Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

NEBUCHADNEZZAR OPUS

1842, then. Who's up, who's down, who's flying around, and who are those magnificent men in their flying machines? Well, I'll answer a full 50 per cent of those questions right now.

Chopin's still around, for one. Tragically, despite being only thirty-two, he's got just another seven years left to live. But 1842 finds him in Paris, probably at his creative peak. Even though he really didn't have the ideal constitution for it and was in somewhat dubious health - in fact, in the flighty world of the ultra-romantic Pole, someone had once remarked that the 'only constant thing about him is his cough'. Just last year, 1841, despite all his debilitating nerves and personal turmoil, he'd gone down a storm in Paris, and a follow-up concert in February 1842 was just as good. When I say 'personal turmoil', I mean chiefly the fact that this was the time Chopin was at the height of his affair with the novelist Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin, Baronne Dedevant, better known as George Sand. At first, he'd resisted her charms - indeed, he'd not immediately recognized any charms at all. T did not like her face,' he said. 'There is something off-putting about her.' Maybe it was the fact that she smoked and wore men's clothes in public. Maybe it was her well-known coterie of lovers. Whatever the initial setback, they were now lovers, living separately in Paris but summering together in Nohant, some 300 kilometres south of Paris, in the heart of Indre et Loire.

Although the concert of 1842 was to produce some of Chopin's best ever reviews - 'sheer poetry superbly translated into sound' - it proved to be the penultimate public concert of his life, the last being at the Guildhall in London, just a month before he died. In fact, from here on in for Chopin, the going appears to be pretty much downhill. A split with Dedevant Sand, failing health and somewhat convenient if soulless marriage. But let's look on the bright side, eh?

Actually, what is the bright side? Is there one? Of course there is, but, as so often with composers, it comes in the form of the 'pay now, receive later' standard artist format. In 1842, he was the undisputed bantamweight champion of the romantic piano. Everything's black and white to him, he's the sort of nineteenth-century 'Fat Reg from Pinner' - and, let's face it, he's still writing virtually nothing that doesn't have a piano in it. More 'bright side' comes if you look at the facts, too, because, in a career of only thirty years or so, he utterly transforms what the piano can and can't do, both on a technical level - sometimes - and on an emotional one. Add to this the fact that his influence would be felt for at least a good fifty years after he died, and you're talking a premier league player, here.

Berlioz, of course, is still around, big-time. The man who put the mad into 'madrigal' is still very much a contender in Morecambe's Mr Romantic 1842 competition, I think it's fair to say. And if Chopin is the bantamweight of the early romantic movement, then Louis- Hector is certainly one of the heavyweights, pushing orchestral rules to their limits, refusing to be fenced in by old forms and - and this is quite a key thing for Berlioz - managing to get his imagination into his music. In fact, I need to stop here and go into how important this is.????)

Good. Now how can I say this better because, throughout history, this becomes more and important. What I mean is, of all the early romantics, Berlioz was one of the best at being able to say, 'Right. I'm imagining a… pair of lovers,' and VOOM! there they are, quite literally AUDIBLE in the music. There's a particular bit from the 'March to the Scaffold' from the Symphonic Fantastique, in which he's writing music that depicts a guillotining taking place, and so acute is his symbolic orchestration that you actually hear the decapitated head bobbling into the basket. Gruesomely macabre and very Berlioz, but yet SUPERB romantic craftsmanship. As music progresses through the periods, composers had sought more or less - usually more - realism in their music. Remember Gluck putting thunder into his opera on page 83? Well, it's just a very sophisticated form of that. As time passes, the deepening levels of this musical picture-painting will rock to and fro.

It's a similar concept to when artists paint pictures; if you put it at its crudest, they can either paint EXACTLY what they see, or they can paint something totally abstract. You have a set like the Impressionist painting a sort of half-way house, and then lots of points on the curve, too: Seurat, with his pointillist version, Braque with his cubist outlook - all manner of different takes on 'painting what it is I see'. And so it would be with composers. Some would want you to be brought face to face with an event in their heads, others would want to give you merely a general impression of what it was like and indeed some would just continue to want you to hear simply the music that was in their heads. And it will hopefully always be like this.