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.