As a rather moody eighteen year old, I had a Summer holiday job working as a waiter in the small and very pretty Sussex village of Alfriston.  For over two months I lived in the building on the left of the photograph below called, accurately enough, the Tudor House. It was indeed a largely Sixteenth Century building with earlier bits discernable if you looked hard enough.  It was a beautiful if somewhat spooky house owned by a couple whose son, about my age, was away for the Summer doing something much more exciting than working as a waiter. I inherited his room at the front on the left hand side with a very atmospheric view down the High Street.

It was mostly very hard work. My job was to get the place ready every morning in time to open for morning coffee then to serve the pre-lunch customers – mostly coffee and scones – and then to gradually set up the tables for lunch when I was joined by two or three other waiters or waitresses who travelled in by bus from a nearby town. Alfriston was, and I guess still is, a very busy tourist village in the Summer so we were kept pretty active serving meals indoors and in the garden at the back from Noon until 2.30 every day and then taking half an hour for our own lunch before turning the restaurant round again for afternoon tea when even larger crowds, often in coach-loads,  descended on us for cream teas with cakes and icecream. Two or three evenings a week I served dinner too so there wasn’t a lot of time to mess around.

I remember the Summer of my eighteenth year as hot and long but then that might be true of everyone’s memories of that most atmospheric of times in our lives. I enjoyed living in this old house and, once I had decided not to be spooked by stories of the place’s ghost and learnt to ignore those bumps in the night, I felt almost at home. The owners mostly left me to myself when I was off duty so I could spend my time idling with a book, playing with the two large Alsatian dogs or the two rather sinister black cats hoping that my waiter’s feet would eventually stop aching all the time. They did and soon it was as if I had always been a waiter in this lovely place.

The proprietors’ son was obviously cherished, if not spoiled, by his parents because, much to my envy, they had build him a chalet at the bottom of the garden that he used as his study/den and, most enviably of all, because it was a long way from the house and the neighbours, he was given a powerful stereo system that he could play away from prying ears. I was determined to get in there and to try it out as I had only ever heard hi-fi equipment in Music classes at school. I was scheduled to go to music college that Autumn and music was, as it still is, my obsession.

My relatives had been buying me opera recordings since my early teens but the newer stereo recordings had to be played in boring old mono. My wages were never going to buy a decent stereo player so I had to content myself with envious daydreams about that little wooden building at the bottom of the garden. On a rare day off, I returned home and secreted away my latest opera recording, Ponchielli’s La Gioconda (written as you may have guessed if you have been following these blogs) in 1875. This story came back to me because I have just been listening to music written that year as part of my self-imposed journey through the history of classical music.

The composer, Amilcare Ponchielli, is not one of the greats but in this passionate, tuneful and wonderfully melodramatic opera, he found his voice and wrote something that instantly blew the moodily eighteen year old me away. I just had to hear it on that stereo system with the giant speakers I had spotted through the window. I thought up various devious ways of getting in there but in the end just asked the owners and they said yes.

Now this was my first solo experience with very expensive hi-fi and excited would be an understatement for the way I felt. I was free that evening, it was one of those endlessly light Summer evenings when the temperature never dropped below very hot. I went down there with the key, sorted out the controls, put on the first LP and sat back across the room on an indulgently comfortable sofa ignoring the sauna conditions soon generated by having to keep the windows closed. Now for me there is only one volume for Italian opera and that is as loud as you can make it. The  stereo system didn’t disappoint and the little wooden shed truly rocked.

The role of La Gioconda was taken by the great Italian soprano Renata Tebaldi, nearing the end of her career as the possessor of the best lyric soprano voice of her generation. For her twilight career, she decided to let rip and in this recording threw caution to the wind and gave it her considerable best plus a whole lot more. The other stars met her on her own level and fulfilled the promise of this opera where all the main characters are totally out of control and often hysterical  through the extremes of passionate love. This was, in my opinion, what love was meant to be like. The opera performance that evening will always play in my memory as one of the most exciting moments of my life – sad though that might seem to you.

The evening turned to night and the last note faded leaving me silent, overwhelmed and thrilled. I savoured the moment for as long as I could but then there was a knock on the door.

Yes, you may have guessed, what had been the right volume to my ears, had been received as an outrageous onslaught on the tranquil sensibilities of Alfriston’s villagers. Apparently there had been telephone calls from irate people way down the High Street but the owners of the restaurant, bless them, didn’t tell me about it until the music ended.

I couldn’t repeat the experience, of course, as I wasn’t interested in playing the music pianissimo but I didn’t regret it or, in my youthful arrogance, express any remorse. There could never be a more exciting way to experience the all-or-nothing glories of Ponchielli’s opera. It still had that power when I played the recording again, decades later, as part of my nerdy musical project.

If you dare, play this clip from the recording as loud as you can and, hopefully you will see what I mean when the two main females, Renata Tebaldi and Marilyn Horne sing ferociously in a vocal competition to see who loved the poor tenor hero , Enzo, the most. Horne, as Laura, sings “I love him as the very breath of life!” but Gioconda counters with “I love him like the lion loves when it’s drawn to blood, the wind to flight, the lightning to the summit…and the eagle to the sun!” These women are not to be messed with, either of them.

This is the music I still hear when I walk down that quaintly beautiful Sussex village high street:

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In the second of my ballet extracts centred round famous tunes written in 1875, I have moved to an grandly melodramtic Italian opera, La Gioconda written that year by the one hit wonder Amilcare Ponchielli  (1834-1886) who was one of those unfortunate Italian opera composers, like Pietro Mascagni (1863-1919) and Ruggero Leoncavallo (1857-1919)  who only managed, no matter how hard he tried, to write a popular opera once. The work has never been forgotten because it contains so many great tunes none more tuneful than the famous theme from the ballet scene from the opera known as The Dance Of The Hours. You may think you don’t know this but, yet again this week, you would be wrong.

Here it is in vividly decadent performance from Barcelona starring Letizia Giuliani and Angel Corelli choreographed by Gheorghe lancu. I hope you are not easily embarrassed by bare chests because both Angel and, er, no pun dared, Litizia give an uninhibited display and some great dancing:

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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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