OF CLASSICAL MUSIC Read online

  OF CLASSICAL MUSIC

  STEPHEN FRY

  STEPHEN FRY'S

  OF CLASSICAL MUSIC

  INCOMPLETE amp; UTTER HISTORY

  Actor, director, novelist and writer, it seems there is no end to the talents of Stephen Fry. Most recendy, he has appeared in Absolute Power on Radio 4 and BBC 2, hosted the BBC 2 quiz show QI and has been enjoyed on Classic FM's The Incomplete amp; Utter History of Classical Music with Stephen Fry. His film credits include Peter's Friends, A Handful of Dust and Oscar Wilde in Wilde and his radio projects include Loose Ends, Frybeat and Saturday Night Fry. As a writer, Stephen's TV credits include Not the Nine O'Clock News, Mastermind, Saturday Night Live and A Bit of Fry and Laurie. His first novel, The Liar, was published in 1991 and was on the bestseller lists for several months, and he has since followed with more bestsellers: Paperweight, The Hippopotamus and his autobiography Moab Is My Washpot. Adding to his string-laden bow, his directorial debut, Bright Young Things, his own adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies, was released to critical acclaim in 2003. Tim Lihoreau is a music graduate from Leeds University and is creative director of Classic FM. He worked as a professional pianist before joining Jazz FM in 1991 and then Classic FM in 1993. He is the author and producer of the radio series Classic Tales and The Incomplete amp; Utter History of Classical Music with Stephen Fry, and he has won two Sony Radio Academy Gold Awards and four ntl Commercial Radio Awards for his work. He is co-author of Classic FM's Pocket Book of Classical Music axA Pocket Book of Quotes. Recendy, Tim has moved in front of die microphone as one-third of Classic FM's Mark, Tim and Annie. He lives near Cambridge with his wife and three children.

  AS TOLD TO TIM LIHOREAU

  PAN BOOKS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  FOREWORD

  I'd like to thank Classic FM's Managing Director, Roger Lewis, for the opportunity, the time and the never-ending encouragement to work on the Incomplete amp; Utter History, as well as Darren Henley for both the original idea and the generous support. Also at Classic FM, a big thank you to Kate Juxon for all her help, as well as Gues Pearman and Jo Wilson. A huge thank you to my commissioning editor, Emma Marriott, who, from day one, has given me nothing but support and encouragement on this project. I'd also like to express gratitude to the copy-editor Christine King and designers Sean Garrehy and Jonathan Baker. Finally, I'd like to give a big thanks and a sloppy wet kiss to Siobhan, Millie, Daisy and Finn, for letting me have so much time in 'the den'. Love 'n' thanks.

  ] vcryday and sublime. That's what it is. yjohann Sebastian Bach is quoted as once saying, 'It's easy to play.? iv musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the i if.lii time and the instrument will play itself.' To some extent, I agree with him. I'm pretty sure I could master the techniques necessary to be lord over, say, a recorder or a mouth organ. I could press the right buttons, probably, and who knows, maybe even manage 'Frere Jacques' before long. The part over which I almost certainly hold no dominion, though, is the part that happens both before and after you've touched the piano key or covered the recorder hole. The bit that says, 'Play this not only now, but like this.' Then says, 'And phrase it like this.' Even, 'and draw this out of the note to make people subconciously think back to that part of the tune three bars kick.' That's the bit that reminds me that, yes, Bach did have his flutter tongue firmly in his cheek.

  The Greeks knew this. They had their nine Muses, each shedding a light on one particular area of 'mousike' - that is the art of the Muse, eovering not just music and dance but all areas of arts, science and, generally, learning. Hence, words like music and museum (even mystery) have an original connection to the works of the Muses. I sometimes wonder if it's a knowledge of this that intimidates me so much in the area of music. At school, one of my greatest regrets was my inability to produce

  any two notes, in order, which could be said to resemble a tune. One note? Fine, I could produce one note with the best of them, possibly not a very nice note, admittedly, and occasionally attractive to passing wildlife, but nevertheless, a note all the same. It was only when I had to produce two or more notes, in succession, in tune, that I had any problems. Serious problems, actually, hence I tended to shut up, to not join in, to mime even. My music had charms to 'seethe' the savage breast, if you like.

