The Age of Tragedy Howard Goodall's Story of Music

Music, one of the most dazzling fruits of human civilisation,

is today a massive global phenomenon.

And so it's hard for us to imagine a time when, in centuries

gone by, people could go weeks without hearing any music at all.

Even in the 19th century, you might hear your favourite symphony four or

five times in your whole lifetime,

in the days before music could be recorded.

MUSIC: "Poker Face" by Lady Gaga

The story of music, successive waves of discoveries, breakthroughs

and inventions, is an ongoing process.

The next great leap forward may take place in a back street

of Beijing, or upstairs in a pub in South Shields.

Whatever music you're into -

Monteverdi or Mantovani,

Mozart or Motown,

Machaut or mash-up -

the techniques it relies on didn't happen by accident.

Someone, somewhere, thought of them first.

Music can make us weep or make us dance,

it's reflected the times in which it was written, it has delighted,

challenged, comforted and excited us.

In this series, I've been tracing the story of music from scratch.

To follow it on its miraculous journey, misleading jargon

and fancy labels are best put to one side.

Instead, try to imagine how revolutionary,

and how exhilarating, many of the innovations

we take for granted today were to people at the time.

There are a million ways of telling the story of music - this is mine.

So far in this series, we've travelled from cave men with

their bone flutes, to the Industrial Age where large orchestras

and frenetic pianists shook the bones of their weak-kneed audiences.

We've followed the leisurely unfolding of musical innovations in

the medieval period, up to the point in the 18th

and early 19th century, where they're coming at us thick and fast.

By 1850, music's on fire and things have got grand, gutsy and gory.

Supernatural love, destiny, death and immortality weren't

invented in our own vampire-obsessed 21st century.

The whole tragic love-and-fate thing became an obsession like no

other for composers in the second half of the 19th century.

They let loose a tidal wave of emotional roller coasters

that left their audiences in a state of exhausted, bewildered arousal.

In fact, it's hard to find a piece of music written between 1850

and 1900, that isn't about death and/or destiny.

If you were looking for a starting point for this death and destiny

craze in music, you could do a lot worse than a piece of music written

by a deluded, brilliant, emotionally unstable French composer in 1829.

The composer in question was a kind of cross between Beethoven

and Lord Byron.

His name was Hector Berlioz, his ground-breaking piece,

Symphonie Fantastique.

Berlioz's inspiration for his Fantastical Symphony was

the legend of Faust, the intellectual who sells

his soul to the devil in return for both knowledge and earthly pleasure.

Here was a handy metaphor for the tormented,

misunderstood genius whose gifts separated him from ordinary mortals.

No wonder so many 19th century composers were attracted to

the idea, like moths to a flame.

Berlioz was definitely separated from ordinary mortals,

he was a borderline psychopath.

But the music that poured forth as catharsis from his troubled mind

was immensely influential on all the other composers of the century.

Apart from anything else, he legitimised the idea that

being isolated and mad were the best qualifications for being a composer.

The French and Germans delved further into this morose

and misanthropic frame of mind as the 19th century wore on,

as we'll see.

Thank goodness, then, for Italian Opera.

In Italy, tragedy in opera wasn't caused by pacts with the devil,

but bad behaviour by humans.

Well, men.

In 19th-century Italy, opera was a popular art form.

I don't mean popular as in some people quite liked it,

I mean popular as in everyone either went to,

or knew the songs from the latest operas.

If you lived in Turin, or Milan or Naples in 1850,

opera was your iTunes.

I know this seems strange when you think of modern day opera,

with seats costing a 100 quid plus, and posh folk in DJs, but for

all of the 1800s, in Italy, opera was the people's entertainment.

IN ITALIAN:

The giant who bestrode Italian opera in the last half

of the 19th century was Giuseppe Verdi.

Verdi remained at the top of his game from his first hit in 1842,

Nabucco, to his last, Falstaff, an astonishing 51 years later.

Throughout his long and gloriously successful career of 28 operas,

Verdi managed to convey

often complex emotions and plots in an easy-to-grasp,

enchanting-to-sing Italian vocal style,

so that ordinary folk really could leave the theatre humming the tunes.

People who couldn't afford a ticket soon heard the big hits.

Barrel organists and other itinerant musicians would

hang around the theatres, learn the tunes,

and make a living playing them for punters in the street the next day.

This was the mid-19th century equivalent of a juke box.

