But how did I know they'd go and invent opera long before they had proper sopranos? Amazing, really, when you think. But nevertheless, opera was here to stay, and, with opera, came egomaniac primadonnas. But, as we've said, not female ones. In fact, arguably, much worse: egomaniac primadonnas with a grudge. In fact, with a grudge and no balls. What an awful combination.
What's the most amazing thing about the revolution that was opera, though, is that, despite being the biggest thing in vocal music in years, centuries even, it, more than any other innovation, led to a dramatic improvement in another, seemingly completely different, area, namely instrumental music. Why? Well, because the accompanying orchestra in the pit was called on to play more and more dramatic music. Very often, this dramatic music would mean playing new things, new sounds which had never been tried before when instruments were simply for accompaniment. Now that ever new sounds and textures and effect were called for, composers needed ever better players who could pull off the more technically demanding music they were writing for their operas. This would eventually lead to the orchestra leaving the pit altogether, and going up on to the stage, on their own, much to the outrage of the Church.
The Church, you see, HATED instrumental music. And why? Well, because of the very fact that it was instrumental, and therefore NOT VOCAL. If there were no voices, there could be no words, and if there were no words, there could be no praising God. But, well, it's post-Reformation, now, and the Church's influence is very much on the wane. Even it could not stop something as fundamental as instrumental music from taking root. And so it would grow and grow. And we'll follow it as it does, but for now, let's to^ the court of Louis XIV.
I say, witch? Could you hold up both hands and tell me the time? What's that you say, 1656? Thank you!
Well, I've checked and the hands on my witch tell me it's 1656. Time for an update. 1656. Where are we? Well, it's thirty-six years since Miles Standish and the Pilgrim Fathers landed at New Plymouth, which is an astonishing coincidence, when you think - all that way round the globe in a souped-up junk boat and they land somewhere with almost the same name as the place they left. Also, the English Less-Than-Civil War had been and gone, and Charles I had had his headache cured in rather dramatic fashion by the men with the Beatles haircuts, Cromwell and Co.
BATON CHARGE
? ver in Paris, however, the French King is having an altogether nicer time of it. In fact, if you had dropped in any time around 1656, you might have come across a rather remarkable piece of entertainment. Remarkable not only for the fact that the reigning monarch of France is about to dress up in a golden solar costume and prance around like a wazzock, but also because, by the time he's finished, the development of the orchestra would be on a different planet. The P Did you like the way I left the verb out, there? Very post-Ref, don't you think? (lecasion was a lhtle ballet, cooked up by the King's composer in resi-ili-nce, Lully.
Jean-Baptiste Lully was an Italian working in Paris, who was born not only with a musical ear but also with dancing feet. He and the King were about to dance a duet, with Louis Quatorze dressed as the Sun - hence the tide The Sun King, which stuck. I guess as titles given to you for prancing around like an idiot go, the Sun King isn't bad. I imagine Uranus King would have been much harder to explain to the vicar.
Such a success was the ballet that Lully was promoted from a lowly 'violon' player to Director of the King's Music, eventually going on to set up a revolutionary orchestra of twenty-five violins as well as flutes, oboes, bassoons, trumpets and timpani. In fact, if you ever get the chance to listen to anything by Lully performed live, try to remember that half of the instruments you are hearing were, at that time, brand, spanking NEW. They were gadgets, gizmos, the new toys, only just developed. You see, Lully was experimenting with music and the sounds of the orchestra. More importantly, he was experimenting with the sounds of the orchestra and getting it right. He was changing the face and sound of the orchestra for good.
LULLY. FALSY SENSY SECURITY
S
adly, nowadays, not much Lully is ever really played or heard. He is, to be fair, best remembered these days for the manner of his end which, despite being well chronicled, deserves to be recounted. It's said he was in the middle of a performance of his?? Deum, a piece which, irony of ironies, he had written to mark his beloved King's recovery from some illness or other. No doubt one of those particularly unpleasant seventeenth-century ones. Er, probably involving pox. Whatever.
Anyway, back then, when you conducted an orchestra, you didn't just wave a baton in front of them. Oh no, back then, they made you earn your money. You had a big stick, roughly the size of a broom handle, sometimes with bells on, sometimes not, and what you did was you held this stick vertically and banged it on the floor, every first beat of the bar, or howsoever took your fancy. In this tragic performance of the?? Deutn, though, there was Lully, banging the floor with gay abandon, when he suddenly whacked himself in the foot -1 don't know, maybe some particularly attractive 'bit-of-wig'-" walked past. Whatever happened, a few days later an abscess is said to have developed, whereupon he contracted gangrene and died some time after. Dead at the age of fifty-five, and forever consigned, alongside Alkan/ '* to that section of music books entitled 'Composers who met sticky ends' Poor sod.
PASS THE PURCELL
I
^ngland. 1689. (Cue that sort of stirring yet scene-setting music.Jthat you get in a classic black-and-white, Sunday afternoon movie. The music dies.) There's been a bit of a reshuffle, as it were.
Cromwell, the Lord Protector, as he ended up, is long buried. Let's hope he was dead. All in all, though, thank goodness - I mean, ghastly haircuts.
Charles II also came and went. A bit like when we went from the 1960s to the 1970s: out went the roundheads, and in came the long, flowing locks. (Wonder if they wore flares?) The capital has more or less fully recovered from both the Great Plague - which killed off some 70,000 people, give or take a stiff- and the Great Fire. And so to music, where there is now a bunch of great composers, carrying on the good work in the current big thing, opera, and none more so than England's finest, Henry Purcell.
Much like Lully in France, Purcell was composer to the King's private band, as well as being organist at Westminster Abbey. In historical terms, Purcell is a bit of a mystery man. Very little is known Ј This genuine Louis XIVpiece of original slang has been authenticated from the only surviving manuscript»/Thesee et ses gateaux de fer -'Tbesie and his buns of steel' ©. fi fi Charles-Valentin Alkan, a couple of centuries later, allegedly reached up to retrieve a book from a top shelf and was killed by his falling bookcase. about him. In fact, so little that I've had to make some of the next bit up, see if you can tell which.
Now some thirty years old, his rise to musical stardom had been more or less meteoric.
He was merely the bellows pumper on the organ at fifteen and yet composer to the King at eighteen. By the time he was twenty, he was the best-known composer in England. And his favourite colour was purple.© Well, sorry, but there's not much else we know about him. Let's see.