The earliest music of our culture has not survived, as it was not possible until the twelfth century to write it down in such a way as to determine the pitch of the notes and their relationship to one another. Then, for the first time, the austere but haunting two-part plainchant of Léonin, the resident composer at the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, was written on a ‘stave’ (a series of horizontal lines), and this was extended by his colleague Magister Perotinus to three and four parts, which characterized a style of writing called organum.
But, astonishingly, it was a woman who was to compose the first music to survive into regular present-day performance. Besides her remarkable gifts as a composer, Hildegard of Bingen had mystic visions throughout her life and believed that God was communicating directly to her. The church (and indeed the pope) accepted that her experiences were genuine, and this gave her far-reaching philosophical power as a confidante of the church authorities, including the pope. She believed that the world should be experienced and enjoyed jointly by man and woman, yet be balanced by resistance to sin. ‘Only thus is the world fruitful,’ she suggested. Her music is a simple, soaring monody with immediate appeal.
By the time Josquin Desprez arrived, medieval polyphony had matured into vocal writing of great feeling and intensity, whether in Mass settings of great eloquence in four or five parts or in simpler motets, which are still very telling. Carlo Gesualdo’s motets bring astonishing dissonances and chromaticisms, often flagrantly pungent, which surely reflect his own personal life. Byrd and Tallis were the two great composers in Elizabethan England.
Monteverdi, whose life spanned half of both the 16th and 17th centuries, is however surely the key figure in Italian vocal music of this period. The expressive range of his eight books of madrigals is remarkable, and Book 8 includes the unique pair of dramatically inspired mini-operas, Il ballo delle ingrate and Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda.Their intensity and originality are however capped by his 1610 Vespers and the three major operas, L’Incoronazione di Poppea, L’Orfeo and Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in patria.
Turning to England, we encounter some of the greatest instrumental music to have appeared so far: the sublime Fantasias for viol consort by Orlando Gibbons lead on naturally to the Fantasias of Purcell. So little is known of this great composer, except his music and the fact that he was honoured enough in his time to be buried in Westminster Abbey.
Two key baroque composers dominate the first half of the eighteenth century: Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel. Bach’s influence was initially in German music, while Handel (born within a short distance of Bach) left his native Saxony and made his career in England. Both were musical geniuses of the highest order, yet fascinatingly they never met. They also chose to explore quite different musical genres.
The peak of Bach’s achievement in vocal music lay in 300 church cantatas (of which about 200 survive) and included the great Passion oratorios, and a uniquely original and expansive Mass. He was a famous organist and composed much commanding organ music. He also wrote relatively lightweight, Vivaldi-style concertos and a great deal of extraordinarily original harpsichord music (now often heard on the piano). Equally memorable is his solo instrumental music, suites and partitas for cello and violin.
Handel developed the Corelli-influenced concerto grosso, and wrote keyboard suites that were quite different from Bach’s. But he is most celebrated for his Italian operas, the English oratorios of comparable calibre (not least Messiah, the most performed of all choral works), and the Fireworks and Water Music, written for the king, which were to become some of the first suites of popular orchestral music, vividly scored.
Antonio Vivaldi was justly famous in Italy in his own time as priest/musician and writer of countless concertos for diverse instruments. A wag once said that ‘he wrote the same concerto five hundred times,’ but that is patently not true; his invention is inexhaustible in its diversity, in both his instrumental and (more recently revived) vocal music (secular and sacred). It seems remarkable that after he died, in 1741, his output was all but forgotten until Louis Kaufman and the Concert Hall Chamber Orchestra directed by Henry Swoboda revived and recorded The Four Seasons in Carnegie Hall in December 1947. The work has now become the most popular classical work in the whole repertoire.
The entertaining German composer Georg Telemann was almost equally prolific and his music is certainly comparably attractive, specializing (besides concertos) in colourful baroque orchestral suites, often engagingly pictorial and featuring local scenes in Hamburg, where he lived.
