RAVEL'S DENOUEMENT
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
FROM BEGGARS' OPERA TO COMMON MAN
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es, the year that produced the Bolero also produced a new style of opera in Berlin. The words were by Bertolt Brecht, after the eighteenth-century John Gay (yes I know John Gay didn't get into this book in his own right, so to speak, but I'm afraid his century was full. I mean it was standing room only and he fell out the back.) And the music was from Kurt Weill, who, despite coming next to Anton Webernja in many of the music books, thought that music should be readily appreciable by the people. None of the boffin-type, system music for him - he thought that his audience should be humming his tunes before they left the theatre. Of course, he couldn't resist giving it a boffin name, could he - 'Zeitkunst' or 'contemporary art', really. I don't know, they just can't help themselves, can they? What's wrong with MUSIC, for goodness' sake? Anyway, if he was the people end of things, and S g, Webern and Berg were the other end, then skipping backwards and forwards in the middle was the wonderful, slightly dotty character of the forty-six-year-old Stravinsky. He was virtually a portfolio of ALL the different schools of modern music in one. Never stuck to one thing for too long. Much as in life, he was a series of not-so-much contradictions, as, well, fl I know Vve said this before, but, on this occasion, it's true. Honest. 1» Another follower of Schoenberj}. U-turns, I suppose. He went from block to block, in a sense, as if he was on stepping stones. One minute, he's just MODERN - although Stravinsky himself once famously said that he didn't write modern music, he just wrote good music - anyway, one minute he's modern, then he's using the S g rules of harmony, and then the next minute he's almost 'classical' - or neo-classical, as the boffins like to say. From the Greek 'neo' meaning new, so not the original classical music, but the twentieth century's revisited version of it. So in 1930, he came up with one of my most favourite pieces, ever - the Symphony of Psalms. It's extraordinary stuff- a spooky-sounding cantata for chorus and orchestra, which can leave you in tears one minute then have you thinking of horror movies the next. It was just every bit as good as that other great hit from 1930, Hoagy Carmichael's 'Georgia on My Mind'. Ah, a belter. And, who knows, maybe playing in the background when CW Tombaugh discovered Pluto. 1930, you see. A good year. But roll on 1934.
RACH-ING IT IN
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t the beginning of 1934, Rachmaninov was, like Hoist, Elgar and Delius, still going strong. However, unlike Elgar, Hoist and Delius, Rach was still going very strong when 1934 came to an end. By this point, he had already toured America a few times - as a pianist, that is - before eventually making it his permanent home. If you compare his 1934 effort with Stravinsky's of 1930 - both Russian, both settled in America - then you get two very different pieces. Totally different. And why? Well, probably because of the audience thing, again. Stravinsky was, more or less, writing for the history books. Rachmaninov was writing for the audience. And I don't mean that as a put-down. I mean, well, he just was. He was by now in America with a place in Switzerland, and touring to make money. And, of course, being a pianist-composer, when he needed a new piece, he simply wrote one. As in 1934. Just think. The German president, Hindenburg, has just died, and Hider has proclaimed himself Fuhrer: the democrats are forced out in Austria, following the revolu- tion; and the thirty-year-old Salvador Dali paints the surrealist William Tell. Now, listen to the lush, gush and dangerous to hush tunes of Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Does it really seem to match? I'll leave that to you.
Just one year later now, and the Nazis repudiate the Treaty of Versailles, Mussolini invades Abyssinia, and Hider establishes the Luftwaffe. In a speech to Parliament, Churchill warns of the German menace in the air. Now, imagine a Prokofiev ballet of the same year, Romeo and Juliet. In one scene, his music is set alongside some stunning choreography, which pits the Montagues against the Capulets. If you haven't seen a production, do go.??? now, though, can you bring up the sound of the Montagues and Capulets in your head? Have you got it? Keep it going as you read. The Kenneth Macmillan version has the two opposing sides lined across the stage. They strut, arms alternately outstretched, left, right, left, right - they're strutting so arrogandy, left, right. And then you realize. They're goose-stepping. Left, right. Rachmaninov may not have captured 1934, but Prokofiev has certainly captured 1935.
And then there's the small question of Shostakovich. It's scandalous I've let myself get this far, without really mentioning Dmitri Shostakovich. One year after Prokofiev unleashes Romeo and Juliet, Shostakovich is meant to be coming up with a new symphony. By now, he's only twenty-nine, and he is constrained by the Soviet authorities, who monitor and vet his every note.
Many composers in Russia suffered at the hands of the strict Soviet regime. The Communist Party had a very clear idea of exactly which type of music was good for the people and if they didn't hear it in your music, you were in trouble. Shostakovich had had problems with an opera of his, Lady Macbeth ofMtzensk, which the official state newspaper, Pravda, had labelled 'chaos instead of music' His Fourth Symphony had, more or less, been stopped at the rehearsal stage, and had not even premiered. He was under massive pressure to come up with music that fitted in with the order of the day - 'socialist realism', as they called it. So, in 1937, he unveils his Fifth Symphony, bearing the now infamous subtitle 'A Soviet Artist's Response to Just Criticism'. It was a massive hit - thank goodness for that. It is, regardless of what anybody might say about its inception, a wondrous piece, with a slow movement to end all slow movements. If, after listening to it, it doesn't make you want to just pack it all in, give up your job and take up composition, then I…? No?… It doesn't? Well… flower pressing, then? No? OK, try this.