STEPHEN FRY - OF CLASSICAL MUSIC

Y

ou see, I've got a friend who has got themselves into a spot of bother. Yes. I know. But, you see… this friend is called… music. Mm. I know, I know… no, I know it's not the first time, but… look, just hear me out, will you?

Thank you. You see, the way I see it, it's something like this. You remember when I expressed my feelings about Mozart and, well, I said that dog years are ment to be like human years, only times seven. Something like that. So, you give a small child a puppy, and what happens? Of course, in seven years' time the small child has progressed by, yes, well done, seven years, but the dog? Well, officially, the dog is now about fifty. And, well, a fifty-year-old and a seven-year-old sometimes don't have a lot in common, do they?

Yes, yes, I'm coming to the point, right now. My point is… my point is… well, forget Mozart, now. I think MODERN MUSIC is the puppy. The small child? Well, the small child is the AUDIENCE. The two don't proceed at the same pace. Not at all. That's why, in 1925, composers like Alban Berg (a follower of S g) can put out pieces like Wozzeck - don't know if you've ever heard it? It's a tough if hugely rewarding piece - when probably what the mass audience could take was no more than, say, Lehar's operetta Paganini or at best, maybe, the more verdant shifting sounds of something from the sixty-year-old Great Dane, Carl Nielsen - maybe a symphony, like the Sinfonia Semplice, from the same year, 1925. But, that's the problem, really. Music was never going to go backwards. Not since S g left the transfigured night behind and found the moonlight. The moonlight from the puppet, I mean. By golly, that sounds clever, doesn't it? All I'm saying - in this poncy, roundabout way - is that when S g ditched any attempt at hummability, which he still had in buckets in his piece for string orchestra, Transfigured Night (1899), in favour of the 'It's music, Jim, but not as we know it' atonality of his song cycle, Pierrot Lunaire ('the moonlight from the puppet') - in which he tipped over the edge, musically, into what to a layman would seem like total cacophony - then, well, music was never going to be the same again.

Composers had, since the death of Wagner, been looking for the next place to go, the next not so much 'style' of music, but 'music' itself. They'd been looking for the next 'music', the new music that would be the next homeland, the next '-ism' if you like, that would come after Classicism and Romanticism. But, well, it never came. Not as far as the audience was concerned, at any rate. And this is the child and the puppy, back again, growing at different rates. The composers were becoming more and more intellectually stimulated by new methods - new methods that sounded, to the untrained audience's ear, like… well, like they were wrong. Music that wasn't right. I mean, when Berg's opera Wozzeck was premiered, it was greeted with utter disbelief by the German critics. As the Deutsche Zeitung put it:

See? They don't like it up 'em, Mr Mainwaring. And they would go on not liking it up 'em for quite some time, in fact. Even now, although Wozzeck gets a public airing quite a lot - for modern music, at least - it is still an no-go area for a huge majority of people calling themselves music fans. Personally, I can only recommend, till I'm blue in the face, that you go to see a great production of it - it really can leave you breathless, just so long as it's done right. Give it a try. As Mrs Doyle would say: 'Go en, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on, go on…' 'Ah, you Will, you Will, you Will, you Will, you Will, you Will…' Oh, look - I'm blue in the face.

While I recover, let me break this to you gently. I'm skipping on a year. Sorry. Maybe if I point to something behind you and shout, 'Ooh, look at that!' youwon't notice. 'Oooh, look at that!'

T

he sun has risen on a slightly damp, overcast morning in 1926. The last four years? Forget them. They were just a dream and they're gone. It is 1926 and let me take a quick cross-section of the musical year. Three pieces from the twelve-month period that brought us Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Fritz Lang's Metropolis and, of course, not forgetting the ever popular hit song, 'I found a millionaire baby in the 5 and 10 cent store.' (Ahhh, they're playing our somewhat unmemorable song again.) From the new Hungary came the forty-four-year-old Zoltan 'Best first name in all music' Kodaly and his Hdryjdnos Suite -1 wouldn't like to tell you what we used to call it at school. I have a certain soft spot for this piece, it being all about one of the biggest liars on the earth, and me having written a book called The Liar. The suite that was formed from Kodaly's opera is a real corker, packed with great tunes as well as some beautiful soundworlds - the sound of the cembalo and the musical portrayal of a ginormous sneeze. In England, the twenty-three- year-old William Walton is premiering his suite, Fa fade, complete with the grand and slightly intimidating Edith Sitwell projecting her poems from behind a curtain. The score comes complete with musical quotes from some diverse sources - there's a bit of Rossini's William Tell in there, and even a bit of'Oh I Do Like To Be Beside the Seaside!'-13 Finally, from Poland, 1926 gives birth to the often neglected, yet often staggeringly beautiful, music of Szymanowski, and his setting of the Stabat Mater. Szymanowski came from the disappearing background of Poland's landed gentry, although, when his family estate was ransacked in 1917, he devoted himself to finding the voice of contemporary Polish music. Take a listen to his Stabat Mater, one day, because he succeeded. Three cheers for twentieth-century music. 'Hip hip'… I said'Hip hip'…? Grumpy sods. same stunning piece of music. So! Get real. It's allowed. You CAN think of Torvill and Dean when you hear it, this is a musical snob-free zone, here. Don't you worry. You can even think of lovely Dudley and his rather tall, blonde leading lady, with the… beads. Makes no difference. The music still sounds the same. And again, yes, it is one of those pieces that is played a heck of a lot, these days, now that it has become so popular. But, well, you can't ruin it. It's the sign of a great piece, maybe. Can't sit here hypothesizing, though. Got to get on. Got nearly forty years to cover in the next few paragraphs. Good job I brought a packed lunch.

Tt's 1928 - look, it's my book, if I say it's 1928, it's 1928 - other-JLwise I'm taking my ball back - and Ravel is puzzling over a piece of music. He's just received a commission from a dancer for a piece of orchestral music, and it has made him reach for the scraps of manuscript he started some time back. They were all about one simple short tune, repeated over and over again. In the same key. He got them out and looked over them again. Could you really sustain an entire fifteen -minute-long piece with absolutely no 'development' of the tune, and staying in just one key? The answer? No, 'course you couldn't - OR THEN AGAIN, COULD YOU?

It would be the supreme test of a supreme orchestrator, because, to be fair, few other composers knew what sounds an orchestra could and couldn't make the way Ravel did. And furthermore, he proved it in 1928, with his Bolero.

OK, so it does go into another key, just a little way from the end, but to brilliant effect, it's got to be said. Nowadays, of course, some say it is tarnished, somehow, by associations with Torvill and Dean. Well, to that 'some', I say 'TOSH and POPPYCOCK!' It's still the