Thomas Arne in England, following in Handel’s footsteps, had success with both instrumental music and opera (at Covent Garden) and his Artaxerxes was the first opera seria with words in English. The score has had to be reconstructed, but is well worth investigating, full of attractive numbers colourfully orchestrated.
The period between 1732 and 1827/8 is without doubt the richest section of our musical timeline and one cannot consider any of these four great linked composers without remembering the other three. Haydn, living for much of his life at Esterháza, commented that, isolated as he was, he had to be original. But he was not just original, his originality was extraordinarily prolific. His most precious contribution was the virtual invention of the string quartet, and he left us nearly 80 of them, including six very agreeable works for a long time attributed to him as Opus 3 but actually written by Romanus Hoffstetter, which he acknowledged as authentic in his complete works, perhaps one of his light-hearted jokes. But they are not unworthy, and the rest are magnificent, desert-island fare (for I.M.).
Haydn also gave us 104 hardly less stimulating symphonies, of which undoubtedly the last twelve, written for London, are among the finest. It now seems difficult to believe that before the Second World War most of Haydn’s earlier symphonies had not even been printed, and their availability owes much to the research of a brilliant musicologist, H. C. Robbins Landon, whose Symphonies of Joseph Haydn was first published in 1955. The sad thing is that many of these early and middle-period works, which are of the highest quality, are still very seldom heard in the concert hall. But of course they are all available on CD. Haydn was not a concerto specialist, but he wrote a single trumpet concerto for the new keyed instrument when it arrived, and it has never been equalled since, let alone surpassed. However, he wrote some excellent works for cello, and his keyboard concertos, for piano or harpsichord, are by no means to be dismissed. His Creation and Seasons are among the first great English choral works.
There are many who consider Mozart to be a greater composer than Haydn, and in the case of certain very special works they may be right. The operas, Così fan tutte, Don Giovanni, Le nozze di Figaro (especially) and Die Zauberflöte are indispensable, as are the Clarinet Concerto and Clarinet Quintet, many of the piano concertos, but especially No. 23 in A, K.488, and the Double Piano Concerto, K.365. The five violin concertos are also memorable, capped by the masterly Sinfonia concertante for violin and viola. The last four symphonies will be among many readers’ special favourites, as will the six quartets dedicated to Haydn, and the String Trio in E flat and the G minor String Quintet. But Haydn’s contribution overall remains colossal and so, with proper respect, we place the achievements of these two masters side by side.
Beethoven stands alone and supreme at the centre of the pantheon of great composers. He began writing music of his own time, then expanded every musical form – symphonies, concertos, chamber, instrumental, piano and choral music – and took them forward into the future. None more so than the string quartets, of which the first six are supremely classical and the late works have a sublimely subtle inner essence to which the listener raptly responds without seeking or needing analysis.
Schubert is the great musical lyricist, both in his countless songs and in the glorious chamber and piano music. The symphonies have a powerful simplicity, the Unfinished marks the true beginning of Romantic music. His last instrumental works, including the String Quintet and the final B flat major Piano Sonata, take us into an Elysian musical world unsurpassed even by Beethoven.
Rossini and Donizetti showed us that great art, besides being musically satisfying, could also make us smile with pleasure. Beethoven greatly admired The Barber of Seville, an opera which matches stylish melody with sparkling humour. Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, L’Elisir d’amore and La Fille du régiment are all great fun, often made at the expense of a pompous central character – the epitome of opera buffa. But Donizetti could also write serious opera, of which Lucia di Lammermoor is justly the most famous, and Bellini followed in his wake.
Hector Berlioz burst into the nineteenth century with the Symphonie fantastique, the first epic Romantic programme symphony, written only a few years after Beethoven’s death, yet conceived in spectacle and hyperbole, and orchestrated with a brilliance none of the composer’s predecessors could have dreamed of. The comparably masterly concert overture Le Carnaval romain, less than ten minutes long, is in some ways even more breathtaking, as is his Requiem.
Mendelssohn is credited with bringing the fairies into the orchestra in his exquisite Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture and Incidental Music, and he also travelled to Scotland to create an unsurpassed musical seascape in the Hebrides Overture.
