Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

ANT AND HIS SISTERS

Q

uick update, if I may. Technology, first. Technology is coming on in leaps and bounds. Someone, for example, makes a bid to be forever remembered in the history of music by inventing the piano. The guy's name was Cristofori. I repeat… Cristofori. You see, I can't .0 Mmmm, lean see the school essay subject now: 'HanAel was not so much a composer as a Royal Ghetto Blaster - discuss. Not more than 1,000 words.' help thinking that he missed a trick, really - more or less blew the 'history' bit. He should have taken a leaf out of, say, Biro or Hoover's book, and called it the Cristofori. That way, today we would be quickly nipping over and playing scales on the 'Cristofori', or listening to Cristofori concertos. Even watching tea commercials on TV where performing chimps said, 'Eh, Dad. Do you know the Cristofori's on my foot?' 'No, but you hum it, son, and I'll play it.' As it is, he called it a 'piano', and, so nobody knows his name.

What else? Well, Handel and another of the big, young composers, Domenico Scarlatti, have had a piano duel. That's just like a real duel, only you're expected to kill your opponent by throwing a piano at them. Not surprisingly, it was declared a draw, and they both lived/© Elsewhere, we've had the first cricket match - Londoners versus Kentish men - and also in England banknotes are now in. Only a matter of time, I suppose, in that snuff had been around since 1558, so… well, sooner or later you were going to need a banknote, weren't you? All this AND the Prussian army introduce pigtails as their standard haircut, beating the corporate Britain of the 1980s by some 270 years.

Now, I want to introduce you to Antonio Vivaldi, the man who wrote 400 concertos. Or, as Stravinsky said, wrote one then copied it out a further 399 times. (Saucer of milk for the Russian - he was expressing the not uncommon view, it has to be said, that many of Vivaldi's concertos can sound a little… well, samey. At least after the first 200.)

Vivaldi was born in Venice just three years after? amp; H and was lucky enough to have a rather musical dad - a fiddler at St Mark's. At the age of fifteen he entered the priesthood, and was ordained fully some ten years later. The combination of his holy orders and his mop of Chris Evans ginger hair led to him being nicknamed Hlprete rosso\ the red priest, although having a special dispensation that allowed him not to say Mass, I'm not sure quite how much of a priest he could have been. It's a bit like being a rugby player, but not actually playing any matches. (So, Jonny Wilkinson at the moment, then.) Vivaldi spent most of his professional life as music director of a girls' fi amp;OK, that's not what a piano duel is at all, I know. But it does sound more fun. The real duel saw Handel playing organ and Scarlatti playing keyboard, and each was adjudged to be the best on their respective instruments. «»rphanage in Venice, the Conservatorio dell'Ospedale della Pieta -or, often, the Pieta, for short.

His priesthood was called into question, again, when he was rumoured to be more than just good friends with not just one soprano but two: sisters, Anna and Paolina. Eventually he, too, like Handel, I ravelled all over Europe, but precious little is known about what he got up to. He spent the last couple of years of his life in Vienna, where, sadly, he pulled off the Composer's End No 207 - the so-called 'Death in Poverty' position - perfectly. He was sixty-three. Thankfully, he left behind him some fifty operas and 400 or so concertos (or just one if you agree with Stravinsky), the most well known, now - almost to the point of distraction - being part of Tl cimento dell'Armonia e dell'in-ventione' Opus 8. That is, The Tour Seasons: not just a beautiful series of concertos, but also not a bad hotel and a fine pizza.