But even Verdi himself got caught up in death-and-destiny fever.

To this already inflammatory mix, Verdi added sex.

Take La Traviata, first performed in 1853.

It's about a doomed love affair, climaxing in the tragic death,

from TB, of the once promiscuous female protagonist, Violetta.

Based on a recently published best seller,

The Lady Of The Camellias, by Alexandre Dumas,

it was a huge hit.

Of course, stories like The Lady of the Camellias

allowed Victorian audiences to have their cake and eat it,

to enjoy being spectators of what they thought of as lewd behaviour,

then have their hypocritical morals endorsed

by seeing the naughty woman who indulged in it die a horrible death.

Not before she's broken their defenceless hearts, mind,

with a farewell of choking beauty.

IN ITALIAN:

La Traviata is accessible, tuneful and melodramatic.

But its aim is to force its audience to confront its own prejudices

and double standards.

It's no coincidence that the figure of the fallen woman stalks

through so many operas,

novels and paintings of the second half of the 19th century.

With increased male, middle-class spending power,

came astonishing levels of prostitution.

La Traviata confronts this male, sexual hypocrisy that every

woman had her price and yet should be condemned for it.

Except in the theatre.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

So solid was the foundation Verdi created for populist Italian opera,

that he was able to hand over the torch to

composers like Leoncavallo, Mascagni and especially Puccini,

who carried it right into the 20th century.

If it had been left to the Italians, classical music would have

made it to the modern age without so much as a scratch.

Still completely mainstream, still loved by everyone.

But some combustible Berlioz fans, north of the Alps,

took over the helm of the ship while Verdi wasn't looking,

and all hell broke loose, and I mean hell.

Outside Italy,

music in the second half of the 19th century was totally dominated

by a French-speaking Hungarian, born in what is now Austria.

I'm talking about Franz Liszt, yes Liszt.

His music may not be as well known these days

as Brahms, Tchaikovsky or Wagner, but he was the guy

all other composers, including those three, looked up to.

He was the trail-blazer, the experimenter, the pace-setter.

To do full justice to the death-and-destiny obsession,

music needed to be turbo-charged,

and Liszt was the man who provided the rocket fuel.

Disturbing emotions were conjured up in his harmonies,

flashy set-pieces thrilled and terrified

a sensation-seeking public.

Liszt was the composer who, more than anyone else

in the 19th century recalibrated music's forces.

So it's worth looking in detail at some of the many innovations

he brought to fruition.

Liszt innovation, number one -

"The Devil has all the best tunes".

Liszt's Totentanz, "Death Dance",

triggered a craze for extravagantly ghoulish, Halloween-style music,

full of dark, deep, crashing chords and abrasive strings.

It's a craze that has yet to abate.

The legacy of this kind of up-tempo theatre of the macabre didn't

just inspire composers of the period,

like Saint-Saens with his Danse Macabre...

..or Grieg's March Of The Trolls.

But also film composers of our own time,

like the spookily brilliant Danny Elfman.

In Batman, directed by Tim Burton,

edge-of-the-seat action sequences are given

an undercurrent of avenging menace by Elfman's Lisztian score.

But Liszt's creepy death dance wasn't the only musical trick

up his sleeve.

Liszt innovation number two - "All the fun of the Fair".

Liszt was a spectacular pianist who more or less single-handedly -

or should that be two-handedly? -

forced piano builders to adopt iron frames to replace wood frames

because they simply broke under the hammering he gave them on stage.

Liszt dazzled audiences with his use of the piano as a kind

of fairground of effects.

This is Liszt in lighter, crowd-pleasing mode.

His Grand Galop provided the template for Offenbach's

hallmark Can-Cans of 20 years later.

In his thirties, Liszt became music's first international star.

Some female fans became hysterical

at the mere sight of him on the stage.

But showy turns were only a fraction of what Liszt could do at the piano.

Liszt Innovation number three - "First Impressions".

He created a style that shimmered and gleamed,

an aural equivalent of the blurred vibrancy of a painting by Monet,

where sounds, like colours, melted and smudged into each other.

This sparkling piece was written just three years after the first

impressionist exhibition had taken place in Paris, in 1874.

Liszt's incandescent paintings in sound were to be hugely

influential on a younger generation of French composers,

particularly Claude Debussy.

Debussy's glimmering piano pictures owe a huge debt to Liszt,

whom he revered, like a disciple.