Chopin and Liszt then stepped on to the concert platform with their romantic piano music, matching delicate poetry with sparkling virtuosity. At the same time Verdi and Gounod romanticized the operatic stage, and Wagner imbued his characters and the large accompanying orchestra with an overwhelming chromatic sensuality, although they usually took a long time to sing what they had to say.
French composers can usually be relied on to write racily exuberant music, and Offenbach was perhaps the wittiest of them all, providing a perfect counterpart to Wagner’s melodramatic hyperbole. In Germany, Bruckner added weight and expansive length to his nine symphonies while Brahms in his four symphonies, Violin Concerto, and two great Piano Concertos sensed that he was regarded by his compatriots as a natural successor to Beethoven. When quizzed about the obvious similarity between the great, expansive melody in the finale of his First Symphony and the main theme of the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth, his scornful reply was, ‘Any fool can see that.’
Bizet wrote just one symphony, in C major, but it is sheer delight, especially in the hands of Beecham. He also gave us one of the most popular of all operas, Carmen, which Oscar Hammerstein greatly praised for the sheer number of ‘hits’ that he acknowledged the score contains.
The music of both Dvořák and Tchaikovsky is permeated with the rich folklore of their respective homelands. Indeed Stravinsky stated, ‘Tchaikovsky was the greatest Russian of us all.’ Yet Dvořák wrote his finest symphony, the ‘New World’, while he was in America, and the folk influence in the beautiful main theme of its justly famous slow movement has as much of an American influence as Czech.
Tchaikovsky, alongside Schubert, was the greatest melodist of all time, and every one of his works overflows with memorable tunes. He told us that he would often wake up in the middle of the night with a new theme running through his consciousness, complete with harmony and orchestration. He had to get up immediately and write it down, for he would have forgotten it by morning. Tchaikovsky befriended Grieg when the two composers came together to England to receive honorary doctorates at Cambridge University. They liked each other immediately and Tchaikovsky greatly admired the haunting simplicity of Grieg’s music with its strong, Norwegian folk flavour.
If it is the refined delicacy of the lyricism of Gabriel Fauré which captivates the listener, it is the sharp, pungent originality of Janáček’s writing that catches the ear with its often abrasive orchestration. Elgar was truly English, very proud of his patriotism and conscious of his heritage. He did not seek dissonant textures in the orchestra but scored traditionally, with sonorously expansive string and brass and a reliance on rich melodic lines and strong rhythms and, in outer movements, a thrusting, vigorous impetus, finding its zenith in the Pomp and Circumstance Marches which are famous. His greatest work was The Dream of Gerontius.
Puccini and Richard Strauss were also both both supreme melodists and scored richly and romantically for the orchestra. Puccini’s masterpiece, La Bohème, has a continuous inspired melodic flow from the first note to the last and Strauss’s Rosenkavalier brings an utterly magical ‘Presentation of the Silver Rose’ scene and an unforgettable final Trio. Their principal works between them have helped to keep opera alive and popular since the era of Verdi.
Gustav Mahler is a very different musician from Bruckner, while springing from the same roots. Like Bruckner, he left us nine very expansive symphonies, but with greater orchestral and vocal variety between them. No. 2 is subtitled the ‘Resurrection’ because of its spectacular Judgement Day choral finale, and No. 8 is called the ‘Symphony of 1 000’ because of the huge musical forces required for performances. But Nos. 1 and 4 have an endearing lyrical warmth, No. 5 has a glorious slow movement and No. 4 has a simple song for its finale.
Debussy was in many ways the most original orchestral composer of the twentieth century. None of his music is predictable, especially in its harmonic and melodic language; virtually all of it is impressionistic, and its vivid use of colour and drama is uniquely compelling. Ravel’s muse is more subtle, the lusciously sensuous Daphnis et Chloé and the delicate Ma Mère l’Oye are among the most beautiful scores of the whole century, with an almost Mozartian refinement of texture; yet much of his music glitters with colour and sparkles with rhythmic intensity. The English composer Frederick Delius also creates glowing luxuriance and gentle suggestion in his orchestral writing, with its very English pastoral evocation, although there is passion too. He needs a special sensitivity from his performers and that is something Beecham above all other conductors brought to his music.