  So, at an early age, it was decided to leave it to the experts, let them get on with it. They seemed to be doing a good job. And besides, there was one branch of music at which I excelled. I think I'm not being unduly immodest if I were to say many thought I showed early promise in this area. Indeed, sometimes, so accomplished did I become in this particular musical discipline that I more than momentarily considered taking it up professionally. The area I'm talking about, of course, at which I consider myself of Olympic standard, no less, is… listening.

  Listening to classical music. I could do it, in the words of Voltaire, 'jusqu'a ce que les vaches viennent a la maisorC. And how right he was. My favourite composers to listen to are Mozart and Wagner, but I have a quite extensive listening repertoire beyond them. Don Giovanni, though, is a work that I can come back to again and again and, like a favourite journey at the end of which you arrive somewhere special, I discover new things every time. Always finding something new. Similarly with Wagner. I have long since managed to separate the rather grisly man and his music. Richard Wagner was far from pleasant and his racial and political views, unpleasant to begin with, have been coloured by the cordial relations his descendants had with Hitler. But by their fruits shall ye know them, the works of Wagner are as antifascist as could be, espousing as they do, love over power.

  This book is aimed at those who love listening to great classical music. It is, as I will remind you at various stages along the way, an incomplete book. It does not cover many of the things that it should do in order to merit the title Stephen Fry's Complete amp; Utter History of Classical Music. Hence, we decided against that moniker, ingeniously arriving at one that both suggests and hints at it, while at the same time completely bloody contradicting it. Brilliant. A stoke of genius I'm sure you'll agree. It is also full of opinions, some of them mine,?..»mc of them not. It is full of suppositions, of flights of fancy, of musi-i.il mind trips and, indeed, of complete Tosh. In fact where I do shamelessly resort to making it up, I've taken the liberty of inserting the symbol © for Tosh, just so as not to confuse too much. Also, in?»u In not to put you off too much, I have put some of the ephemera explanations, asides, what have you - into footnotes, so that a reader in.1 hurry might be able to skip on. As a result, it is a very personal book, which, if it does nothing else at all, will convey some of the personal enthusiasm the author holds for his subject. Also, from time to time, I'll take a peek into the current affairs of the age, to see just what was going on when the great composers were, well, composing. While music is, in essence, abstract and needs no knowledge brought to it, either of music or of history, it is fascinating to see what events wore shaping the world while the composers lived. Developments in history, art, philosophy and science profoundly affected composers, so iluring the course of this book contemporary moments, some trivial, some seismic, are mentioned.

  It's not just Mozart and Wagner that rustle my bustle, though, I hasten to add. In fact, I have often stopped and wondered, while we were listening to the seemingly endless hours of live concerts and CD recordings of the works of the Great Composers in order to make this book, just exactly which one I would have liked to have been.

  Beethoven is the most obvious choice after my top two. He may not have been able to hear at all, towards the end, but his capacity to feel was second to none. What attracts me about Beethoven is that idea of'everyday sublime' again. Picture Beethoven, if you will for a moment, in his room in the
Schwarzspanierhaus. His run-down old Graf piano is behind him, totally… well, knackered, from his attempts to beat it so hard and be able to hear it. On the shambles of a desk in front of him, next to his ear trumpet, are numerous books written and over-written with stilted notes, in which his guests had had to write their conversations. There are also sad leftovers of food, broken coffee cups, spilt candle wax - in fact it looks more like a student's bedroom than that of a man whose name would live for years through the genius of his music. Everyday, squalid even. Yet sublime.

  The Brit in me can half see himself as Elgar, too, on occasion. Now that must have been a whole different ball boy. Er, I mean game -sorry, slip of the tongue. I remember seeing a picture of Elgar and his wife, Alice, standing outside their summer home, Birchwood Lodge, near Malvern. Elgar is to the right of the front door, his arms folded in a sort of 'impatient dad' manner, a flat cap on his head. Alice appears to be dawdling, head slightly cocked, at the gatepost. There's something about the photo that makes me think I would have liked the life. The idea of my father owning the local music shop appeals too. Ever since Mork and Mindy, the music shop had replaced the sweet shop for me as the number one in the list of Top Ten Mythically Fantastic Places to Work when I grew up. And the way he wrote the Enigma Variations very much appeals to my ludic tendencies - concealing not just his friends in the movements, but concealing the origin of the tune, too. Yes, Elgar. I could be him.

