Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

GOING DUTCH, MAN!

? if rell, in the music department, our hero, Wilhelm Richard VV Wagner, to give him his full name, is now thirty, as I mentioned. By the time they were thirty, most composers had done lots of their best stuff. In fact, if you take a goodly percentage of them, they'd more or less done it all. I mean, Mozart hadn't long left to live in which to do much more work, anyway, and a large number had already popped their clogs.

Wagner, of course, was Mr Exception that proves the rule. Mr Perverse, if you like. A late developer, as it were - you know the sort, who get that first, whisper-thin, slightly pathetic moustache just before they leave school. Well, I think that's Wagner. True, he'd produced some things by now - operas such as Die Hochzeit, Die Feen and the aforementioned Das Liebesverbot, but, well. Just reread that sentence again. Better still, let me help. Here: True, he'd produced some things by now - operas such as Die Hochzeit, Die Feen and the aforementioned DPLS Liebesverbot, but, well. Exactly. Ever heard of any of them: Hochzeit, Feen and Liebesverbot'? Unless they made up the midfield for Borussia Monchengladbach in the '70s, then I imagine the answer is probably no. Which tells you a lot about what calibre of work he'd produced up till now. To be fair, he has yet to realize his potential. But, equally, to be fair, not everyone around him is agreed that he even has potential. After all, he'd been expelled from Leipzig's Thomasschule, and then spent most of the short time before he left university - early, I might add -gambling, drinking and womanising. (What you might call, these days, a model student, but, in those days, a disgrace.) Also, his formal musical training amounted to no more than six months with the Cantor at Leipzig Cathedral. When he finally got a job, the one at the Magdeburg Opera House, when he was twenty-two, his first ever production - his own opera, of course - had succeeded in bankrupting the place, and he'd been forced to flee the town, along with his wife Minna, and head for Riga, in what was then Russian Poland. So, a genius-in-waiting or an unpleasant megalomaniac with 'small-man' syndrome? (He was only 5 foot 5 inches, by the way.) Well, as the Geordie voice on Channel 4 might say, 'You decide!' Whatever the case, one thing was for certain. All of a sudden, quicker than you could say T love me, who do you love?', Wagner's luck was about to change.

His new opera, Rienzi, was staged in Dresden, and it was a huge success. Messrs Hochzeit, Feen and Liebesverbot were well and truly last year's men. Rienzi was a hit and, as they say in Internet world, a hit is a hit is a hit. Interestingly enough, the music of Rienzi is still very much early Wagner, even at thirty. It's not his mature style, and you might even say it was pretty much in the style of the current vogue composer, Meyerbeer. Of course, if you did say that, it might be best to say it out of earshot of Tricky Dicky. As far as he's concerned, he's got a hit on his hands and it's all his own work - what I did in the summer holidays by W.? Wagner, aged thirty and three-quarters.

So, when Wagner was asked to follow it up, rather than come up with more of the same, he decided that it was time to unleash something completely different on the unsuspecting Dresdonians. After all, they'd loved Rienzi, they would love his next one. All he had to do was to get down on paper the amazing sound-world that was in his head, and - VOOM - he'd have another hit on his hands. He cast his mind back, just a few years, to 1839, when he'd had that particularly unpleasant, and rather gut-wrenching, sea voyage. Er, to Paris. Three times, his ship had almost gone to the bottom of the ocean in much the same way as the contents of his stomach. The other abiding memory of the trip, though, was a tale he had heard, the story of the wandering Jew of the ocean, who had boasted that he could sail round the Cape of Good Hope in all conditions, and had been sentenced to sail the seas for all eternity. Bit harsh, if you ask me, but still. The conditions of his sentence allowed for him to put into port just once every seven years - presumably to stock up on sickbags - and his plight would be over only if he could find a love that would be true to him till death. What a totally ridiculous story, thought Wagner, and therefore absolutely perfect for an opera. Before long, he had the libretto written. Oddly enough, he offered it to the Paris Opera, hoping for a commission to finish it off, music and all. Instead, they gave him 500 francs for the story, and bade him good day. In his financial position, he wasn't going to turn it down, so he took the money and ran back to Dresden. There, he was able to use his earnings to give him time to finish the music. And he did. His brand-new opera - still a bit beholden to Meyerbeer but nevertheless with many of the remarkable soundworlds that would make his later work the stuff of legend - was complete. It was finished. It was concluded. It was… accomplished. It was…a flop. A big, flaccid, floundering flop.

It was also called The Flying Dutchman or, in his native German, Der Fliegende Hollander. And they hated it. Couldn't wait to get out of the opera house. Positively ran to hills to avoid it. Obviously, the world was not yet ready for the maturing Wagner.

To be fair to the audience - and, indeed, to all first-night audiences at major music events in history - can you imagine being in their shoes? Put yourself there. It's 1843, you're in Dresden. You've just heard Richard Wagner's first semi-mature work. Previously, the most shocking thing anyone would have ever heard up to that point was probably, what? Well, maybe the Symphonic Fantastique by Berlioz, or even Les Huguenots by Meyerbeer? And, to be fair, only a lucky few hundred have heard those, too, so far - you can't exactly download the MP3 of Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable off the Internet. So what do you do after the first night of something like Der Fliegende Hollander? What DO you DO?

You're probably speechless. I mean, who could have dreamt up such a series of sounds? Lots of it didn't quite make sense to you. And the people around you appear to be speechless, too, so it can't be just you. So what do you do? It's ended. And you're speechless. The curtain has come down. In less than a moment, it will come back up again. What DO you do? Do you stay silent? Do you dare… clap that first clap? Well, you don't really even like doing that when it's an opera you absolutely love, so you definitely won't do that. You don't know what to do. Do you? No! So?

So, you boo like crazy, more out of discomfort than anything else, and because you're pretty sure no one around you liked it either. Then you reach into your pocket for that lump of rotting artichoke that you just happened to bring for your interval snack. Ah well. Too bad, Wagner, you think as you lob. Ooh, great, got him right in the small of the back, too. Good shot. Made the bugger fall flat on his arse. Fantastic.

Still, Wagner's day will come. In fact, in about, let's see, just two pages' time, give or take a concerto. Which gives me the perfect excuse to skip a couple of years and come up in 1845. Let me fill in the news gaps.