Sibelius, Vaughan Williams and Rachmaninov were key symphonists of this era, spanning the period between the 19th and 20th centuries. All three composers wrote naturally symphonically, thrillingly using themes of real memorability. Rachmaninov was the most romantic of his time and wrote four memorable piano concertos and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, a set of brilliant variations for piano and orchestra on a familiar theme which calls for great pianistic imagination and virtuosity from the soloist. Zemlinsky’s music is even more ripely sensuous and full of inventive sonorities and luscious invention. His most celebrated work is the passionately poetic Lyric Symphony, which includes two vocal soloists. Holst is most famous for his vividly characterized orchestral suite, The Planets. In many ways this is a unique programme symphony in seven diverse movements, ranging from the ferocious ‘Mars the bringer of war,’ to ‘Saturn’ with its closing mystic diminuendo of female voices. ‘Jupiter’ is the jolliest, with its famous, very English central tune.
Arnold Schoenberg’s early music (notably the symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande and Verklaerte Nacht) has a sensuous richness of texture which appeals to listeners in a way that much of his later, more ‘modern’ music fails to communicate. But the American composer Charles Ives, while flouting convention in every way in his use of enigmatic dissonance, has no communicative problems, rather bringing astonishment in the daring originality and sheer personality of his music.
Béla Bartók, once a seemingly daunting modernist writer, breaking new ground, has found his way into the popular repertoire by vividly coloured orchestration, drawing on earthy Hungarian and Romanian folk music. Indeed the Concerto for Orchestra has now become a favourite demonstration of orchestral virtuosity.
Stravinsky was discovered and nurtured by the impresario Serge Diaghilev and, after beginning with his ballets, The Firebird (with echoes of Rimsky-Korsakov) and Petrushka, went on to write one of the great masterpieces of the twentieth century, the Rite of Spring, then moving on to write music of great originality in almost every other sphere. He was not a natural melodist, but borrowed from Russian folksongs instead. His compatriot, Serge Prokofiev’s, peak achievements include the richly melodic ballet score for Romeo and Juliet and the equally inspired monumental opera based on Tolstoy’s novel, War and Peace. But he wrote masterpieces in every form, including memorable concertos for cello, piano and violin, superb ballet music, and seven highly stimulating symphonies, plus chamber music. Miaskovsky’s mellow, seemingly old-fashioned Russian style, full of nostalgia and poignant lyricism, may seem backward-looking, yet it is easy to come under the spell of the elegiac mood which is his speciality.
The Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra, Piano and Timpani is one of the most powerful works of the twentieth century. He too was prolific, writing six symphonies that show real vision, concertos and much chamber music of great appeal for a variety of instruments.
Poulenc’s Les Biches (another Diaghilev ballet) is a favourite score of ours. It is skittish, high spirited and fresh, and delectably melodic as only French music can be. The original choreography takes place near the beach with the corps de ballet in skimpy swimming costumes, and later having a vigorous tussle around a sofa. But there is an underlying feeling of naughtiness in the choreography which suggests that all is not what it seems.
Of all the USA’s twentieth-century composers it is Aaron Copland whose music hauntingly captures the vast open spaces of the American continent best and, like Stravinsky, it was the ballet which inspired his greatest music. Leonard Kerstein of the New York City Ballet tried to commission a score from him without success until one day he left behind on the composer’s piano a book of cowboy songs, including one of the most famous, ‘Old Paint’. The result was the masterly Rodeo, and Billy the Kid. But Copland’s masterpiece, Appalachian Spring, was written for Martha Graham’s ballet company and is a truly unforgettable score, climaxing with variations on the delightful Quaker melody, ‘The gift to be simple’.
Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings is for Americans what ‘Nimrod’ from the Enigma Variations is for the British public; it is actually a version for full strings of the slow movement of his String Quartet. But all Barber’s music is rewarding, and his glorious Violin Concerto now holds its place among the greatest international works in this form.