Liszt's contribution to orchestral music was equally immense.

Liszt innovation number four - "Symphonic Poems".

He invented what he called the symphonic poem

and wrote 13 of them to get the new form off to a cracking start.

This is Liszt's symphonic poem, Prometheus,

inspired by the Greek myth in which the Titan, Prometheus, steals

fire from Zeus to give to mankind.

He's punished by being bound to a rock,

while a great eagle snacks on his liver, every dawn for eternity.

Pain and anguish saturate the music.

The idea behind Liszt's symphonic poems was to reduce

the traditional four movement symphony, as perfected by Beethoven,

into one concentrated shorter piece that would be a musical

response to a non-musical artwork.

By doing this, Liszt was moving away from the idea of music

as an abstract entity of its own, where audiences listened attentively

to 40 minutes of pure music, like doing a crossword or a brain-teaser.

His symphonic poems took just one scene,

a character or a snapshot, and wove the music around that.

It was Liszt more than anyone who shifted the emphasis

away from orchestral music as pure music,

to music that tried to illustrate something else.

This, for example, is the opening of his symphonic poem -

Hunnenschlacht, the one inspired by a then famous mural

of Attila the Hun's many battles.

Fought in 451 AD, against the now Christian Roman Empire

and their allies, this was a rare example in which Attila

and his heathen Huns got a sound thrashing.

Liszt's musical response to the painting attempts to depict

the ghostly armies of the battle mustering for the fight.

Interspersed amongst the whispery strings are military

outbursts from the horns.

You'll notice in the painting that there are relatively few

actual soldiers depicted, it's more ordinary men

and women who've been engulfed unwittingly in the conflict.

So Liszt is careful not to make his orchestra sound too percussive

and martial, at least to start off with.

Eventually the battle proper kicks off, and if you look closely,

you'll see the Romans carrying a gleaming golden cross.

In the midst of the battles tumult and chaos,

Liszt introduces on the trombones an old, plain song chant,

Crux Fidelis, "Faithful Cross", to represent this image in the scene.

The final three minutes or so of the piece has the plain song

theme interwoven into increasingly excited strings.

Liszt rounds off his musical account of the painting

with storming victory music,

complete with extra brass reinforcements and a pipe organ.

With the instruction, "If it can't be louder

than the whole orchestra, don't bother!"

This was music on a grander supercharged scale than had

ever been heard before, and when younger composers like Wagner

and Tchaikovsky heard it, it thrilled and inspired them.

For an audience in a concert hall it was equally awesome.

Liszt was setting a standard for everyone else to meet.

If the atmosphere of the final climax

sounds familiar to you, here's why.

It's exactly the sort of grandiose and hyper-ventilated music

you'll have heard over the years in countless movies.

In Cecil B De Mille's epic, The Ten Commandments, made in 1956,

Moses parting the Red Sea wouldn't be half as thrilling without

Elmer Bernstein's stirring score.

Liszt's symphonic poems, where the music conjures up the drama

of a scene is where the technique of how one might score a film began.

And Liszt was also ahead of the curve

on another 20th-century development.

Liszt innovation number five - "Serial Thriller".

In his Faust Symphony of 1857, Liszt includes a melodic phrase that,

while it might not sound all that revolutionary to our ears now,

was to light a long fuse, and prefigure the complete

dismantlement of the basic building blocks of Western music.

The opening theme of 12 notes may not be an instantly hummable melody.

But it does, as it happens, use up all 12 notes

of the Western scale, without repeating any of them.

So what? You may say.

Well this is what, when the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg,

68 years later, proposed a new way of organising music,

whereby a melody could only use

the 12 notes of the Western scale without repeating

any of them, a method known as 12-tone serialism, it more or less

brought about the collapse of musical civilisation as we know it.

No kidding.

But Liszt had been experimenting with it in this symphony over

half a century earlier with no fuss or bother.

Liszt had died by the time the only-12-notes-never-repeated idea

really took hold.

He might also have been appalled by the uses to which yet

another of his list of innovations was eventually put,

what used to be called "Musical Nationalism".

Or, one might say the ethnic heritage phenomenon.

Liszt innovation number six - "I can't get no self determination".

In 1848, there were a series of revolutions all over Europe.

Many of them were set in train by groups of people who shared

a common language and culture,

who wanted to gain independence from the various super powers that

controlled them, most of all the Austrian Empire, ruled from Vienna.

