Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
THE MAD, MAD WORLD OF THE MAESTROS
Elgar was mired in melancholy, Verdi veered from scandal to superstardom and Schubert’s life was snuffed out too soon. Learning about the private lives of the great composers is key to appreciating the masterpieces they created...
When Giuseppe Verdi died in January 1901, aged 87, the crowd that gathered for his funeral procession was thought to be the largest public gathering Italy had ever seen. His private life in his younger years had been viewed as scandalous but as the cortege passed through Milan, many in the crowd of probably 300,000 began to sing. They joined in the chorus of the Hebrew slaves f rom h is opera Nabucco, music that had been the anthem of Italian unification more than a generation earlier.
Verdi had become more than a master musician and the titan of the Italian opera stage. He was a hero.
Think of another funeral, in Vienna in 1827 – that of Ludwig van Beethoven, who had taken the classical tradition of the 18th century and fuelled it with a new romantic fire. Walking behind his coffin, carrying a torch, was a young Franz Schubert, who had been inspired by his music but, as far as we know, had never plucked up the courage to talk to his hero – he was reported to have left one of the city’s coffee houses rather than risk an encounter. Schubert was already sinking towards his own death the following year at the age of only 31.
The tragic genius Beethoven had created a new symphonic world, and written for the piano like no one before him; the unattractive, sexually perplexed, unsure and ailing Schubert had written hundreds of songs – let alone his seven completed symphonies and piano masterworks – that would be treasured by generations long after he was gone. Figures like these continue to tower over the musical landscape, and the sheer power of their presence and the stories of their complex, troubled lives, as told in this magazine’s new three- part diarised series, starting today, are a reminder of the essence of what we’ve come to know as classical music: that it speaks of humanity and struggle. People sometimes talk about classical music as if it is some kind of exhibition in a museum, dusty and unchanging, stuck in time. The truth is that it is the reverse – everchanging, capable of constant reinterpretation, an inspiration to anyone who will take the time to listen; not necessarily to study, or to investigate as some act of scholarship, just to listen. There would be no point to music as a mathematical exercise or a diversion. A tune might stay in your head for a while, or a piece of whimsy might give some passing amusement, but the real thing demands attention and won’t release you.
The free compilation CD that
comes with the first part of this series (see page 7) is only a start, but maybe an exciting one. Listen to these pieces and you will know why the journey has to begin. Anyone making this journey into music, which leads to solace and excitement in equal measure, will find the lives of the great composers a guide towards the heart of that puzzle, because each of them was capable of inspiration that was unique, fashioned at a particular time and stamped with a personality that is unmistakable.
I have talked to many musicians over the years – conductors, soloists, composers – and it’s been extraordinary to realise how hard some of them still find it to describe precisely how the power of music operates. They can analyse the brilliance of Mozart’s score for The Marriage Of Figaro, for example, or describe Antonio Vivaldi’s technique in the hundreds of concertos he produced in Venice at the start of the 18th century, but a mystery remains.
Mozart’s unmistakable signature is what someone once called the ‘divine simplicity’ with which he could weave magic. To put it at its most obvious, he had the same notes available to him as everybody else but in a few bars he could create an unforgettable atmosphere and cast a spell.
You can’t hear more than a few bars of a Tchaikovsky symphony, for example, without understanding that you are in Russia. On top of that, his personality was tortured. He struggled with his homosexuality, and the principal relationship of his adult life was a peculiar one, with the wealthy woman who was his patron but whom he never met. And from that turmoil came music that seems to hover permanently between passion and despair.
Among composers from these islands, it is probably Edward Elgar who has a similarly unmistakable voice. WB Yeats said he was possessed of ‘heroic melancholy’, and although there is profound confidence expressed in his two completed symphonies and in his reli- gious meditation The Dream Of Gerontius, the longing that Yeats identified is always there.
He completed his cello concerto in 1919, with the First World War just over, and its poignant tone, shot through with anger, makes it an anthem for the age. The world had been pulled apart, and although artists – in music, painting, literature – were beginning to fashion new ideas, there was a darkness that produced rage.
Elgar, whose elegiac spirit seemed to capture every contour of the English countryside that he loved, wrote music that spoke of his time. Reaching maturity at the apogee of empire, he was the Victorian who lived long enough (he died in 1934) to experience the recording studio and even the birth of the BBC. That journey, from Queen Victoria’ s Diamond Jubilee through war to the tumult of the 1930s is reflected in his music as clearly as if it had been painted on canvas.
