Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

THE NAME'S WAGNER… RICHARD WAGNER!

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s one of my favourite people, Oscar Wilde, once said, T like his music better than anybody's.' Absolutely. I wholeheartedly concur. OK, if I'm to be honest and decent and true, then what he actually said, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, was, to be precise: 'I like his music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without people hearing what one says. That is a great advantage.' OK, well, yes. He was being facetious. But, regardless, Wagner really is one of my favourite geniuses. Before we refocus on him, though, what's happening with his fellow luwies, the composers of the day? Who's still around? Well, Chopin, Berlioz and Liszt are still the big noises. Mendelssohn is still alive, though, as are Verdi, Schumann, Gounod, Offenbach, Suppe… lots of them really. The Classical Music First 11 is fielding an odd, some would say illegal, 4/2/20-odd formation, and the big four, attacking up front, are Frederick, Hector, Franz and new boy Richard. Of that attacking front four, it is, to be fair, Wagner who is going to become top goalscorer, in terms of history, and eventually command the biggest following, or claim the biggest influence.

In a way, Wagner basically carried out a root and branch overhaul of music. Gone were the rules. Gone was the form book, the structure. Wagner, and indeed many of the romantics, but Wagner most of all - to be fair - said simply, 'Why should we?' and then did his own thing. As a child, he had loved Beethoven, and used to spend hours and hours copying out the scores and making arrangements of his music. He also loved the operas of Mozart - the first true German opera composer, he called him - and, if you add to this as healthy respect for the composer of the day, Meyerbeer, well, you can see how it all came about, in a sense. Throw in the fact that, as we know, he was only 5 feet 5 inches tall, and everything becomes crystal clear. The equation would read: pB x kB + 1?(?)