  Tchaikovsky. How I'd love to have lived through what he lived through. The picture I try to imagine of Tchaikovsky is when he was given his honorary degree from Cambridge University in 1893. As it's a place I know well from my own student days, it's odd enough just to think of him strolling the streets, or going back to his temporary digs at West Lodge, Downing College. The man who had written the piano concerto in? Flat, the violin concerto, Swan Lake, the Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty might easily have nipped off up Regent Street and watched the punts go by, humming the latest ideas he had in his head for the: Pathetique Symphony. But there are a couple of other points that grab me about his visit. First, he wasn't the only composer being honoured at that June ceremony - he was in good company. Saint-Saens and Bruch were also getting degrees, and the three of them got together to give a small concert the night before. Just imagine that. Also, this was the June of 1893. Within a few months of leaving Cambridge, Tchaikovsky had drunk a glass of tap water, contaminated with cholera, and he was dead.

  Brahms - now there's a chap I can appreciate. Started every day at 5 a.m., in his rented lodgings, with a strong, freshly brewed coffee. In fact, he wouldn't let anyone else prepare his coffee precisely because they wouldn't make it strong enough. He would then retire to his chair where he would smoke a good cigar - at 5 a.m. - all the while sipping 01) his strong, dark coffee. This was his ritual of choice, every morning. I,ater in life, when he had been made very wealthy through his music, lie still remained in his rented lodgings and he still enjoyed his 5 a.m. coffee and cigar. The everyday, you see, yielding up the sublime.

  Finally, there's Handel, a fellow ardent pipesmoker (of course, his was a white, long-stemmed rune pipe whereas I personally favour a more traditional round-bowled calabash). What excites me about Handel is not his genius, or his ability to move you with some of his music - something I can find rare in a baroque composer - it's his appetite. As a man of dual nationality, it seems Handel could eat for both England and Germany at the same time. There is one famous story of him going into an English tavern and asking for a table for four. When the waiter came he ordered four hefty meals, which duly arrived. 'When will your guests be arriving?' asked the serving maid. 'What guests?' chuntered Handel. 'Now just put the food down and leave me be,' at which point he set about devouring all four meals. That's the sort of composer I want to listen to - a real one, an everyday one, and yet one capable of producing some of the most sublime music. Rossini (so popular it's easy to overlook how good he was) liked his food too. So much so that he retired from composing and devoted himself to gourmandizing. We owe the Tournedos Rossini recipe to him. tephen Fry's Incomplete amp; Utter History of Classical Music, the book, came from a project I undertook with Tim Lihoreau, Creative Director of the popular radio station, Classic FM. Long after the radio programme was a pleasantly fading memory, I was approached and asked would I like to be involved in a book based on the same project? Of course, I immediately declined, saying I had no desire whatsoever to rekindle this relationship and, furthermore, could you remind Mr Lihoreau that he still had Ј150 and a Rolf Harris LP of mine? The offer was, however, repeated. I turned it down again. Of course, when I had declined the offer a third time, it was pointed out that, well, they owned some photographs… and that if I didn't want them to get out, I had better agree to the book. OK, x

  I said, so long as I don't have to cancel any work to do it. (Well, I had Bright Young Things - The Ptmto for Tasmania to work on and three jam commercials to voice. I didn't want to lose out.)

  So, the ghasriy chap followed me around with his tape recorder virtually everywhere I went. The Tasmanian premiere, he was there. Recording QI, he was there. In fact, if you watch a rerun of last year's BAFTAs, you can just see him peeping out from below the lectern. Nightmare, it was. But still. It's finished now.

