Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

HEAR THE WORLD UNRAVEL

O

ne year later, 1912, and Maurice Ravel would have been thirty-seven - a great age for a composer, I would imagine, if you had your health and a good twenty-five years left in you. And this seems true of Ravel, who did his first work for Diaghilev's Ballet Russe company in 1912, thus highlighting a pattern. Diaghilev's company is a rather forward-looking dance troupe, working out of Paris, and counting the great Nijinsky - the dancer, not the horse - among their number. It was the same company who had inspired Stravinsky to greatness a year earlier. This is one of the most gratifying parts of the entire 'great' artistic process - generally speaking, greatness breeds greatness. Up until his ballet music, Stravinsky had produced nothing more interesting than the Symphony in Eflat - a good piece, but not monumental. The combination of Diaghilev, Nijinsky, the Ballet Russe and, it must be said, Paris itself - the capital of the Modernist movement - and, well, it seemed to make people raise their game. Certainly it did with Ravel. Despite having some great work under his belt already - Pavane pour une Infante defunte, Jeux d'eau and Sheherazade - in 1912 he produced what a lot of people see as his greatest work, Daphnis and Chloe. Oddly enough, Diaghilev hated it. And, indeed, the first-night audience hated it. No change there, then. Imagine you were playing 'May I?'. You know, the game where you are given an instruction and you have to say 'May I' before you do it. Only, in this instance, you're playing it in 1912. You're given the instruction, 'Take two cavernous nostril breaths.' So, you clear the lungs, and breathe in, through your nose, two massive cavernous nostril breaths. What would you scent? Well, I'm getting… hints of… Lenin and Stalin in Pravda: I'm smelling Woolworths opening… I'm… I'm getting a rumour of… the first parachute jump… yes, and I'm getting… is that Picasso's The Violin) I think it is. There's also a frisson of Modigliani… maybe the Stone Head… or is it Woman with Long Neck) No, it's definitely Stone Head. Mmm, I'm also getting… what is that? A strange… afterscent… it's… oh, it's the Titanic. Sinking. My word, what a year. That really was something. All that and Delius comes up with On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, an orchestral tone poem which seems to capture the essence of this period - a dusky, deliquescent time, when God was in his heaven and all was still right with the world. Of course, if you were playing 'May I?' then you would just have had to go right back to the start, because you didn't say 'May P.

Ah, to be young again. For now, though, let's see in the new year of 1913.

Can you imagine it? The countdown - 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1… at which point the band break into those cataclysmic bars from Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. People look up nervously from their merry, cross-arm clinches. A couple try to form some kind of dance steps around the those chords that sound like the warning of the end of the world. Amazing, not so much off-beat chords as no-beat chords, each one like nail in the coffin of the halcyon years. Nobody was expecting that. That's not exactly the music of party hats and Snowballs, is it? But, to be fair, Stravinsky is really only reflecting what's going on. Two Balkan wars, Gandhi arrested, Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence, Death in Venice from Thomas Mann, but, possibly most fittingly, Du Cote de chez Swann, the first part of? la Recherche du temps perdu by Proust, written from within the cosy silence of his cork-lined Paris flat.

Elsewhere in 1913, the first Charlie Chaplin movies are beginning to appear and Benjamin Britten was born. In perhaps the most jarring juxtaposition, though, the hit song of the year becomes 'It's a Long Way to Tipperary'. So, on the one hand, you have The Rite of Spring, on the other 'It's a Long Way to Tipperary'. Fab. I guess that would make for a pretty difficult round of'Singing the words of one song to the tune of another'. Bags not me, Humph.

You'd be forgiven for thinking, considering the big music of 1913 - The Rite of Spring, that is, not 'Tipperary' - that when war did finally break out a year later, the heady, noisy world of music would get even headier and noisier. Well, as I say, you're forgiven for thinking that. 1914 goes on to produce two of the softest, sweetest moments in all this music we call classical - The Banks of Green Willow and The Lark Ascending, both pieces that could only have been written by Englishmen.

Both pieces are very much products of their time. Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending is a glorious piece of picture painting, with a solo violin taking the part of the eponymous bird, swooping, soaring and hovering, yet all time preserving the inner integrity of the music. The Banks of Green Willow was die product of VW's friend, George Butterworth, and, indirectiy, the product of Eton, Oxford and die Royal College of Music. George Sainton Kaye Butterworth, to give him his glorious full name, was twenty-nine when he wrote his most famous piece. At die outbreak of the war, he immediately signed up. Almost as soon as he got to die front, he was decorated for bravery, but was then killed on die Somme. He received his Military Cross posthumously. The age of innocence is over. Let's get to 1915.