THE YOUNG ONES
I
f I could be so rude, could I just ask you to put a bookmark in this page for just a moment. Remember which line you're on, if you would, close the book, and look at the front cover.
Are you back? Right, well you will have noticed that the words on the front said 'Stephen Fry's INCOMPLETE and utter history of classical music'. And, in my view, incomplete is such a beautiful word, isn't it? It's a perfect dectet of letters, a divine decimal delight which deliciously describes the nature of the next section. In… complete. Innnnnn… complete. Gorgeous, isn't it? Makes me want to jump on a chair and sing it to the tune of Fingerbobs. 'In… complete… In complete…' Stunning, isn't it?
I guess what I'm trying to say in the previous paragraph is that we are about to zoom, lickety-spit, through a full three decades, not even stopping to spare the horses. So do forgive me. Here we go. With the possible exception of Cliff and the Shadows, the other young ones of 1982 were Benjamin Britten and the Sunday Times Colour Supplement. (OK, so Benjamin Britten was forty-nine, which is stretching it a little to call him a young one, but the Sunday Times Colour Supplement was brand new this year.) Britten's incredibly moving War Requiem is a moving mixture of Latin Mass and the poems of Wilfred Owen. Well, I did say some of the effect of the war would take a while in coming. It was premiered just a year after the Bay of Pigs became the temporary centre of the world, and the same year that 3,000 US soldiers and marshals had to accompany James Meredith on his first day at college, to stop riots happening round him. Why? Simply because he was black.
Two years later and possibly one of the most famous 'What Were You Doing When…' events, ever. The year will forever be etched in the brain to many - certainly for me, I know - mainly for the question: 'Do you remember what you were doing the day… the day Deryke Cooke thwarted Mahler's ambition to write the same number of symphonies as Beethoven?' At least, that's how I remember it. Yes, it's amazing, isn't it? Some musicologist finds Mahler's last sketches, and just goes and finishes them off. So you have… Mahler Ten. In 1964. Very odd. Someone would eventually do it to Beethoven, too, but not for a good twenty-four years yet. What else has happened? Well, "65 saw Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, commissioned by the Dean of Chichester, oddly enough, and premiered the same year as Lyndon B. Johnson was. Well, to be accurate, he wasn't premiered, he was presi-dented, I suppose. Still. Onward. No time to lose.
1967 becomes the year of Jeremy Thorpe leading the Liberal Party; of the Six Day War; of Martin Luther King leading marches against Vietnam; and of both the US and Soviet space programmes in crisis following deaths on launch and re-entry, respectively. Elsewhere, at Cape Town's Grooote Schuur Hospital, Christiaan Barnard performed the world's first heart transplant. Oh, and here's a fine couple of statistics to put alongside 1967 in your brain's filing system: Iff 1967, 5.3 BILLION CANS OF SOFT DRINKS
WERE SOLD IN THE US ALONE. (5.3 BILLION!!!)
Also, do you remember that quote from Alexander Graham Bell, about his telephone - T firmly believe that, one day, every city will have a telephone!' Well, according to statistics from 1967, there were already, by then, 100 million telephones in the US alone. Would you Adam and Eve it. All that and we lost Dorothy Parker. 'This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.' Marvellous, but I don't know. Does it all fit with this music from 1967? I mean, Aram Khachaturian, the Armenian composer who was by then well into his sixties, brought out Spartacus in '67. Play the Love Theme from Spartacus and Phrygia in your head - or The Onedin Line, if you prefer - and tell me if it fits 1967. I'm not sure.
Not quite finished with the Swinging Sixties. I need to just mention that in 1969, while Neil Armstrong was misquoting himself, Karlheinz 'No, but I've trodden in some' Stockhausen was in the middle of the first performance of his vocal classic, Stimmunjj. Now, call me odd, but I've got a recording of Stimmung - on vinyl, if you will! - and I think it's absolutely fab. Perfect music for putting on when you've had more than the odd glass of Chateau Margaux and someone is passing something round. OK that's enough of that. Thank you. Agenda Item 17; Any other business?
Shostakovich is now up to fifteen. Symphonies, that is. By 1972 -yes I said 1972 - he has premiered Number 15 which seems to get past the Communist Party unamended. That's more than could be said for 13. Communist leader Krushchev made him change the words. It seems a world away now, the old Soviet regime, doesn't it, and yet you have to remind yourself, it wasn't long ago, was it? 1972, I mean. Flares, Last Tango in Paris, an Oscar for Liza Minelli in Cabaret - and, just to forever help you to place it, Shostakovich's Fifteenth Symphony. Wow. There was also the death of Picasso, the death of WH Auden, and, one year later, Britten's Death in Venice.
Britten premiered his latest opera, Death in Venice, at his still-thriving festival in beautiful Aldeburgh. Sadly, it was around this time that the composer's health reduced him to doing very little composing at all.
1974. Just to place it for you, it was also the year Harold Wilson became PM again, the year Grenada won its independence, and the year Lord Lucan disappeared after the murder of his children's nanny. No, I haven't seen him. After that, well, musically, the '70s became more of a graveyard than anything else. By the time Thatcher came to power in '79, we had already lost Milhaud in '74, Shostakovich in '75, Britten in '76 and Khachaturian in '78. Add to that the loss in '77 of two of the world's greatest singers - Maria Callas and Elvis Presley - and you might be forgiven for retiring to your room to wrap yourself in your beloved vinyl collection.
True, the Polish composer Gorecki - pronounced Goretski, appar-endy - had come up witli a new symphony just as Concorde came in to service in 1976, but more about that later. The Gorecki, that is, not Concorde. Although, having said that, let me find some time for the Italian composer Luciano Berio. Apart from writing all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff for his wife, the singer Cathy Berberian, and a bunch of solo stamina tests for different instruments, called 'Sequenza's, he also found time in the '70s to revisit a set of folk songs he'd arranged in 1964. He repolished them in '73, and, by the mid to late '70s, they were getting more than a few performances around the world. The reason? Well, probably because they didn't sound like someone tuning a shortwave radio. If you are one of those people who feel they can't really listen to twentieth-century music, then try these, because they are a very easy way in, albeit via some cute old tunes. I may be wrong, but I believe the score calls for two rather large car suspension springs to be struck at various points. Don't let that put you off, though - the Berio Folk Songs are lovely. Anyway. Off we go. Let me nip on to 1980.
To Hoy, in fact, in the Orkney Islands. Very beautiful little place, I'm led to believe, and, by 1980, it had been the home of the English composer Peter, now Sir Peter, Maxwell Davies, for some nine years. He's one of what is often referred to as 'the Manchester group', because they were all making music in Manchester and they no doubt went round in a group. Probably, you know, all chewing gum, wearing shades and looking hard. Maybe not. Anyway, out of a set that included Alexander Goehr and Harrison Birtwistle as well as Elgar Howarth and pianist John Ogdon, Maxwell Davies is probably the one who wrote stuff that you have some vague chance of ever whistling. So, while the SAS stormed the Iranian Embassy on a crisp May morning in 1980, he was peacefully and, I hope, obliviously, putting the final bar line on his new work for solo piano, Farewell to Stromness. It is a delightful piece, written as a composer's protest against the imminent threat of uranium mining.
To be fair, it's a world away from things like his Eight Songs for a Mad King in the late '60s. Having said that, if you see die Songs for a Mad King on the bill anywhere, do try and get along, because they are a great piece of music theatre, if they're done right.