Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

VIRTUOSO REALITY

n fact all this talk of virtuosi brings me round to a new theme -virtuosi. Mm, maybe I could have rephrased that. They haven't really been around much until now, to be fair, or at least not in the same way. True, there'd been concertos for ages now, but never with this big emphasis on pushing the performance to the limit, this desire to show 'anything you can do'. And why? Well, mainly because they just couldn't have done it before. I mean, look at Sony Playstation 2 compared with… say, Asteroids. Or Pacman. P Which are basically mis without the buttons on the top - if you wanted to change the note you were playing, you had to do it with your lips.

What do you mean 'What's that got to do with it?' It's got everything to do with it. Technology was moving on, and making lots more things possible. Things that composers would never have tried before were soon going to become the norm. And with this new breed of 'virtuoso' instruments came… well, a new breed of virtuoso players. Remember, we ARE still in the classical period but only just - we're dangling by a semi-quaver. In fact, to be fair, the first of these new virtuoso players was already here, and, boy, was he about to make himself known.

1798: the year of Wordsworth and Coleridge; the year the French stormed Rome and declared the 'Roman Republic'; the year that Britain had to declare a new 10 per cent income tax to pay for war; the year that Casanova died, aged seventy-three and nine inches.

1798: the year a sixty-seven-year-old Haydn set to work on another of his 'Indian summer' pieces, The Creation. 1798: the eleventh birthday of a virtuoso, Nicolo Paganini.

Paganini had been taught mandolin and violin by his father and, at the age of eleven, he was ready to make his first public appearance. His finest hour, though, is yet to come, so for now, let me show you this ad I discovered while leafing through the files in the Bruce Forsyth Library of Classical Music in Vienna: ??? you tired of the oldvtaysQ ofired of the same old s^mpfionics^ The same old sad little solos and polite little 'prestos'? You are? Well, why not become an EARLY ROMANTIC! For just Ј39.99, plus 10 florins penny postage and packing, you TOO can be both EARLY and ROMANTIC. Membership of the EARLY ROMANTICS entitles you to write three hugely indulgent virtuoso concertos a year, be grumpy in public, bad with money, as well as the right to wear your hair in a ridiculous quiff, possibly above some broken round spectacles. And remember, if you're not satisfied with being an EARLY ROMANTIC, you… can't have your money back, but you can tear all your music up and throw a luwie fit… Remember, all music subject to status. Early Romantic!? niifuliilnil tiy i… Irani. Hubato, Libretto and Staccato. Lovely, isn't it? It's one of the very earliest adverts for the Early Romantics, part of a collection of parchment ads on loan to the Forsyth after having originally been found stuffed behind the sofa in the dean's office at the University of Bonn.

It's 1800. The year generally thought to have been the start of the Early Romantic period, despite the fact that the classical period is generally reckoned to have gone on to 1820. Well, old dog… new tricks and all that. You see, romantic music… it's just a label, that's all. Some people wrote music that sounded distincdy classical, while some people wrote music that sounded pretty much romantic - and both in the same year.

There was one person who sort of straddled the two periods, though. He wrote in the dying days of the classical and more or less singlehandedly kick-started the romantic. This had happened before -CPE Bach was the end of the baroque and start of the classical. But while CPE is now no more than 'musicologically significant' - that's muso speak for 'pants', by the way - the man who was both the end of the classical and the foundation stone of the romantics would end up being a bit more of a household name. And that's because his 'household name', as it were, was… Beethoven. Well, thank goodness. He's here at last.

1800: the year of Beethoven's first symphony. Napoleon is now First Consul, Italy is conquered and the age of Beethoven has arrived. His very first attempt at the symphony came at the age of thirty. By composers' standards, that's a heck of a long time to wait - Mozart released his when he was only eight, remember. In fact, Mozart only had another five years left in him when he was thirty. Beethoven was an altogether different animal, though - you can say that again - but then he would be. He's being born into a very different world. Alessandro Volta has just, more or less, made the first battery, out of zinc and copper plates. The Royal College of Surgeons has been founded - and you know what that means? Not only is the world getting so much more scientific, but also, well… the golf courses are now going to be full every afternoon.

Enough of this. I'm just 'logging in' with Beethoven for now. We'll be back to check on him soon. For now it's time to check on the comeback kid, the man who wrote more symphonies than, well, than he needed to really - the one and only, you thought he was dead, Franz Josef 'Don't Call Me Boring' Haydn.

Haydn has been coming to the end of his time as Kapellmeister at Esterhazy. Just a couple of years ago, he'd knocked off the Austrian National Anthem for the Emperor's birthday. He'd called it 'Gott erhalt Franz den Kaiser'. Of course, it took on a slightly different tone when its words were later changed to 'Deutschland, Deutschland, tiber alles'. Haydn was fully expected to retire. He wasn't particularly well, and, at nearly seventy, was thought by many to have probably produced his best work, by now.

Haydn, on the other hand, was having none of it. Just as the sun was setting on the Esterhazy dream, our Franz came up with one of his most youthful-sounding works, which would go on to become one of his most popular choral pieces, The Seasons. A year later, he would retire, on full pension, revered as one of the grand masters of classical music.