One of the 1848 uprisings took place in Liszt's native Hungary.

The rebels were crushed.

Liszt composed a set of what he called Hungarian Rhapsodies.

They were certainly rhapsodic, but how genuinely Hungarian were they?

Liszt, like every other composer of his time,

was a trifle confused about what indigenous Hungarian music

actually was, believing it to be the same as gypsy music,

which in turn was often muddled up with Turkish music.

We now know they were all wrong, that gypsy music was separate

and different from Hungarian folk music,

and that the music they all thought was gypsy music was in fact

Hungarian folk music, played by gypsies in Budapest and other

cities for the enjoyment of better off Hungarian and Austrian patrons.

The gypsies kept their own music to themselves.

MOURNFUL VIOLIN MUSIC

It's important to make one thing absolutely clear.

The ethnic heritage phenomenon may have been motivated by a deep

and sincere love of country and of the traditions and roots of peoples

who felt bossed about by other more powerful nations, no doubt about it.

But what it was not was a bottom-up grass-roots movement,

whereby peasant troubadours presented

the treasures of their communities to the world.

In all cases the movement sometimes called "nationalism in music"

was concocted by highly trained, sophisticated, well travelled,

middle-class composers who took bits and pieces of folk song

and dance that they'd heard and tarted them up.

The music that emerged was aimed at a mainstream audience who had

no real interest in peasant culture whatsoever.

Amongst the most popular collections of the type were

Brahms's Hungarian Dances of 1869 and 1880, for example.

They are great fun and a polished, accessible format,

by a man from Hamburg. But let's be honest about it,

if you played one of them to a passing Magyar milkmaid

on the banks of the Danube River in 1870, and asked her what it was,

she'd have likely answered, "Nice, some kind of fancy German music."

The integration of pseudo peasant style into the piano

and orchestral mainstream was an unstoppable flood.

To be fair, though,

the fashion yielded many of the best loved nuggets of 19th-century music.

Nowhere were the moral questions surrounding the borrowing

of elements from ethnic music and putting them into mainstream

music more fiercely debated than in the United States of America.

In the late 19th century, middle-class Americans were keen not

to be outdone by their European counterparts,

so they built concert halls, established orchestras

and invited star names across the Atlantic to perform.

One such high profile visitor was the Czech composer, Anton Dvorak.

But when he was head-hunted, to run a music college in New York

in 1892, at 20 times the salary he'd been getting doing the same

thing in Prague, it had an odd effect on his musical compass.

The most famous result of Dvorak's sojourn in the United States

was his 9th Symphony, From The New World,

with its now very familiar slow movement.

It's an innocently memorable tune, rather like a hymn.

Indeed it was later given holy words and turned into one,

prompting some to assume, wrongly, that Dvorak had borrowed

an actual African-American spiritual for his melody.

But there were other tunes in the symphony that triggered

a more heated debate on whose music belongs to whom.

This is one of them.

Though he denied it, Dvorak was repeatedly asked

whether this tune was an actual native American folk tune.

It certainly sounds like one.

What's more, Dvorak urged his composition

students in New York to go out and find a native American and African

American folk songs to incorporate into their classical music.

Why did it matter though,

whether the tunes were borrowed or newly composed?

It mattered because this was a period when the USA's official

policy, called "Manifest Destiny", permitted the violent appropriation

of the lands of native Americans for the benefit of white settlers.

Consciously or not, adopting the music of non-whites

who actually were oppressed was a risky strategy.

It could have emphasised just how powerless,

excluded and ripe for exploitation they were,

which is why the symphony, as well as being the source of much musical

enjoyment, has caused some soul searching as well over the years.

The moral debate as to whether it's ethical for a richer people

to adapt the music of a poorer people for their musical

entertainment, often unaccredited and unpaid, has never gone away,

and it's just as hotly debated in our own time.

Not least in the fields of blues, jazz and world music.

In 1895, Dvorak, desperately homesick, returned to

his native Bohemia, the subject of the great body of his music, which -

especially his Slavonic Dances - was a hymn to Czech nationalism.

But any awkwardness we may feel about Dvorak

and nationalism is a walk in the park compared to the hornets' nest

provoked by Liszt's most needy and argumentative disciple of them all.

Liszt innovation number seven - "Richard Wagner".

