francais' of Ravel. It all comes out, though, with the particularly conservative Englishness of a Cotswold village. It's delicious, too, a musical creamy tea, only the jam's got schnapps or absinthe in it.

Stravinsky - Russia's finest. Wow, the name alone fires me up. It was one of those names that I had to have opened up for me. I refused to do it myself. Someone had to physically sit me down in front of a crummy school record player, perched precariously on its specially built hardwood ledge in the corner of the room, and force-feed me the early ballets. Even then, I wouldn't ingest it. It took a liquidized Symphony of Psalms before my eyes widened and I thought 'OH… MY… GIDDY AUNT!' And that was it. From then on, I listened differently to Igor Stravinsky. Sometimes, he painted pictures for me in his music, sometimes he just gave me a series of building blocks and seemed to be saying, 'Here, you assemble these. Make what you want out of them.' One of the occasions I most remember as being the former was with The Firebird -1 know, amazing that it wasn't The Rite of Spring. Someone played me the Finale from the suite of The Firebird and I was just gone. It seemed to be modern music meets Hollywood ending. I was hearing all sorts of things - I could hear someone splashing bucket after bucket of paint everywhere across a wall-sized canvas, as if they were creating a Pollock-type painting. I know, I know - mixing my eras, but that's what the music seemed to be saying. But the overriding image that stuck in my head was when the orchestra settle in to those last chords. The J. Arthur Rank-type procession has finished, and these oscillating chords start, the beginning of the end. Every time - EVERY TIME - I hear a magic carpet. EVERY TIME. As soon as they start, I'm on this flat, exotic magic carpet, and we're levitating a little, then a little more, then we reach out the height of a tall room: then we descend a little, then a little more, until finally we touch down again. We haven't gone on a trip anywhere - even though it may sound like I have! - we've just… tried it out. Levitated on the spot, gone up, gone up again, then lowered, lowered again and then finally come to rest. That is exactly what is happening for me towards the end of the finale of the Firebird suite. One day, I'll go and see a performance and see just exactly what DOES happen at this point in the ballet.

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was born at the right time and in the right place. After a fairly musical upbringing at the hands of his father - a bass in the Imperial Opera - he was lucky enough to meet Rimsky-Korsakov. He was just twenty-one at the time while Rimsky, at fifty-nine, was very much the grand ageing, if not old, man of Russian music. Stravinsky played through some of his early pieces to R-K and, just three years later, became a fully fledged pupil. The two became good friends, with Stravinsky going on to provide both music for Rimsky's daughter's wedding, and, eventually, a death chant for his own funeral. It wasn't long before he came to the attention of the big thing in ballet choreography at the time, Serge Diaghilev, and, before long, he would be shocking the music world with his dance music. But more of that in a moment.