I haven’t written about my geeky Classical music project for a bit – the one where I’ve been listening to the whole rich heritage of the repertoire chronologically from 1100 onwards – so I thought I would tell you how I’ve got “stuck”in 1876.

When I celebrated my arrival in this interesting year, I thought my main preoccupation would be Brahms’ First Symphony – a work I loved before limited my listening to works written either in the chosen year or before it. I haven’t got there yet though because I stumbled onto ballet discovering that two of the most important works of classical ballet were both written in 1876 – Delibes’ Sylvia, a wonderful piece that I didn’t know before and possibly the most well-known of all ballets, Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.

At first I thought I would give the Delibes ballet score my self-imposed rule for pieces that i’m not that bothered by – the three plays and it’s gone – but I found I’d got hooked not just on the music but on the ballet itself especially in the modern re-working of the choreography by the highly original American choreographer John Neumeier for the Paris Opera Ballet.

Most people only really know Delibes’ music thanks to the use of a duet from his opera Lakmé (1881-1882) in the British Airways ads where a lyrical boating son sung by two Indian women has been turned into BA’s signature tune and a hymn to airflight written at least twenty years before aircraft looked like this, one of the Wright brothers first gliding machines:

Tchaikovsky’s music has been stolen by advertising companies too – most famously and infamously for a well-known brand of chocolate. Tchaikovsky had been having a busy old time in 1876 because not only had he been composing Swan Lake but he had been on a European tour where he heard the first performance of Wagner’s Ring cycle at Bayreuth: “Finally on Thursday it was all over, and with the last chords of Götterdämmerung I felt as though I’d been released from captivity. Perhaps Nibelungen is a very great work, but there’s never yet been anything more boring and prolix than this long-drawn-out affair…Of course there are some wonderful moments – but taken all in all, it’s killingly boring! How many hundreds of thousands of times nicer is Sylvia.” (Tchaikovsky. A biographical and critical study by David Brown. Pub. Victor Gollancz). Whilst we might hold Wagner’s work in higher regard than Tchaikovsky did but, I suspect more than a few of us have suffered moments of boredom in even his greatest works but, maybe not as often we we do in Tchaikovsky’s lesser works where he tries too hard to be “academic.” He was right in his admiration for Delibes’ ballet though admiring the score for its beauty but also for its dramatic continuity and he regretted not hearing it before writing Swan Lake, especially in the acts where the action is “held up” by series of dances owing very little to the “action”. He may not have known though that Delibes was a great admirer of Wagner and in Sylvia, the hunting wood nymphs owe a great deal to Wagner’s wild Valkyrie maidens.

I was intrigued by Tchaikovsky’s admiration for Sylvia and by how he retained his opinion that it was a better work than Swan Lake. Consequently, I have been listening to both scores in obsessive delight, learning to love them both but, ultimately agreeing with the great Russian that the Delibes is the superior work conceived lyrically, gorgeously in fact, but tightly integrated at a drama. I too wish Tchaikovsky had heard it before finishing his own ballet which is only really fully inspired in the magnificent second act.

The plot for Sylvia is, for all Delibes’ efforts though, a light and slightly silly one unlike the iconic conception of those swans on the lake in the moonlight. Enter John Neumeier who kept the essences of the original – The virgin goddess of the moon, Diana has a favourite nymph, Sylvia, who is her best huntress. Sylvia though falls in love with a handsome shepherd boy and then the ballet stories diverge. John Neumeier uses the music to tell a darker, more sophisticated tale of female love in different ages of woman. Everyone should see this great work and luckily it has been recorded on DVD.

I want to see more choreography by John Neumeier, especially his realization of Mahler’s epic Symphony No. 3 but that music is but a dream in 1876.

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In my musical journey through 1875, I have come across a surprizingly large number of pieces that have since become so famous that even people who don’t think they’ve heard any classical music recognise with ease. The first of these is an extract from a ballet written that year by the French composer Leo Delibes. You may think that you don’t know it but you would be wrong.