The composer Liszt most influenced was his own future son-in-law,

and self appointed saviour of all art himself, Richard Wagner.

The colossus of Wagner is an inescapable reality of

late 19th-century music, indeed, of recent western civilisation.

That's because Wagner's style was so particular, his agenda so ambitious

and his stature as a German national figure so all-embracing, that he

was an act no normal mortal composer could hope to follow.

Worshipped unlike any other composer in history,

the claims for Wagner's status is the architect of modern theatre

and the godfather of modern music have been, well, Wagnerian.

But how well do those extravagant claims stand up to scrutiny,

and how much in fact did he owe to Liszt?

Wagner has been credited with innovations to music

development he did not in fact innovate.

Take harmony, for example.

The cliche is that Wagner began dismantling the way harmony,

the manipulation of chords, had been working happily for a few 100 years.

One way he did this dismantling, was to take a chisel to

the common triad, the basic building block of all western harmony.

So he'd take a simple chord, like C minor, and squash it.

Alternatively he'd take the simple chord of C Major, and stretch it.

These techniques are known in the trade as diminishing

and augmenting chords.

Diminishing or augmenting chords does strange things to the way

they behave, they become unstable,

creating a sense of nervousness, or anxiety and uncertainty.

Wagner uses them prolifically in his operas to evoke pain

or anguish, or to tell you something grim is about to happen.

In the first part of the Ring Cycle, for example, angry, diminished

chords are often used to signify the dangerous power of the ring itself.

Diminished and augmented chords, Wagner may have made his own,

but they were first used in abundance by Liszt.

His Faust Symphony of 1855, yes,

he did one too, begins with an anguished opening theme

entirely made of augmented chords, broken up into a tune.

Very soon there is an outbreak of demonic pain,

punched out in a series of diminished chords.

While we're on the subject of chords,

diminished and augmented, and Wagner's debt to Liszt,

we need to tackle Wagner's most famous chord.

So famous in fact that it has its own name, lengthy tomes have

been written about it and academics have based whole PhDs on it.

It is called the Tristan chord.

The Tristan chord comes from Wagner's opera, Tristan and Isolde,

and whilst it has been accorded the kind of mystique and reverence

usually reserved for the Holy Grail, or Einstein's special theory

of relativity, it is, when all is said and done, wait for it,

a diminished chord.

Wagner's debt to Liszt is so great that it's fair to make

the perhaps shocking statement that there is no innovation,

no technique, no supposed great leap forward, in expression or style.

anywhere in Wagner's monumental output that is not found

somewhere first in Liszt.

But, and this is a big but,

notwithstanding Wagner's frequent borrowings from Liszt,

it will be churlish not to stress that the greatest composers

have always tended to synthesize the styles and currents of their

time, and Wagner's music in any case has far better tunes than Liszt's.

Tristan and Isolde is an out and out masterpiece,

with sweeping yearning themes, deserving of its place

in music's pantheon, whatever it may or may not have innovated.

Like Verdi's La Traviata, 12 years earlier, it's about a doomed

love affair - death and destiny, of course.

There is however one very important difference between Verdi and Wagner.

Wagner chose quite deliberately to restructure opera in direct

defiance of the established tradition, as developed

over 200 years, mostly by Italians.

The Italian way was to divide up the opera

into clearly defined songs, called arias,

narrative prose-like singing that carried the plot, called arioso,

duets, trios and sweeping choruses with a bit of ballet thrown in.

Italian opera was therefore like a variety show.

Wagner threw this out and replaced it with a continuous musical flow,

with all those elements mixed in together into one seamless whole.

He decided that his best source material wouldn't be other

operas, but the powerful symphonic tradition of the concert hall,

that was dominated by Germans, especially Beethoven,

and wannabe Germans, like Berlioz and Liszt.

What's more, Wagner's main subjects were thoroughly German too.

His operas are made up of stories from history and myth,

which put archetypal Germanic heroes to the test,

like Tannhauser, Lohengrin and the Mastersingers.

Or they concern themselves with sacrifice and denial, like

Tristan and Isolde and Parsifal, or they confront the inevitability

of the corruption of power, or all of the above at once,

as is the case in Wagner's monumental four opera cycle,

The Ring Of The Nibelung.

It took Wagner 26 years to create his epic Ring Cycle.

To stage it, Wagner had his own theatre erected,

designed to his own specifications at Bayreuth in Bavaria.

