Episode 1 Howard Goodall's Story of Music

MUSIC: Orchestration of "Poker Face" by Lady Gaga

# Can't read my, can't read my... #

Whatever music you're into,

Monteverdi or Mantovani, Mozart or Motown, Machaut or mashup,

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

Someone, somewhere thought of them first.

These days, we take many - if not most - of the innovations

laboriously worked out by our distant musical ancestors for granted.

And it's a shock to project yourself back to a time

when these techniques didn't exist.

To take the example

of one of the greatest leaps forward in music's whole history.

If I want to write down an opera and get you to sing it,

I don't have to stand there and whistle it to you and hope you'll remember all the tunes.

I can write them down. But consider what it must have been like

to sing in a Medieval abbey or cathedral in the days before

anyone had puzzled out a workable method

of being able to write music down.

When a monk or nun sang plainchant in the centuries

before about 800 AD, what they had in front of them was the text,

in Latin, of what they were singing. Just the text.

They had to memorise the melody. All this!

This is one of the most spectacular feats of memory in the history

of the human race. But it's also a bit mad.

It might take ten years of daily repetition and practice

to memorise the entire plainsong repertoire for the church year.

So it was deemed highly desirable to find a way of reminding yourself

what the tunes for any bit of text might be.

This is a 3rd-century Christian hymn written in Ancient Greek.

Above the words, tantalisingly,

is a fledgling attempt at writing the tune down.

Alas, so far at least,

no-one can agree on what exactly it's meant to sound like.

Hundreds of years went by until squiggles came along.

That's not their real name, which is neumes,

but squiggles are what they are.

This is a page from the Winchester Troper,

the oldest surviving manuscript of organum anywhere in the world.

It's the painstaking work of Anglo-Saxon monks.

What it shows is the Latin text that was intended to be sung,

with squiggles above the words and in the margin.

The idea of the squiggles was to give some indication of

whether the note of the melody went up or down over any given syllable,

so they're better than nothing. But the squiggles had a major flaw.

They're essentially a way of jogging your memory

of a tune you already know.

They're rubbish at teaching you a new tune from scratch.

That's because they're not very good at indicating just how high or low

successive notes are supposed to be,

like a map without longitude or latitude.

The breakthrough came in around 1000 in the Italian city of Arezzo,

and it was the brainchild of a musical monk called Guido,

known nowadays of Guido of Arezzo.

Guido's methods were simple and clear.

First of all, he gave these squiggles, or neumes,

a standardised, easy-to-read form.

So each note had its own symbol, or blob.

He then drew four straight lines onto which the notes,

or blobs, would be placed.

One of the lines he made red to give you a fixed bearing

as against all other tunes, a bit like the musical equivalent

of the equator, or the Greenwich Meridian.

So wherever the note, or blob, is placed,

represents its pitch position, that is, whether it's an A, B, or C.

# La. #

If the note goes up, the blob goes up.

-HIGHER:

-# La. #

And if it goes down, the blob goes down, step by step.

# Ole, ole, ole, ole, ole, ole. #

Before Guido, you'd think up a tune and then teach it to everyone

you know, and hope they pass it on without mucking it up.

After Guido, music could be fixed on a page

and could be reproduced by someone who'd never heard the tune before.

Guido's method has been refined over the years,

by indicating the duration of notes, for example,

but it's essentially the same system we still use to notate music today.

# But every time she asks me Do I look OK?

# I say

# When I see your face

# There's not a thing that I would change

# Cos you're amazing

# Just the way you are

# And when you smile... #

The ability to lay out multiple lines of melody

on a kind of musical spreadsheet allowed composers to plot out

far more complicated musical structures.

This was to set music on a course towards greater

and greater sophistication,

all thanks to the bright idea of a monk from Arezzo.

By 1400, musicians had at their fingertips

a workable system of notation that could denote rhythm as well as melody,

and a reasonably sophisticated grasp of polyphony -

the interweaving and layering of voices on top of one-another.

They also had a basic selection of instruments

to complement the human voice.

