Actually, stepping back for a moment, can you honestly imagine it? Gargantuan sounds and breathtaking cannons, all set in a first performance at the Temple of Christ the Redeemer. Personally, if I listen to it on CD, I always try to crack open a packet of sparklers at the appropriate moment, in an attempt to do it justice.
THE BIZARRE AND CHARMING
? dd title but, still - bear with me. 1883, then. What's… 'goin' down', as they say in the trendy world of dropped letters? Well,?? tell you what's 'goin' down'. Skyscrapers, that's what's goin' down. Or up, should I say. In Chicago, to be precise. The first ever. Not exactly huge by today's standards, but still, there it was, up there, and, well, doing what skyscrapers do, just… scraping the sky. Well. Good.
Also, Paul Kruger has become President of South Africa; the Orient Express has had its first run - Paris to Istanbuclass="underline" slight delays in Strasbourg - seasonal manpower shortages, but otherwise a cracking start. What else 'gives', in 1883? Well, Nietszche writes Also Spmch Zarathustra, no doubt giving the then nineteen-year-old Richard Strauss something to think about; Renoir paints Les Parapluies, and, to be honest, we lose a bunch of heavyweights. Turgenev, Manet, Karl Marx and, saddest of all, just one year after Parsifal, Wagner.
One minute's silence, please. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60.
At the risk of going immediately from the sublime to the ridiculous, 1883 is also the year that the Comte de Chambord died - wait for this one! It's a belter. Here goes. 'That's God proving tliat, while he may be omnipotent and all powerful, he is a little impolite because…'
…it's coming, it's coming… '…because HE TOOK THE LAST BOURBON!' Oh, come on, it wasn't that bad.
RINGFLUENTIAL
4
o, the world MINUS the Wagmeister. What sort of an effect will that have on the price of eggs? Well, let me come up to the surface somewhere in 1883. The year that the Metropolitan Opera House opened in New York, and, more pertinently to us, here and now, it's the year that Leo Delibes had an unexpected hit on his hands.
Apart from Coppelia, Delibes has been more or less dining out on his only other great success, the ballet music to Sylvia.
Delibes was another child prodigy, born in 1836 at St Germain-du-Val, midway between Angers and Le Mans. He attended grown-up Conservatoire from the age of twelve - a little late by prodigy standards (remember, Bizet was there by nine) - but struggled to find any real success with his work. Then, when he was thirty, the Paris Opera put on his ballet, La Source, a work that was to start his composition career in earnest. Coppelia followed soon, a work still very much in the repertoire of ballet companies today. Opera-wise, though, he had lesser success.
Then all of a sudden, just eight years before he's due to pop his pointe shoes, he comes up with the music to an opera with so breathtakingly ludicrous a plot that even Barbara Cartland would have put it back in her bottom drawer. Yet, as so often happens, Delibes is virtually libretto-blind, and he somehow came up with the score to save it. Lakme - the world's favourite opera, if you like, considering it contains the delicious 'Flower Duet', beloved of British Airways ads, but nonetheless beautiful for it - thus giving the cue for? further fifteen minutes of fame and a few more suppers where he can turn to the woman on his right and start with the line, 'Haven't you seen me somewhere before?'
Not a million miles away, in Troldhaugen, the composer Edvard Grieg is also allowing himself to enjoy life a litde more. He's currendy at work on a tribute to one of the founders of Danish literature, one Ludvig Holberg. In 1883, Grieg was forty and had the benefit of a Norwegian government annuity to keep him comfortable. So he was able to take it all a litde easier, something which might account for why he had done almost all his best work by the time he was thirty-three. Still, he duly finished his suite of pieces for piano, which he called, not surprisingly, the Holberg Suite. Then, no doubt, he made himself a cup of coffee. Then, maybe, stared out of the window for a few moments. Maybe he would go down and lean on his gate later that afternoon. He took another sip of his coffee. Maybe he'd look out of the window again. Or should he save that for later, after 'the gate'? So he looked down at his new piano suite. 'I could always… what… transcribe it for strings?' And so he did.
It was this latter piece, by EG, that Debussy called 'the bizarre and charming taste of a pink sweet stuffed with snow'. Right. Yes. Not quite sure I know what he's on about, there, but still. (I'd take him out, Matron, he's almost ready!)
Now, a brief insight into the heady twelve months that liked to call itself 1884 - or 'Toby' to its friends.
TO TOBY!
A
h yes, Toby. What a great year. But what is there to say? Well, I could tell you that some lucky people have been digging in the Transvaal aand haave now got raather a lot of gold in their haands. Not quite so glamorous, some other people have been digging in the middle of London, and have come up with the Bakerloo Line. In Paris, Le Matin, issue one, appears, possibly containing an article on the new work by local boy Auguste Rodin, called The Burghers of Calais. It might also have had a leader column on the poindess pointillism of Georges Seurat, as his latest, line Baignade Asnieres, m giving people cricked necks die same year. In Britain, George Bernard Shaw joined the small but perfecdy formed Eabian Society, while in die good old U S of A Huckleberry Finn was a bestseller for Mark Twain.
Back in Vienna, Brahms has swept aside all thoughts now of Beethoven, with his brand-new symphony, which many consider his greatest. Well, at least he thought he had. Sad to say, some critics immediately start calling it 'his Eroica\ AAAgghhh! Don't you just hate it when that happens? CRITICS! They can never examine a new work without feeling they have to point out any similarities it bears to things they can vaguely make out themselves. 'Ooh, didn't that bit sound a bit like the first bar of "Oh I do like to be beside the seaside"? It did, didn't it! Pretty sure it did!' - cue article in paper next day: 'This is quite clearly HIS "Oh I do like to be beside the seaside". Patendy!' AAAGGHH!
Anyway. I should stop there. Suffice to say, Brahms's Third Symphony is Brahms's Third Symphony is Brahms's Third Symphony. It's wonderful, and that's all there is to it.
THREE FAT LADIES. ER,
(WITH A FUNNY HEAD) 1888. It was a very good year. Let's just focus, gradually, on what was hap- actually, 'and flat feet'. That tide should read 'with flat feet'. Can we correct that?
L
ovely. Sorry, but Neville is in the Retail, as theysay. 1888, then. A very good year. And to focus in, as I said, well, there was rather a lot going on.
Germany gets through two bosses: William I dies, as does his successor, Fred III. Fred Ill's place is taken by William II - sounds like a very odd game of chess, doesn't it? William II, of course, is now more commonly known as The Kaiser or Kaiser Bill, Kaiser being simply a Germanic version of the original for emperor, Caesar, much like the Russian word Tsar. In London, Jack the Ripper has started his reign of terror, the Football League has been founded and the -FT has commenced publication. It would be only a matter of time before someone cracks one of my favourite jokes: What's pink and hard in the morning?^ Lovely. Only last year, '87, LL Zamenhof had devised Esperanto, the international language, and supposedly 'extras tre facile lernabla lingvo? And if you understood that sentence, then it must be true. Back to '88, and Emile Zola publishes La Terre, not in Esperanto, but in French, while Oscar Wilde brings forth The Happy Prince, and other tales. Elsewhere, the twenty-eight-year-old Mahler becomes Music Director of the Budapest Opera; Kipling writes Plain Tales from the Hills, and Van Gogh paints The Yellow Chair - nothing like a spot of DIY, is there?