For its first complete performance,

he decreed that the house lights should be dimmed.

This was such a novelty at the time it drew gasps from the audience.

He also hid the orchestra under the stage,

and instigated theatrical effects never before attempted.

Wagner's ambition was nothing less than the creation of the

art form of the future, in which all the arts would combine and fuse,

led by the unequally greater power of music.

In order to do so, he needed a tool kit of components

and systems at his command.

One such technique is his use of fragments of melody,

or rhythm, or harmony as calling cards of a character,

a place an idea or a thing. These fragments, or cells,

from which he created the whole web of the music,

are called "leitmotifs".

Whatever Wagner-worshipers tell you,

Wagner didn't invent the leitmotif idea, the credit for that lies

squarely with the opera composer and distinguished writer

ETA Hoffman, 60-odd years earlier. Just thought you should know.

Wagner perfected the leitmotif technique in all his mature operas,

particularly his Ring Cycle.

But in his final opera, Parsifal of 1882, he went one stage further,

giving his leitmotifs what he hoped would be sacred power.

Amongst Parsifal's 20 or so principal leitmotifs,

for example, there's one for the Holy Grail itself,

one of the key ingredients in the legend on which

the plot is based, which sounds like an Amen in sacred music.

And there's one for the concept of suffering.

Parsifal himself has one, the hero of the story,

an innocent fool who is redeemed by pity.

His motif is usually played

by the heroic trombones and horns, naturally.

Once you start combining, modifying and transforming these tiny

cells of melody or harmony, though, the possibilities are virtually

endless, which is how Wagner derives such a richness from the technique.

IN GERMAN:

The second musical hallmark Wagner puts to work in Parsifal

is a technique called "chromaticism".

It comes from the Greek word meaning "colour"

and is the musical equivalent

of filling a canvas with thousands of colours instead of just a few.

In the music of Mozart or Beethoven, say, there was

a hierarchy of chords, a bit like the pieces in a game of chess.

The king chord was the chord of the key the piece was written in,

C Major for example, then there were queen, bishop, knight

and castle chords, all more important than the humble pawns.

What chromaticism did was to weaken these hierarchical

relationships, eventually making all chords as powerful as the others.

This did away with the sense of "coming home" in a piece of music.

It was a deliberate attempt to make harmonies unfamiliar,

unstable, and more exotic in flavour.

In the opening prelude of Parsifal's third act, the music shifts

and slides around, deliberately avoiding settling on one key

or chord. This is extreme chromaticism at work, you're

meant to feel disorientated and in the grip of mysterious powers.

The harmony's in meltdown because Wagner has used chromaticism

to put you in an un-homely and unsettling place.

As for the plot, well Parsifal doesn't have one,

so much as a series of ritualistic scenes.

Set in Medieval Spain, it's a quasi-religious happening,

set against a parable about the Holy Grail,

guarded by the Knights Templar in their secret castle, Montsalvat.

The work is complete with symbols, magic, and time travel,

but there's a deadly serious idea,

that personal redemption is achieved by

resisting temptation and seeking an understanding of fellow suffering.

Compassion has a healing and liberating power.

There's nothing mad or fanciful about this idea,

and the first and third acts of Parsifal,

the acts that take place in the Grail's mountain

refuge of Montsalvat, contain music of breathtaking grandeur

and beauty, to match the aspiration of the beliefs underpinning it.

IN GERMAN:

Parsifal is the work of a mountainous talent,

seeing to give meaning to the world around him,

to guide humanity towards his vision of enlightenment.

There's another side to the philosophy behind Parsifal, though,

a side that for some Wagner-worshipers flipped a switch.

It's not possible to side step the fact that the climax of this

crusader story focuses on the magical properties of the spear

that allegedly pierced the side of the crucified Jesus of Nazareth.

The pure blood of Christ, the Holy Grail containing it,

and the sacrificial significance of Good Friday

are all presented as both real, and miraculous.

The holy blood itself is seen as purifying, purging the evil,

the weak and the sinful.

Plotting against the innocent Christian Parcifal

is the Darth Vader of the tale, a malicious sorcerer called Klingsor.

Until the 1950s portrayed in Bayreuth

productions as of Arabic or Jewish origin.

IN GERMAN:

He's accompanied by a possessed shape-shifter, Kundry,

a reincarnation of the cursed Jewish princess, Herodias.