One final piece of the jigsaw still needed to click into position.

In around 1400, harmony took a huge leap forward,

a leap that was to change the way music sounded for ever.

We still live with that change today.

Before 1400, when composers layered notes on top of each other

they only chose a very limited menu of possible note combinations.

There was the basic octave.

And there were two other note combinations, both of which

Medieval musicians called perfect,

because they were thought to be Godly.

The perfect fourth.

And the perfect fifth.

And before 1400, that's more or less it.

In this famous piece, for example, all the harmonies are sung

either four or five notes apart from the basic melody line.

# Gaudete, gaudete Christus est natus

# Ex Maria Virgine, gaudete... #

To our ears, accustomed to the subsequent 600 years of harmony,

there's something missing, which makes the music sound bare

and a little cold.

# Tempus adest gratiae Hoc quod optabamus

# Carmina laetitiae Devote reddamus

DRUMS START

# Gaudete, gaudete Christus est natus

# Ex Maria Virgine, gaudete. #

What's missing is a combination of notes that,

before 1400, composers had virtually ignored.

FEMALE CHORAL SINGING

The man who did use this note combination set things up

for what was to be a giant leap for harmony.

He was an English composer called John Dunstaple.

Dunstaple introduced the mighty but imperfect third.

Why is the third imperfect?

If you count just three notes up from your starting point, C,

you arrive at E. Why isn't this third a perfect distance?

The reason is that the third, unlike the fourth and fifth,

has two different versions, what we'd call now a major version

and a minor version. It is Mr Ambiguous.

You can see just how ambiguous by counting further up the keyboard.

If I count three notes from D, for example, I come to F,

creating a minor third, ditto E to G.

But F to A, like C to E, is a major third.

The fact that the third can be either major or minor,

depending on where you start counting from,

might sound like only a slight technical difference, but it's not.

The pivot between the major third and the minor third is the pivot

upon which all western music balances.

Very broadly speaking, one is happy and one is sad,

and harmony's using these thirds make the music richer, more subtle

and more affecting.

FEMALE CHORAL SINGING

But allowing the leans-both-ways third into music

had one other big by-product. Let's start with C again.

We'll count up three steps and find ourselves at E, a major third.

Then if we carry on up another three steps to G,

we've created a minor third.

But what happens if we play all of these three notes together?

All these three notes played together are called a triad,

and triads are the bread and butter of all western music.

PIANO PLAYS

Here's a song you may recognise which is built on triads.

# Morning has broken

# Like the first morning

# Blackbird has spoken

# Like the first bird

# Praise for the singing

# Praise for the morning... #

15th-century musicians discovered that triads had an important

effect on each other when they were mixed together.

It's to do with the constituent notes of the chords.

The C major triad, for example, contains two of the same notes

as the E minor triad, and is therefore closely related to it.

Similarly the E minor triad shares two of its notes with

the G major triad, and they are closely related.

Mixing together chords that are closely related to each other

creates a mood of harmonious smoothness,

like melding adjacent colours in the spectrum.

Triads have another great benefit.

They can also create the sense of home in a piece of music.

Let me demonstrate with a famous spiritual song

from a few hundred years later - Amazing Grace.

In the first phrase of the song,

we start on one chord under the words "amazing grace".

# Amazing grace. #

Then we shift to another one on the word "sweet".

# How sweet. #

Then home again to where we started.

# The sound. #

That safe landing back to the chord we think of as home

is called a cadence, or ending.

# Amazing grace

# How sweet the sound. #

Everything feels right about that little journey of chords.

We felt good returning to where we started, at the end of the phrase.

In the second phrase, we go on another short chord journey.

# That saved a wretch like me. #

And we have another little cadence by moving to a new chord

on the word "me".

Again, this journey feels logical and satisfying,

we're being led from one place to another.

# I once was lost

# But now I'm found

# Was blind but now I see. #

You can quite clearly hear that there's nothing haphazard

about the choice of chords under the tune, it's meant to be.