The distinguished (Manchester-born) music critic Neville Cardus declared William Walton’s First Symphony the finest since Sibelius, and it is good to see that after a period of eclipse it has now returned to the concert hall. Walton’s output was comparatively small but includes outstanding concertos for all the major stringed instruments, some outstanding film music, two splendid coronation marches with nobilmente tunes worthy of Elgar, and in Belshazzar’s Feast one of the very finest choral works written in English. And we must not forget Façade, a series of delicious orchestral vignettes designed as a backcloth to all but inconsequential poems by Edith Sitwell, but which stand up equally well in their ballet form, without the words.
Benjamin Britten was infinitely more prolific than his predecessor; because he wrote so much vocal music, of which the delightful Ceremony of Carols remains one of the most inspired examples, his music is now better known than Walton’s. He wrote a remarkable number of songs, which he performed with his musical and personal partner, Peter Pears, and it was Pears who took the lead role in Peter Grimes, an operatic masterpiece if ever there was one. Among Britten’s orchestral works are the engaging Simple Symphony for Strings, the superbly inventive Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge and, of course, the Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, in which he writes variations on a comparatively little-known theme of Purcell.
We have a special place in our hearts for Malcolm Arnold, an orchestral trumpeter-turned-composer who wrote tuneful, stimulating and friendly music (including nine splendid symphonies) and many shorter works, vividly coloured and never short of good tunes. Alas, he lived and composed at a time when writing tunes and music which communicated readily to the public was unfashionable, and the adverse reception from his critics all but broke his spirit.
Many would regard the Russian genius, Dmitri Shostakovich, as the greatest and most highly original composer of the twentieth century. He lived in Soviet Russia under Stalin and endured constant vitriolic criticism from inferior musicians in the Soviet hierarchy who were unfit to pass any musical judgements at all. But the Russian people did not desert him, and for them he wrote an enormous range of music in all forms, including 14 symphonies, many of which recorded recent Russian history, or made disguised comments on the repressive communist lifestyle. His dance and ballet music is spontaneously tuneful (his arrangement of ‘Tea for two’ a particular delight) and his powerful opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, is among the most memorable of the twentieth century. He wrote some fine piano music too, but he reserved his inner feelings for his chamber music. The string quartets are the most personal and deeply expressive of all his works.
Olivier Messiaen is the true mystic of French music. His Turangalîla Symphony (the title comes from Sanskrit) is on an epic scale to embrace ‘almost the totality of human experience’; his single, masterly chamber work, the visionary Quatuor pour la fin du temps, composed during his days in a Silesian prison camp, is unforgettably haunting. But much of his other music (especially the works for organ) is concerned with religious experience and his sense of the eternal, while his Catalogue d’oiseaux for piano is immersed in bird-song which he loved so much.
Rautavaara’s is another wholly original voice of our time, though by no means a formidable one. His symphonies are readily approachable, full of colour and atmosphere, and he has written a series of concertos for different instruments, which are all hauntingly accessible and richly evocative. The most famous is the Cantus arctcus, using tape recordings of Arctic bird calls against an orchestral backcloth.
Here, finally, are two relatively new names, one English, the other American. Thomas Adès writes brilliantly for the orchestra, combining intricate rhythms with dazzling use of colour. But it is his opera, The Tempest, which has placed him firmly on the musical map. He writes very imaginatively for voices and his vocal lines are both melodic and singable. This is a work that could well make it into Covent Garden on a regular basis.
The American, John Adams, however, has already written a superb opera which is bound to join the international operatic repertoire. If Nixon in China seems an unlikely subject, it has all the drama one could ask for, particularly in the choral and ensemble writing and the vividly rhythmic orchestral accompaniment. Moreover Adams has the rare twentieth-century gift of writing lyrical lines for the soloists that are grateful to sing and moving to listen to. Adams’s other orchestral music with its extended minimalist style is original, ear-catching and inventive, and there is a great deal of it, nearly all of high quality.