Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

THE YOUNG ONES
I

f I could be so rude, could I just ask you to put a bookmark in this page for just a moment. Remember which line you're on, if you would, close the book, and look at the front cover.

Are you back? Right, well you will have noticed that the words on the front said 'Stephen Fry's INCOMPLETE and utter history of classical music'. And, in my view, incomplete is such a beautiful word, isn't it? It's a perfect dectet of letters, a divine decimal delight which deliciously describes the nature of the next section. In… complete. Innnnnn… complete. Gorgeous, isn't it? Makes me want to jump on a chair and sing it to the tune of Fingerbobs. 'In… complete… In complete…' Stunning, isn't it?

I guess what I'm trying to say in the previous paragraph is that we are about to zoom, lickety-spit, through a full three decades, not even stopping to spare the horses. So do forgive me. Here we go. With the possible exception of Cliff and the Shadows, the other young ones of 1982 were Benjamin Britten and the Sunday Times Colour Supplement. (OK, so Benjamin Britten was forty-nine, which is stretching it a little to call him a young one, but the Sunday Times Colour Supplement was brand new this year.) Britten's incredibly moving War Requiem is a moving mixture of Latin Mass and the poems of Wilfred Owen. Well, I did say some of the effect of the war would take a while in coming. It was premiered just a year after the Bay of Pigs became the temporary centre of the world, and the same year that 3,000 US soldiers and marshals had to accompany James Meredith on his first day at college, to stop riots happening round him. Why? Simply because he was black.

Two years later and possibly one of the most famous 'What Were You Doing When…' events, ever. The year will forever be etched in the brain to many - certainly for me, I know - mainly for the question: 'Do you remember what you were doing the day… the day Deryke Cooke thwarted Mahler's ambition to write the same number of symphonies as Beethoven?' At least, that's how I remember it. Yes, it's amazing, isn't it? Some musicologist finds Mahler's last sketches, and just goes and finishes them off. So you have… Mahler Ten. In 1964. Very odd. Someone would eventually do it to Beethoven, too, but not for a good twenty-four years yet. What else has happened? Well, "65 saw Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, commissioned by the Dean of Chichester, oddly enough, and premiered the same year as Lyndon B. Johnson was. Well, to be accurate, he wasn't premiered, he was presi-dented, I suppose. Still. Onward. No time to lose.

1967 becomes the year of Jeremy Thorpe leading the Liberal Party; of the Six Day War; of Martin Luther King leading marches against Vietnam; and of both the US and Soviet space programmes in crisis following deaths on launch and re-entry, respectively. Elsewhere, at Cape Town's Grooote Schuur Hospital, Christiaan Barnard performed the world's first heart transplant. Oh, and here's a fine couple of statistics to put alongside 1967 in your brain's filing system: Iff 1967, 5.3 BILLION CANS OF SOFT DRINKS