What's at work here is a logic in the chords. They're obeying

strict laws like the laws of gravity, or the orbit of planets,

whereby some chords exert more power and influence than others.

Discovering the power of triads

was like discovering a chemical reaction.

Composers immediately sensed that something massive

and transformative had happened.

From now on, the basic chord - the triad,

one, three, five - was king.

By 1600, after centuries of painstaking experiment

on the part of often anonymous musicians,

the musical toolbox we still use today was taking shape.

Music had become a rich mix of sacred and secular,

instrumental and vocal.

But one thing music rarely did

was express complex, let alone conflicting, emotions.

The next stage on music's journey

was for a composer who could use dissonance -

deliberate clashes of notes and chords

to conjure up subtle emotions.

What's more, almost anything you'd hear around 1600

was on a relatively small scale.

The time was ripe for someone, somewhere,

to start creating long, substantial forms

that would last a whole evening and leave audiences cheering for more.

Which is exactly what happened.

Opera was born.

The man of the moment, one of the ten most influential

composers of all time, was Claudio Monteverdi.

In his hands, opera went from zero to hero.

DRAMATIC INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC

In opera, music is at the service of the drama, and

so it needs to be able to express complex, even conflicting, emotions.

Luckily, Monteverdi had already spent years

trying to do exactly that

with his sophisticated passion-filled madrigals.

To do so, he had begun to recalibrate harmony.

Let's look at just one of his madrigals,

which put cats among pigeons, even in his own time.

It's from the Fifth Book Of Madrigals of 1605,

and it's called O Mirtillo, Mirtill'Anima Mia,

Oh, Myrtle, Myrtle, My Soul. Listen to this bit.

# Che chiami crudelissima

# Amarilli. #

It's obvious Monteverdi is dipping in and out of

all kinds of chords that don't seem comfortably related to each other.

He wants you to feel surprised or intrigued, especially if it enhances

the words of the poem. So on these words,

"Che chiami crudelissima, Amarilli,"

"The one you call cruellest, Amaryllis,"

he creates a series of deliberate clashes of chord,

called a dissonance, or suspension.

# Come sta il cor di questa... #

Instead of sticking to chords that had close affinities with

each other, he deliberately mixed up unrelated chords

and exploited the strange, disorientating sounds this produced.

VOCALS OVERLAP # Che chiami

# Crudelissima

# Amarilli... #

It was music that could manipulate our emotions that Monteverdi

brought into opera. He also introduced another ingredient,

a dramatic aural effect that had been invented in Venice,

then one of the world's richest and most powerful city-states.

Its huge, cavernous basilica, St Mark's, employed some of the

best musicians in Europe, including, for a time, Monteverdi himself.

On top of all this, the building served as a kind of musical

and acoustical laboratory.

An uncle-and-nephew team called Gabrieli had developed

a kind of precursor of surround sound at St Mark's,

achieved by placing groups of singers

and instrumentalists in different parts of the building

and having them sing or play alternately.

The technical term for the technique is polychoral, many choirs.

MUSIC ALTERNATES FROM LEFT TO RIGHT

Monteverdi knew and admired this polychoral style

and thought it would work alongside his intimate,

emotionally-charged madrigal style when he came to writing opera.

Monteverdi didn't invent opera,

a Florentine composer called Peri did, in 1597.

But Monteverdi did write the first good opera, Orfeo,

which premiered in Mantua in 1607.

He was aiming for maximum emotional effect,

maximum narrative clarity, maximum impact, even shock, and wasn't

going to obey anyone's rules about what he could or could not do.

FEMALE OPERATIC SINGING

What's more, Monteverdi invented a new combination of instruments

never before gathered together.

He borrowed old and new styles, he used choral music,

he told the stories through characters

directly expressing themselves to the audience.

Almost everything about Orfeo was then a novelty.

It was loud, it was long and it was modern.

And let's not forget how liberating it all must have been,

because, as musical techniques had been developing,

century by century, so too had the ability to express more complex,

subtle and unexpected emotions along the way.

Monteverdi was using music plus.