Klingsor forces Kundry to seduce Parsifal in the hope

of contaminating his purity.

Kundry even enlists the help of her teenage

daughters in the task of seducing him.

It's not exactly a family show, Parsifal(!)

The much abused slave-whore Kundry, having converted to Christianity at

the last moment, and been released from the curse that's trapped

her in time, is duly killed off at the moment the pure Parsifal becomes

chief protector of the Grail, blessed by a dove from heaven.

Kundry's final humiliation, and the triumph of the Aryan hero,

Parsifal, were not very subtly concealed metaphors for what

Wagner wanted to happen to German culture.

Politically, his agenda was to give the Germans

a sense of their historical destiny.

And to fulfil that destiny, as he conceived it,

he firmly believed that it would be necessary to remove all Jews

and all traces of Jewish culture from the German Reich.

Unfortunately, in the newly unified Germany

of the late 19th century, anti-Semitism was rampant,

but Wagner's views were excessive even by the standards of the time.

Within just 40 years, the anti-Semitism

and ultra-German nationalism of the 1880s had

evolved into the cancerous ideology of Nazism.

It's no good pretending Wagner wasn't accessory to this

slide into xenophobic vitriol.

In one of his many anti-Semitic publications Wagner said all

contact with Jews was insufferable to any true German,

and that only their annihilation would solve the Jewish question.

The Nazi top brass treated Wagner's opera house

at Bayreuth as a holy shrine, a place of pilgrimage and reverence.

They were welcomed with open arms by Wagner's

surviving family members and the Bayreuth elite.

The gleaming hostess here is Winifred Wagner,

an English woman who was Wagner's daughter-in-law.

Bayreuth, in fact, had become Montsalvat itself, the mountain-top

resting place of the Holy Grail, the high temple of Aryan culture.

Knowing how the message of Parsifal became distorted by Nazism,

it's uncomfortable for us to hear of Wagner's

sublime music without wincing.

In one way, this became the most dangerous music ever written,

because despite being motivated by a devotion to compassion,

it inspired hatred.

Parsifal was put on 23 times in Berlin alone

during the period of the Third Reich.

It's not so far-fetched to suggest that without his link to

the Nazis, most people who are not hardcore opera lovers

would by now have lost interest in Wagner.

That may sound harsh, but the musical evidence of Wagner's impact

is nothing like as convincing as his disciples would have us believe.

Everywhere you look in the 1880s, outside Bayreuth,

you see composers carrying on as if nothing has happened.

I'm not just talking about Brahms, in Vienna, ploughing on with

his symphonies undeterred, but about Offenbach in Paris,

with his knockabout satire and frilly knickers, Johann Strauss the

Younger in waltz-mad Vienna, Bizet's sensuous Carmen, with its catchy

tunes, or Gilbert and Sullivan's witty and effervescent operettas.

These were broad, unthreatening entertainments, that anyone,

with the price of a ticket could enjoy.

Which is precisely why dedicated followers of Wagner,

looked down their noses at such flotsam and jetsam.

Mass audiences weren't deterred by the snobbery directed at them,

they never are, but what became misleadingly

labelled as serious classical music started to believe it was

in some other realm, untainted by all that light, frothy musical fun.

Wagner's acolytes were happy to

retreat into their increasingly exclusive, and lofty club, where

only the initiated, the learned, and the bold would venture to tread.

Their attitude would eventually lead the composer, Arnold Schoenberg

to declare, in 1946, those who compose because they want to

please others, and have audiences in mind, are not real artists.

This disastrous schism between

high and low art had its seeds in Wagner's supreme arrogance,

like that of a high priest swallowing up all

the arts into his musical blueprint for the destiny of human kind.

It was understandable that Wagner might want to

speculate about the artwork of the future, one that would encompass

with it all the arts, centred on human dramas of love, death

and destiny, but it wasn't to be his vision that fulfilled the promise.

Motion pictures were the artwork of the future, a technological

breakthrough that stuttered into life just after his death.

Wagner's main contribution to the music that followed him

was that all the key composers of the next 30 years,

particularly outside Germany, were inspired not to emulate him,

but to somehow find an alternative and completely repudiate him.

In the next programme - an age of revolution more radical

and savage than anything Wagner could have imagined

was about to tear music apart.

Rebellion and subversion, political and musical, was in the air.

MUSIC: "Procession of the Sage - The Sage" by Igor Stravinsky

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd