Bizet was said to have a fantastic ear for a tune and an awful eye for a libretto. Take The Pearl Fishers - despite its famous 'Au fond du temple saint' (literally 'Vmfond of Simon????1??'? it's pretty ropey as far as the words go. With his 1866 attempt, The Fair Maid of Perth (literally, 'the fair maid of Perth') well, he would have probably been better setting the original book by Sir Walter Scott, so bad was the adaptation. BUT THEN… THEN, IN 1872, HE WROTE THE OPERA DJAMILEm
This, too, was an unmitigated pile of pants. Well, actually, that's not totally fair - there were some great tunes in it. I forget their names, now, but, well, Mahler liked it. Having said that, Mahler was only twelve, so he was probably very easily pleased at the time. Anyhow, some three years later - 1875 - he had a minor triumph with The Old Woman of Aries. That's not a bit of gossip, it's the title of the opera - The Old Woman of Aries, or LArlesienne, as he, himself, would have said.
Buoyed somewhat by this, he set to work on a new commission from the Paris 'Opera-Comique'. He chose a book by Prosper Merimee (you'd think someone with his track record in librettos would stay well away from someone with a name like that, wouldn't you?). It was a story of depraved young girls, gypsies, thieves and cigarette makers - I think there's even the odd estate agent. Sadly, Paris opera-goers found it all a little hard to take, and, on the night of the thirty-first performance, having himself pronounced it a failure, Bizet died of cancer of the throat, at the age of thirty-six. If he had lasted just a few performances more? Well, he would have lived to see his new work declared a masterpiece, and hailed as a total work of genius. Nowadays? Well, nowadays, it's probably the most famous, most popular opera EVER. It is, of course, Carmen.
For the life of me, I can't see how it wasn't an immediate success. It has fantastic, immediate tunes; gripping, almost '3D' scoring, and it just grabs you between the earlobes and shouts 'LOVE ME!' Er, as it were. And yet they didn't like it. Well, at first. Poor George. Poor 'his bidet'.
Still, life must go on, though, as artists say, so let's forge ahead. And if Bruckner was the 'sleeping giant' of the 1860s, prepare to meet the 'sleeping giant' of the 1870s.
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( ??. Imagine, if you will, that it's 1876. Are you there? Good. J Right. OK. Alexander Graham Bell has just, one moment ago, invented the telephone. In fact, as far as I know, he's still on hold to Directory Enquiries. Heinrich Schliemann has excavated Mycenae, Disraeli has been made Earl of Beaconsfield and, most importantly, London has a sewerage system. Also, in 1876, another pseudonym has shuffled off. Amandine Aurora, or should I say George Sand. Or should I say Lucie Dupin, Baronne Dedevant, if you know what I mean?
Over in Bavaria, Wagner has opened his huge cathedral of opera, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus - an amazing place, built exacdy to die composer's own specifications (is mere nothing this man can't turn his hand to? Did he grout his own bathroom?), with no visible orchestra or conductor. It also has no side boxes or galleries and no prompter's box. Most importantly of all, what it has got, though, is it has an acoustic to die for. If you look at a picture of it - because, let's face it, most people are unlikely ever to go there, unless they take a serious wrong turn driving down to Tuscany - it's not unlike seeing an opera 'in widescreen'. Your entire attention is focused on the 'band' of drama in front of you. Hence the reason for no prompter's box and no visible musicians or conductor - there are no distractions, nothing to put you off concentrating on the music drama unfolding in front of you. There is, though, a perfect sound coming from… well, that's the point. You're never quite sure. In fact, the more I think of it, the more it is like a good, modern TV. You know how, in some movies done in Dolby stereo, you sometimes hear a background noise or effect that seems to come from almost behind you, or to the side? WeU, it's a bit like that in Wagner's Bayreuth. With the orchestra totally hidden, and the conductor too, you sometimes get a sense of the music simply enveloping you, coming from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Remarkable place. Regardless of any personal view of Wagner, he achieved something special with Bayreuth.
Over in Austria, though, a forty-three-year-old Johannes Brahms was, much like Bruckner had not long before him, wresding to overcome a personal hurdle. Having made Vienna his home some four years ago, he had taken on the job of Conductor at the very well-thought-of Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna - literally the 'company of friends of music', a sort of Royal Philharmonic Society, only with the ability to lead in a waltz - and in 1875, he resigned the job. The reason? Not enough time to compose. So he gave it all up and started to concentrate on the dots. The composer version of an MP's 'spending more time with his family'. Thankfully, it paid off. Refreshed, rejuvenated and refocused/ he came up with a whole series of major works, including, eventually, the absolutely yumerous Academic Festival Overture. He wrote it for the University of Bremen, who were cute enough to give him an honorary degree. As a result, he worked some college songs into the score and it's said that there was general uproar and throwing-in-the-air-of-hatsJ,ja when the orchestra got to the bit which had a grand, triumphal arrangement of 'Gaudeamus Igitur'. It was also, in this 'roll', as it were, that he wrote both the Tragic Overture AND…
…and something a whole lot more interesting. You see, not only did he have ample time, now, to compose, he probably also had time to sort something out in his head. He was, as I mentioned earlier/^ another one of those composers who felt forever in the shadow of Beethoven, certainly as far as the symphony was concerned. Let's face it, he's forty-three, and hasn't produced one yet - and if anyone was destined to, it was him. So, maybe the release from the nine-to-five of the Gesellschaft meant that he could finally get a grip on all that. Because, only one year later, the musical stork arrived chez Brahms, and he found himself the proud father of a finished manuscript - 'It's a symphony!' he cried. And it was: big and bouncing and weighing in at four movements. When you hear it live for the first time, there's always that bit in the fi Which the more astute among you will know is the title of an early, ultimately discarded draft of a Richard Rodgers song.© fifi Again, the more astute of you will recognize the ancient quote here: 'And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth and tearing out of hair, verily much in contrast to thine earlier throwing in the air of hats\ And they were sore. Not sore afraid, just sore!'from the obscure The Song of Wensleydale,
Chapter 7, Verses 9-21. Out of print.©
fififil refer the honourable gentleman to the section headed 'Brahms and THE MANy on page 185 of this very publication. last movement when you think, 'Is that… it is, isn't it?', because there's a bit in the finale where the composer, probably quite deliberately, writes a tune which is reminiscent of Beethoven's Ninth. In fact, Brahms himself was said to get rather prickly if anyone pointed it out, and so, no doubt, had done it deliberately. Odd decision, if I might quote from Four Weddings and a Funeral- to feel forever in the shade of someone else when it comes to symphonic writing, and to then almost put a quote in your first piece from the very same, said composer. It was no doubt the final link that that would lead critics for years after to dub the work 'Beethoven's Tenth'. Still. At least he's got number one under his belt. What next? Well, the world's his lobster. Hughes'? Who he? Ed., as it were. You can't move for microphones, in some shape or form, these days, but has anyone ever heard of David Hughes? No. Well, not as far as I can tell, or to any great extent. There's certainly no 'David Hughes Sunday' falling on the third Sunday in April, upon which children give themselves candy microphones and everyone has a communal 'loudhail' at precisely midday. No! I think someone should do something about it. Anyway, back down from my box, before Matron sees me, and back to the reason we're here - the music.