Throughout the 17th century, composers and musicians had become fascinated - even obsessed -

with what we'd now call chord progressions.

They discovered that some chords have a kind of magnetic attraction

to other chords, but there was a problem.

The tuning systems in place at the time

meant that you could only modulate - move from one key to another -

within a very limited palate of chords,

without creating horrible, out-of-tune sounds.

But in around 1700, a compromise was reached -

a tuning system that allowed you to jump around

from one chord to any other at your heart's content.

It could be, in fact, the single most important development

in all western music.

It was called Equal Temperament, and this is how it worked.

On a modern, equal tempered keyboard I can play in any,

or all of the available 12 key families to my heart's content,

so I can play this...

HE PLAYS "Ain't Misbehavin'" by Fats Waller

..in the key that Fats Waller played it in the 1930s, E flat,

or in the key of G.

Or C.

Or, for that matter, F#.

Moving from key family to key family like that

- the posh name is modulation - on one instrument

is what Equal Temperament made possible.

It also made it possible for lots of different instruments

to play in tune with each other,

which, believe it or not, they couldn't easily do before.

So it's worth finding out how this happened.

Looking again at our piano layout, we see that if we find the note C,

for example, it occurs eight times from bottom to top of the keyboard.

We also notice that there are 12 other notes between each of the Cs.

This is the thing.

As it happens, in western music there are in fact at least 19

sub-divisions between one C and another, not 12.

This is what they sound like.

For some instruments,

playing all these squashed-together notes wasn't an issue.

Cellos, say, are flexible, because you can change a note

by sliding your finger by tiny degrees along the string.

But instruments like the trumpet and piano can't play them,

because their mechanical valves, buttons, tabs and keys are fixed.

It's like the difference between this swannee whistle,

with its flexible pitch...

..and this recorder, with its fixed pitch.

What Equal Temperament did was effectively to abolish

seven of the 19 sub-divisions, and create a standardised 12

that would swallow up the other little notes.

So what used to be the two separate notes, F# and G flat,

became one all-purpose note that accommodated both.

B#, even though it still gets written out in music,

got gobbled up as a separate entity by the note C, and so on.

In their natural state, the notes of the octave are not evenly spaced.

What Equal Temperament did

was to equalise the distance between notes.

Thanks to this compromise, you could now jump from chord to chord

as often as you liked.

The new system of tempering, or tuning, worked.

Indeed, it was JS Bach himself who, in around 1722,

presented the most conclusive evidence that it worked.

He composed two books of pieces to be played in all the new

12 standardised keys, both major and minor.

He even called the books The Well-Tempered Clavier, or keyboard.

What followed Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier were 300 years in which

instruments and our ears were calibrated to Equal Temperament.

One reason the traditional music of say, Indonesia, sounds exotic

and mysterious to western ears,

is because it uses a different system of tuning.

Traditional music apart, though,

Equal Temperament has now been adopted all over the globe.

It's hard to exaggerate the importance of the arrival

and triumph of Equal Temperament

as a standard across the industrialised world.

Like the adoption of the Greenwich Meridian, which made everyone

perceive the map and their place in the world differently,

Equal Temperament altered the mindset

of everyone who enjoyed music.

The modern population of the world now hears all music

through the filter, some would say distortion, of Equal Temperament.

Everyone alive now has a different idea of what sounds "in tune",

or "off key", to everyone alive in, say, 1600,

before Equal Temperament became the norm.

Around 1700 came the invention of a wondrous instrument

that was to become the emperor and empress of music

over the next few centuries.

What we now call the piano

was invented by a Florentine instrument-builder

called Bartolomeo Cristofor.

The unique selling point of the new instrument,

making it different from all the previous harpsichords,

clavichords, spinets and virginals that went before it,

was its ability to play soft and loud,

or in Italian, piano e il forte.

The harpsichord plucked its strings, and so no matter what pressure

you exerted on the keys, the notes always came out the same volume.

Cristofori's invention, instead of plucking the strings,

tapped them with a gentle hammer, tipped with deer skin,

and the harder you hit the key, the harder the hammer hit the string,

resulting potentially in different levels of volume for every note.

A friend of JS Bach's, Gottfried Silbermann, began

manufacturing pianos, and although Bach played on a few prototypes

and even advised on their design, he didn't seem that impressed.

Ironically, it was Bach's son, Johann Christian, living in London,

who was to become the champion of the new instrument,

30 or so years later.

Thus paving the way for the young Mozart

and others to follow his lead.

By the time this early piano piece was written,

believe it or not, the music of Johann Christian's father, the great

Johann Sebastian Bach, had already started to fall out of favour.

For 100 years after his death, in 1750, Bach was a forgotten,

unperformed composer,

until Mendelssohn drew attention to his genius in the 19th century.

If Bach had written operas rather than church music,

it might have been a different story.

Opera composers have always been accorded more respect

and fame than church composers.

Luckily for his great contemporary, Handel, opera was his thing,

at least to start with.

Handel and Bach were born just 80 miles

and four weeks apart in 1685, but never met.

Whilst Bach stayed firmly rooted his whole life in his native

North Germany, Handel was more the adventurer and entrepreneur.

In his long career, he took full advantage of the many technical

and stylistic advances in music

that swept across Europe in the early 1700s.

And there's one other big thing that had changed by 1750.

The arrival of you, the audience.

And you, we, made a massive difference to the future of music.

Before the arrival of a paying public, with its own preferences

and appetites, music had depended on the whims of cardinals or princes.

Now, commercial opera houses and concert halls

opened their doors to anyone who had the price of a ticket.

It was this new and fickle audience that Handel quickly learnt to serve.

Though he spent some of his youth in Italy, Handel wrote

most of his masterpieces after moving to London in 1710.

MUSIC: Giulio Cesare in Egitto - Aria - Al Lampo Dell'armi

Handel had two reasons for coming to London.

One was that his former boss in Germany had become

King George I, in 1714.

The King and his successor, George II,

commissioned music for royal pageants from Handel,

including still famous works, like Zadok The Priest,

the Water Music and Music For The Royal Fireworks.

Handel also settled in London because it was

already on its way to becoming the biggest and richest city in Europe.

The rapidly rising middle class had money to spend on music,

and for a while, they were swept up

in a Europe-wide craze for Italian opera.

The use today of Italian terms like aria, libretto, prima donna

and diva began at that time.

Handel wrote 39 operas, in Italian, for the London stage.

In London, though, the Italian opera boom was short lived.

Its death knell was sounded by a home-grown work,

The Beggar's Opera, produced in 1728.

The black musical comedy of Polly Peachum, Jenny Diver

and MacHeath, and the underworld of Soho, was a full-on

parody of the posh folks' mania for Italian opera.

It was a huge, long-running success.

It didn't do Handel any favours, though.

His earnestly serious Italian-style operas

now seemed out of sync with the public mood.

Casting around for something else to do, he found an unlikely,

unwitting ally in the shape of the Pope.

As well as banning women from singing in church,

the Vatican in the early 17th century had from time to time

forbidden opera, which the Pope thought was too damned rude.

The result was the rise of the oratorio, a kind of opera

that didn't have costumes, or women, or lewd plots, or comedy or scenery.

The singers didn't have to act anything out,

they just stood there and sang.

Oratorios were originally performed in church,

and they drew their subject matter from the Old Testament.

And no-one could object to that.

So when Handel's luck with opera ran out,

he turned to English language oratorio instead.

It was an inspired move.

# Jehovah crown'd with glory bright... #

Handel's first ever oratorio in English, Esther,

was performed in 1732.

It was put on, not in a church, but in a West End theatre.

Handel wrote 16 more oratorios,

nearly all based on stories from the Old Testament, all seen in theatres.

In these works, Handel took elements from Italian operas,

oratorios and concertos, added in the Lutheran Church music style

and grafted them on to the local English choral tradition,

aiming to seduce an audience eager for musical excitement.

He succeeded triumphantly. Hallelujah.