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This week I have come to the end of the year 1875 in my journey through the history of classical music – a year that turned out to be full of popular classics that have mostly held their place in the repertoire. I’ve already written about two of the most famous: Tchaikovsky’s startlingly fresh and adventurous first Piano Concerto and Bizet’s ever new opera Carmen. The year also saw the creation of Grieg’s music for Ibsen’s poetic drama Peer Gynt,  Ponchielli’s robustly romantic opera La Gioconda with is ballet music, The Dance Of The Hours, which you know even if you don’t realize it, Delibes’ second great ballet hit, Sylvia with its famous Pizzicato movement that you also know believe me. 1875 also saw the premier of the comic opera, Trial By Jury, Gilbert and Sullivan’s first successful collaboration and three symphonies that I listened to with differing enthusiasms. Tchaikovsky’s Third, it bored me years ago and, sorry about this, it still bores me today even though I can hear in the two little middle movements the emerging genius of the three great ballet scores. There was also the now largely forgotten but once celebrated composer Joachim Raff’s Seventh which was not dearly as dull as the Tchaikovsky and which even if over long and more than a little over-confident of the composer’s abilities, is an atmospheric and mostly absorbing portrait of the Raff’s childhood home around the beautiful Zurich Lake in Switzerland. The last of the three symphonies this year is by the young and thrillingly optimistic Antonin Dvorak, his Sixth and, by far, the most interesting wok of the three. Coming to early Dvorak as i have been doing recently, I am continually surprized by the strength of his work even as a relatively young man. This symphony, not his greatest, of course, is full of energy, enthusiasm, a real sense of drama and popular communication and, as in so many of this man’s compositions, full of wonderful uplifting melody. It is a young man’s work and deserves a place on the top table of popular classical music.

So that else was written in 1875 and what would I take with me, if i could only take one piece. Well, many of the pieces discussed above, I know so well, I don’t really need to hear again. The Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto came back to me as a surprizingly impressive piece, one to put with the half dozen great pieces by this man, Carmen is wonderful, great theatre and full of great and very sexy tunes and La Gioconda fits into that select bracket of pieces that I love passionately for a mix of biographical and extra-musical reasons (more of this later in another blog). I can take or leave the Grieg  whilst being newly impressed by how his maybe over-played tunes work so well when included in Ibsen’s now seldom performed drama, I am newly thrilled by Delibes’ ballet Sylvia after watching a video recording of a vibrant production from Paris – it was a pleasant surprize to hear the alto saxophone in one of its earliest outings in a symphony orchestra. As for Raff, I have followed his work with special interest through this period as my joker card always wondering how he was once spoken of in the same breath as Wagner and Brahms. I have enjoyed many of his pieces over the years and impress on you that they are more interesting than you might think but, sad to admit, he deserves his place in the canon of music’s also ran. Gilbert and Sullivan are not really my “thing” but it was lovely to hear the beginning of their witty relationship.

In the end, none of these pieces qualify for the ultimate test – the piece that should sit on your shelf representing the year 1875. This has to go to Brahms and his String Quartet No. 3, written two years after his first two published quartets and probably the twenty third quartet that he wrote, so he claims, before destroying all the others on his way to mastering this most difficult of forms and writing a work tha deserves to stand next in line to the masterpieces of Beethoven and Schubert. In this quartet, and the earlier two, Brahms consolidates his knowledge of past masters, in these pages you can hear his tributes to Handel, Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert, along with Mendelssohn and Schumann but you can also hear how music was progressing, towards Mahler, Schoenberg and beyond. It is a major work on the road to the 20th Century but also his last great step before writing the first of his masterly symphonies. I can’t wait to listen once more to his first symphony but that, my firends, has to wait until 1876.

Here is the quixotic third movement of the Third Quartet played by the Jerusalem Quartet but you really should find the whole piece and absorb it:

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