STEPHEN FRY - OF CLASSICAL MUSIC

Imperialism, colonialism - call it what you will - was a bit of a buzz word. In some ways, it put romanticism in the shade - it played bigger venues, sold more records, everything! Colonialism was HUGE - it was the 'ism' for the 1890s. Everybody who was anybody was into colonialism. To give but one example, and, indeed, to give a feeling of everything that was wrong with it, take Heligoland. Where the Heligoland is that, you might be doubly forgiven for thinking, once for the thought, once for the bloody awful wordplay. Well, wherever it is, in 1890, Britain gave it to Germany. Simply gave it to them. In exchange for something, of course, namely Zanzibar and Pemba. I mean, imagine waking up, today, and having a leaf through the morning paper, and turning to the person at the table next to you, saying, 'I see Yorkshire beat Nottinghamshire, yesterday… oh, and we've been given to Swaziland, in a some sort of swap arrangement. Pass the toast, will you?' Staggering, isn't it? National sovereignty in 1890, then, was a pink form in a civil servant's bottom drawer, a few thousand miles away. I don't know.

Elsewherenessly, Luxembourg split from die Netherlands, both Eisenhower and de Gaulle were born, and England becomes a bit less of a 'Barnum and Bailey world' as TP Barnum's famous Circus departs town, after a tremendously long run at London's Olympia. Over in France, Alexander Gustave Eiffel's 320-metre-high tower has kept its place on the Paris skyline, despite the fact that the World Exhibition had now gone, and Oscar Wilde has published The Picture of Dorian Gray. There's also a new craze going round. It's called 'coming down with flu'. Indeed, flu is getting as big as Gilbert and Sullivan.

On a music tip - gosh, how trendy am I? - Rimsky-Korsakov has finished off yet more work by another composer, this time Borodin. R-K and fellow Russian Alexander Glazunov polished up his opera, Prince Igor, which had been left incomplete at his death three years previously. (What's wrong with a work that's Incomplete, that's what I say!) Prince Igor is a wonderfully exotic work, a great spectacle. I can't help thinking, perhaps unfairly, that the blend of Borodin's original vision plus R-K's - and Glazunov's to be fair - extra, colourful orchestration have, in the end, produced a work that is better, dare I say it, than Borodin would have produced had he completed it on his own. I once saw a performance of it, at the Royal Opera House in the late '80s (19, not 1880s) where the central bass role was taken by a man called Paata Burchuladze. I had never heard of him before the performance, and had been tipped off to expect a truly MASSIVE bass voice. All through the first scenes, I was sat there, admittedly enjoying the music, but, equally, thinking, 'Well, I haven't heard any particularly massive bass voice yet. Maybe they were exaggerating?' when suddenly this short, round man entered, stage left, sweeping on as if secretly propeUed, like The Penguin in the Blues Brothers. He got to centre stage, stopped, and, suddenly, out came this STONKING bass voice. The biggest, richest, most sonorous I think I have ever heard. Stunning. It felt like a tube train was passing under the theatre every time he sang a note. I'll never forget it. If you see the name on a Royal Opera House poster any time, then seriously consider remortgaging to afford the entrance fee.

Also, within Prince Igor are the beautiful and striking 'Polovtsian Dances', which come complete with dancing girls and act as a sort of Surprise Symphony chord for the people in the corporate boxes, who only turned up because someone in the office had tickets. Gravadlax has, on occasion, been known to fly off the ledges, like a fishy projectile vomit. In la belle France, they have le beau Debussy.

Follow the Seine west out of Paris and you will come to St Germain-en-Laye. Most tourists who venture there now are either going for the two fantastic chateaux, which afford gorgeous views across Paris, or they're heading for 33, Rue au Pain, the Museum of Claude Debussy. Back in 1862, though, the museum was a lowly shop, Debussy's dad's shop, to be precise, above which the composer was born on the 22nd of August. After a classic 'prodigy/conservatoire/composition lessons' upbringing, he became a sort of live-in musician for the wealthy Nadezhda von Meek (see Tchaikovsky), before winning the Prix de Rome like many before him, and hot-footing it to Rome, as part of his prize. When he returned he was no longer in the service of Tchaikovsky's patron. Probably a good thing -all that skulking around in wardrobes for fear of being found out was not doing his chords any good. Now twenty-eight, he's also shaken off a temporary fascination with the late Wagner and is trying his hand at a sort of early neo-classicism. He's just finished the Suite Berjjamasque for piano, complete with 'Prelude', 'Menuet', 'Passepied' and the simply heartbreaking 'Clair de Lune'. He was attempting to emulate the stylish reserve of the clavecin (old-style French harpsichord) players from the seventeenth century, and probably found the suite's name in Paul Verlaine's poem, 'Clair de Lune, ''…masques et bergamasques'. If you've never stepped beyond the threshold of 'Clair de Lune', then you still have a treat owing to you.

Finally, in Italy, there's Pietro Mascagni. Before we look at him properly, can I just say that the one fact I can't get out of my mind is that Mascagni was born in Leghorn. I think I read that somewhere when I was about fourteen, and it's stayed with me ever since. I imagine the minute I found out, no doubt in a school music lesson, I probably broke into a bad Foghorn Leghorn impression, 'Boy, ah say BOY…' etc, and, like most things that make me laugh, it has stuck. Anyway, just wanted to get it off my chest. Mascagni was a year younger than Debussy and, for him, 1890 would prove a bittersweet year. Having discarded the 'over-academic' teaching at the Milan conservatory, he'd spent a fair amount of time on the road, as conductor to a travelling opera company. Having settled down and married, 1890 saw him come up with his hit opera, Cavalleria Rustica.no. - which loosely translates as 'Rustic Chivalry'. It was probably a hit for three reasons. Firstly, it's got some hit tunes embedded in a taut and concise plot. (It's short enough to be staged, almost without exception, alongside the equally well-trimmed I Pajrliacci.) Secondly, it was not another 'Wagner pastiche' from yet another Wagner disciple. But, most importantly, it was probably the first example of'realism' in opera. They called it ''verismo', and a verismo opera would probably not have wild, showpiece, coloratura arias, just for the sake of it. It would, though, have realistic, everyday storylines, or themes from real life, and would have lots more recitative - the bits where singers 'sing the plot', as it were. They're not set pieces, like arias, but, having previously been used as brief links, or introductions to great arias, they became elevated in verismo operas, so that audiences felt that they were in a slighdy less removed world than previously. I mean, to be fair, opera is still, even today, a bizarre, fake world, but post-1890 it became a little less bizarre and fake. For Mascagni, it proved to be a big hit, the only problem being that he spent the next fifty-five years trying to repeat his success, without joy. Fifty-five years trying to write the hit follow-up but never getting further than 'some esteem' or 'enthusiastically received'. How sad.

Without wishing to disseminate hearsay or gossip, I was once told that Mascagni ended his years at the end of the Second World War, in a hotel room in Rome which had been recently liberated by the Allies. Having been stripped of all his honours due to his following of Mussolini and the Fascists, he was reduced to walking from GI camp to GI camp, begging for money, desperately telling people, 'You know that great tune, that tune that everybody loves - I wrote that. Honest!' If true, the tune he was talking about was the famous Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana, which still reels in the money for tissues and triple CDs and what have you, but which left the man from Leghorn penniless. Absolutely pen- ah say, penniless."