# Hallelujah, hallelujah

# Hallelujah, hallelujah

# Hallelujah

# Hallelujah, hallelujah

# Hallelujah, hallelujah

# Hallelujah

# For the lord God omnipotent reigneth

# Hallelujah, hallelujah

# Hallelujah, hallelujah

# For the lord God omnipotent reigneth... #

Handel brilliantly brought together, in a wholly accessible way,

all the musical idioms of the previous 50 years.

Dramatic and stirring choruses, full-on crowd pleasers, moving and

tuneful solos borrowed from a style that opera had made popular, and an

orchestral bedrock owing a debt of gratitude, once again, to Vivaldi.

# And He shall reign for ever and ever... #

What's more, Handel's oratorios were richly allegorical stories

with plenty of emotional impact, but without

the need for histrionic over-acting, to embarrass the English.

# King of kings for ever and ever, hallelujah, hallelujah... #

And what an audience thought was now important, Handel's oratorios,

though based on religious stories,

were essentially commercial productions,

mounted in theatres, not churches, aimed at a paying public.

Unlike the St Matthew or St John Passions of Bach,

which were aimed at a congregation who

would have attended church anyway, Handel was trying deliberately

to court public taste, which he did, with bells on.

# And lord of lords for ever and ever, hallelujah, hallelujah

# King of kings... #

There was one other key and topical element in Handel's close

relationship with his audience - patriotism.

His 45 years in London coincided with Britain's rise to

the status of world power, and her growing wealth and military

success found their celebration in Handel's patriotic choruses,

in which God and King were more or less

interchangeable objects of praise.

# King of kings and lord of lords

# King of kings and lord of lords

# And He shall reign for ever and ever

# For ever and ever

# For ever and ever

# Hallelujah, hallelujah

# Hallelujah, hallelujah

# Halle-lu-jah. #

Music showed it could become the collective voice of nationhood.

This, for good and for ill,

has been an important function of music ever since.

Handel donated all the earnings from his Messiah

and most of his considerable estate to an orphanage,

The Foundling Hospital, gestures which give us

a clue as to the quality that enriches every note of his music -

compassion.

One of his final oratorios, Solomon,

contains towards its end an aria for the Queen of Sheba.

Now, she is bidding farewell to her lover King Solomon,

whom she'll never see again as he returns to Jerusalem.

The aria, Will The Sun Forget To Streak, is no hysterical

outburst of operatic tragedy, nor is it a plaint of sentimental,

self-indulgent misery,

it's the voice of rueful acceptance, as if the

centuries have melted away, and left us with a simple, humane message.

Time doesn't stand still,

so cherish every moment of joy and beauty with gratitude.

The Queen of Sheba knew she would never encounter

a man of Solomon's wisdom again.

It's debatable whether music has every surpassed the creative

ingenuity and spiritual candour of the masterpieces

of Bach and Handel either.

The second half of the 18th century saw the arrival on the musical scene

of one of the most important forms of music - the symphony.

The pioneer of the form

was a little-known Czech composer, Johann Stamitz.

But it was Joseph Haydn, the Father of the Symphony,

who taught other musicians how to take a simple tune

and develop it into 30 or 40 minutes worth of music,

simply by playing around with it.

The symphony would be nowhere without this skilful moulding

of little musical ideas into a much larger structure.

Haydn was so adept

at this sculpting of a tune from small beginnings

that the younger Mozart and Beethoven

simply copied his technique.

This was the point of a symphony.

It was like an essay, or an exceptionally long doodle.

A song could be just a nice tune, plain and simple.

An opera was a series of songs, linked with a plot,

but symphonies were supposed to be explorations,

a journey to find out what would happen

if you took a few tunes and mucked about with them.

For sure, a symphony is a peculiar thing -

60 musicians simultaneously interpreting instructions

given them by one person with no narrative,

no plot and no literal meaning.

Nor is it generally a description of anything.

Just four loosely-related, seven- or eight-minute sections

of meandering music at slightly different speeds,

strung together for the thought-provoking fun of it.

The odd thing about the symphony at this point in history

is that it doesn't have any direct parallels

in any other artistic field.

It's abstract, more than 120 years

before the concept became fashionable in visual art.

Mozart, then, when he came to write his own symphonies,

beginning at the age of eight, simply adopted Haydn's model.

But there was one crucial difference

between the two composers -

Mozart was a born, unstoppable tune writer.

No-one who's ever lived has bettered Mozart in this respect.

It's like he couldn't help it.

Tunes flooded out of him, seemingly at will.

And that was important, because Mozart,

unlike, say, Bach 50 years earlier,

was mostly writing for a paying public.

If they didn't like his music, he'd starve.

Ravishing melodies weren't a bad way to gain the public's heart,

then as now.

MUSIC: "21st Piano Concerto"

MUSIC: "The Marriage Of Figaro"

MUSIC: "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik"

It pains me to say it, but if you can remember a tune,

it's probably by Mozart.

If you can't, it's probably by Haydn.

To get a feel for the satisfyingly perfect proportions

of a Mozart tune, let's look at just one,

the song Dove Sono from his opera, the Marriage of Figaro.

This song, or aria, is about a woman's distress

that the happiness and romance of the early days of her marriage

seemed to have faded, if not entirely disappeared.

It starts with a disarmingly simple five notes.

Really this mini-phrase is just a decorative version of one note,

-this note, C.

-HE PLAYS A C

To complement this opening statement around the note C,

it's followed by another, a little higher, on the note E.

So we have two well-balanced phrases,

which now feel like they need an answer of some kind.

The next phrase is the same length as the first three put together

and though it starts with the same rhythm,

it goes off on its own little voyage before coming to a sort of rest.

Then the first part of the tune is repeated.

You wouldn't expect a composer as skilled as Mozart

to repeat the second part exactly as it was before though,

and sure enough his second section, having established itself...

..begins a gradual ascent up the musical ladder,

as the lyrics describe her husband's lying lips.

Then it subsides again and rounds off.

This is just the first 40 seconds of the aria,

which has been famous for 200 years, so it must be extremely memorable.

And I don't believe that's just random success.

Genius though Mozart undoubtedly was,

nevertheless he also relied on the established tricks of the trade.

There are some formulas at work in classic tunes, and one of them

is to construct your melody around an important chord.

In Mozart's time, as now,

one chord was more powerful than all others, the one that belongs

to the home key family at any given point in the music.

So in the key family of C, it's the major chord of C,

and the constituent notes in that chord are C...E...and G.

Remember I said that the opening phrase of Dove Sono

was basically an embellishment of one note, C...

..and that the second bit of the phrase did the same for E.

Well, blow me down with a feather,

if the third phrase doesn't begin on G.

Dove Sono, like countless famous and memorable tunes

is shaped from the notes of the king chord, C-E-G.

But something else emerges in Mozart beyond the sublime melodies,

something that's more surprising.

Mozart lived in the decorously polite aristocratic world

of imperial Vienna, a world he never wholeheartedly embraced.

Which makes his operatic visions of heaven and hell,

the spiritual and the carnal, weirdly unexpected.

When, in Mozart's music, we glimpse life's darker side,

or sense loneliness or insecurity,

it's as if a veil has momentarily slipped.

Later composers, especially Beethoven and Berlioz,

do little else than expose their internal turmoil

all over the music, like they're in a modern-day self-help group

of composers with personality disorders.

Mozart's emotional honesty, on the other hand,

is disguised beneath the decorum and poise

required of an 18th century artisan.

We know that the 1770s and '80s were dirty, unhealthy, dangerous

and grim, for anyone but the most privileged.

But it wouldn't occur to Mozart to reproduce that misery.

Like the portraits Gainsborough and Reynolds painted

during Mozart's lifetime,

his music says, "I'll do my best to make this beautiful

"because that's what life can be at its best."

Painter and composer alike would have wanted to ennoble humanity.

They succeeded.

Mozart's dignified compassion in the face of life's challenge

makes his music compelling, even when it's tranquil.