  To sign off, before we start, let me go back to my favourite, Mozart. There are many things about him that are everyday and ordinary The film wasn't too inaccurate - yes, he liked to play billiards, and often composed while he played. Yes, he had a bit of a bottom fixation, which came through in his letters. But the thing that always gets me about Mozart may or may not be true. I read it a few years ago, in a music magazine. New research, it said, might shed new light on how he died. It was not, it said, poison from Salieri. It was not a fatal overdose of mercury, the fashionable cure for syphilis. It was, a new report suggested, down to the fact that some forty-four days before he died, he had enjoyed a meal of pork cutlets, and this might have been his undoing. They were, it said, possibly infected with trichinosis - little parasitic worms that live in badly stored meat, and fitted perfectly Mozart's final symptoms. So. The composer of the sublime Clarinet Concerto, of the sublime Don Giovanni, of the sublime 29th Symphony, was eventually knobbled by a dodgy, everyday chop. Incredible. As Tom Lehrer once said, 'It's a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had already been dead for two years.' Quite, Tom, quite. Stephen Try July 2004

  INTRODUCTION

  I

  t's both a blessing and a curse not being able to sing a note of music. A note in tune, at least. In many ways, I feel almost Palaeolithic in my inability to have my larynx form anything bearing so much as a vague resemblance to something pleasant. It saddens me. On a particularly bad day, I can barely drag my knuckles out of bed and across the floor for thinking about the similarity between my vocal talents and that of a digestive biscuit. But, on the other hand, as someone who is constantly being accused of behaving like a man from an earlier time, it does mean that I feel I have more than a smidgeon of empathy with whoever it was who first managed to utter, incomplete or not, the very first musical note. Admittedly, no one really knows who it was, his good work lost to an age where the chances of keeping hold of an original document were less than they were during Watergate. Besides, as you can imagine, it wasn't really one person, it was an entire bunch of people, working separately, working together, working for kings and queens, for pharaohs and emperors, even entire kingdoms and dynasties.

  So it's almost certain that any clever chap (and, sadly, almost certainly it was a chap) who got us from grunt to note - from savage breast to soothing rest - is never going to show up in the history books. T thought up plainchant for Pope Gregory, you know,' might make a good story down the pub, but it's not going to get you a place in Euterpe's^1 Hall of Fame. And don't for one minute think that this book is going to shed any light on them. It's not. It isn't called the 'incomplete' and utter history for nothing, you know.

  What I will do, however - and don't say I don't g
ive you anything. - is take a look back at which sets of people got the whole music business moving. And to find that out, you have to go way back. And I mean way back. And it's not to ancient Egypt, it's not to Shang Dynasty China, it's not even to the Sumerians or Greeks. You may not believe this, but it's only France, isn't it!

  FRENCH WITHOUT EARS

  T

  ypical. Not only do they make great food, great wine and great lovers, but some people also believe they got the whole music thing first, too. How best to explain this? Well, maybe you could just go with me for a minute, and imagine you are in a cave. You are not far away from Perigeaux some 30 kilometres north of the Dordogne river, once it has parted company with Bergerac. Gorgeous part of France, so possibly take in a spot of wine-tasting when we've done. It's here, in a little place called Ariege, in the Magdalanian cave of Les Trois Freres, that you come across a groovy little wall painting of a character who appears to be half-man, half-bison. (Now there's a phrase I haven't heard since my coming-out party.) In his hand is clearly some sort of bow, and many scholars who can claim to be far cleverer than me have stuck their academic necks out and said: it's almost certainly a musical bow, possibly even a dual-purpose bow -one that doubled up as half instrument, half lethal hunting weapon. I can think of any number of orchestral musicians who would relish a chance to pull one of those from their case.

  If it is indeed a musical bow that the half-man half-bison is carrying, then he probably fixed it to his hunting mask - lining it up with his nose - and struck it with his hands. A not dissimilar practice goes on in many a city traders' toilet today, albeit of far less interest to fl Euterpe, incidentally, was one of the Nine Muses, her particular area being music. musicologists. If you take all this as even, fairly believable, then you do realize that we're talking at least eight and a half thousand years before I lie first Egyptian cat looked up from his food, cocked an eye at his master and thought, 'Something in my gut tells me that bloke's up to something'?