His slightly younger contemporary Richard Strauss made a journey in Germany that was similar, but with a hypnotic sound that was indubitably his own. He was profoundly influenced by the revolution stirred up by his compatriot Richard Wagner, whose search for a fusion of music and drama in his operas gave birth to a sound world that no composer after him could ignore.
A celebrated conductor once told me that orchestras enjoy playing Strauss because he gives every orchestra member something to do. There’s truth in that simple statement. The son of a prominent horn player, Strauss had a meticulous feeling for rich orchestration, and in his operas it is as if he is drawing a new musical map, inviting you to listen in a different way. That is the mark of the original musician – to sound as if a curtain is being pulled back and something new revealed.
After Joseph Haydn had more or less invented chamber music, for a small group of instruments, in the form we know it today in the mid-18th century, the young Mozart (who wrote his first symphony, partly in London, when he was eight) picked up the baton. In his 27 piano concertos, you can chart the course of his short career ( he was 35 when he died in 1791) in which his mastery becomes so complete that the last of them – the concerto in B flat major, composed around the same time as his opera The Magic Flute and the clarinet concerto – se ems to come close to perfection.
That is the quality shared by these composers, the ability to create music that has a wholeness that is simultaneously convincing and mysterious. Again and again, I have heard conductors puzzling over the best way to describe that power.
Although they will know a score backwards, and will spend half a lifetime trying to unlock its secrets, they still wonder why it is that a piece like Mozart’s unfinished requiem or Tchaikovsky’s sixth symphony can create such magic. Explaining the technique is easy enough, but in performance there has to be something else.
The great conductors are those who reach a point where the music seems to speak for itself, as if the technical business of playing the notes, getting the timing right, schooling the orchestra, has passed away and there is complete
absorption in the idea of the music. Every musician recognises it when it happens: a concert catches fire, an opera seems to rise from the stage and fill the theatre, a piano becomes more than an instrument – a voice, with all the complexity of humanity.
Beethoven demonstrated to everyone in Vienna in the early years of the 19th century that he was, like every great figure in music, a revolutionary. With his 3rd symphony, the Eroica, he forged a new kind of music making. Its grand opening chords announced that he had produced something different. The Viennese critics were divided at first, and evidently puzzled by the way the composer was developing his musical ideas. But it was the start of a great t radit ion. The romantic symphony was born.
The Eroica was conceived in tur- moil. At first, Beethoven dedicated it to Napoleon, then scratched his name out on the manuscript when he turned against Bonapar te’s imperial adventures. The music carries a sense of foreboding from the start, and invites contemplation of destruction. The second movement – unusually for a symphony of that era – is a funeral march, and to this day, although any conductor will know the score well, it is a
challenge for an orchestra to unlock the power of the Eroica.
Any competent band can play the notes, but that’s only the start. The European classical tradition throws up that challenge at every turn. When one
of the most famous piano teachers of the 20th century – Nadia Boulanger, in Paris – got a new and talented pupil (and she worked with musicians from Igor Stravinsky to Daniel Barenboim and Philip Glass), she would insist
that before beginning their studies they should learn properly the 48 preludes and fugues by Johann Sebastian Bach that are known as The Well-Tempered Clavier.
Written in two books, they were intended to be training pieces for the harpsichord and take the player deliberately through 24 major and minor keys. Barenboim once told me that he felt when he reached the last piece in Book I – the B minor fugue – he was playing something ‘ that had in it all music there had been, and all that was to come’.
Bach would probably have been astonished to know that these two books are regarded by musicians more than two and a half centuries after his death as one of the foundation stones of our whole musical tradition; but in them he’d laid out what you could cal l the whole nervous system of music, its character and complexity, its possibilities – like the great figures who followed him, and who all came to revere his genius.
Anyone who is gripped by music will find a way back to Bach. He is one of a handful of creators who explain what music can do. Anyone encountering their music will want to know the composers. Even when characters are difficult – Richard Wagner’s notorious anti- Semitism has poisoned many people against him – the search for understanding in music leads back to the source.
A look back at the lives of the great composers is always worthwhile because it reminds us of a truth. They are recognised for what they are because they alone have succeeded in doing something that is almost miraculous – producing music that defies explanation. You can describe it meticulously but it will always hold on to its secret.
And when you feel its power, it will never let you go.