Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

CLICHE ALERT! CLICHE ALERT! CLICHE ALERT! CLICHE ALERT!

…'writing out of his time'. Sorry about that, but it's true. Petrushka was arguably more out of its time than The Rite of Spring, but it was the Rite that caused a riot and, as a result, gets the billing above the tide.

1911, by the way, is the year that the Kaiser was speaking, rather ominously, about Germany's 'place in the sun' - the same year, thank goodness, that thirty-seven-year-old Winston Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty. In China, the Manchu dynasty fell, having been in power since 1644. WOW and then some. 1644. You see?! You see?! Yes, things always change, yes, agreed. (Have you still got Petrushka in your head?) But around this time they seemed to be changing in giant leaps, sea-changing, so to speak. Aircraft were used in a war offensive for the first time in 1911, the Italy-Turkey war, in fact. Sounds sort of 'Mmm' now, a bit 'Oh, really?' now. But think back to then. Aircraft in war must have seemed like something from another world - it must have been so frightening, so different, so weird. THIS is the world Stravinsky was reflecting, not the 'little-finger-poised-with-cucumber-sandwich-and-George-V' world. That doesn't fit Stravinsky and his Petrushka at all. No. He's writing music that can see through that to beyond. He's writing music that says…well, it says Braques, the cubist painter. Its says…Paul Klee, it says Jacob Epstein - all of whom were producing great stuff in 1911: Braques and his Man with a Guitar, Klee with his Self Portrait and Epstein with his tomb of Oscar Wilde, actually. And if you think back, one final time, to the Russian Dance, from Petrushka, then it might also be saying… 'Mahler is dead!' And, indeed, both symbolically and physically, he was. OR WAS HE? Mmmm? Mmmm???

Well, yes, actually, of course he was: died 18th May 1911, if you want the exact date. So, very dead. A lot dead. Dead dead. Dead to the power of dead. He'd 'come over all dead'. (That's enough 'deads', I think. Just wanted to make my point.) So the answer is 'Yes', obviously he is. I just said he was.

But if Mahler is dead, who is it that's writing the lush, romantic music in 1911? Who is it that is not quite writing 'the music of change', a la Stravinsky? Indeed, Stravinsky, himself, called this composer 'cheap and poor'. Well, step forward, with score in hand, one Richard Strauss. The score in question was that of his opera, Der Rosenkavalier. To put it back into context, it was the music of change for Strauss - it was very much his way of going forward.

Richard Strauss had been born into a very musical family - his father being a very famous horn player, who played in orchestras conducted by Wagner. Having shown a ridiculously early and well-formed talent for composing - his Festival March is from when he was ten - he studied at university in Munich, before becoming an assistant conductor to Hans von Bulow. Looking back, he's rather like one of those people who wrap cars up in clingfilm and save them, in pristine condition, in a garage, for years. Then, they bring them out, aeons later and unwrap them. While they appear bright and shiny, they don't really appear new, if you know what I mean. They have all the trappings of new, but they're not… new. In addition, you have to take everything Stravinsky says with a pinch of salt, too. Given time, 'Rudd' Igor would often change his mind on most subjects, eventually going on to give you a quote that totally contradicted everything he'd previously said on a given subject. Nevertheless, Stravinsky's bons mots notwithstanding, whichever way you look at it, Strauss was holding on for dear life to an era and style that all around him were saying was dead.