We've responded to this distant Austrian's voice

across the years and the continents so spontaneously

because his music seems so uncluttered,

without cynicism or intellectual pretension.

ALL: # Soave sia il vento

# Tranquilla sia l'onda

# Ed ogni elemento

# Benigno risponda

# Ai nostri desir

# Soave sia il vento

# Tranquilla sia l'onda... #

Though he spent several bad-tempered years

as an employee of an archbishop,

for the last ten years of his career,

Mozart became what we'd call self-employed.

A bit of public performing, some teaching,

writing on commission to rich patrons,

composing for the theatre and producing dance music.

After Mozart, the freelance, portfolio career became the norm.

Instead of rich employers, composers had to court popularity

wherever they could with a range of potential clients

and had to deal, for better or worse,

with a new, bourgeois audience.

Mozart and Haydn are the composers in history who represent

the moment of change from paid servant to freelance composer.

In the hands of composers

like Haydn, Mozart and the young Beethoven,

the symphony had tended to be pure music.

Symphonies may have had nicknames,

but in general they weren't about anything

except the pure pleasure of taking a few tunes

and experimenting with them.

In the 1800s, that changed.

Beethoven's 6th Symphony, The Pastoral,

kicked off a new movement in music sometimes called Romanticism.

Music now began to be about something else,

and particularly about nature,

which became used as a metaphor for the composer's inner feelings.

Nowhere is this tendency better demonstrated than in

the heartbreakingly beautiful love-songs of Franz Schubert.

Schubert wrote over 600 songs

before his death in 1828, aged only 31.

Amongst them are three outstanding song cycles.

Had they been written in the 1960s,

these song cycles would have been released as concept albums.

If these songs for solo voice and piano

and the thousands of others that gushed out of composers

in the first half of the 19th century

seemed to us to be rather immature or naive

in their treatment of love,

it's because these song writers were young.

Their emotional development, aged 25,

was probably equivalent to a modern-day school leaver.

These men lived at the same time as Jane Austen,

but, compared to her sophistication and emotional intelligence,

they're like teenagers.

You can't escape the fact that the study of the first half

of the 19th century in music is the study of young men

with little or no idea how to relate to women.

A poignant example is Abendstern, or Evening Star,

composed when Schubert was pining

for an 18-year-old piano pupil of his.

Class, wealth, social norms and her indifference divided them.

The song treats with great sensitivity

the pain and loneliness of unfulfilled love.

Schubert's songs were meant to sound like upmarket folk songs,

immediately memorable, lyrically easily-understandable

and relatively predictable in shape.

In a sense, Schubert is the inventor

of the three-minute voice and piano song,

a form that is thoroughly alive today.

# I heard

# That you settled down

# That you found a girl

# And you're married now

# I heard that your dreams came true

# Guess she gave you things

# I didn't give to you... #

The distance in form, intention, mood and expression

between Schubert's songs for voice and piano

and those of say, Adele, is remarkably small.

# Or hide from the light... #

The only thing that would shock Schubert about this song

is the fact a young woman is the song's creator, not its object.

# I had hoped you'd see my face and that you'd be reminded... #

Schubert's songs and Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony had set

the template for using nature as a metaphor for human emotion.

But they also sowed the seeds of another movement,

that of painting a picture in sound.

This became enormously fashionable

and produced a whole wave of composer-painters.

And no-one evoked a picture in sound

better than Felix Mendelssohn.

In this irresistibly enjoyable overture,

A Midsummer Night's Dream, still popular 200 years later,

it isn't difficult to imagine the dancing fairies,

the mischief of Puck and the playful confusion

of lovers lost in the forest.

Mendelssohn could whip up a musical miniature of a play, a poem,

a painting, a person or a place.

A famous example is the Overture to Fingal's Cave,

written after a trip Mendelssohn took

to the craggy shores of the Hebrides in 1829.

There are two strong themes in this piece.

The first illustrates the tranquillity of the cave

and the stillness and calm of the vast, open space.

The other depicts the rolling waves

and the strength and the power of the sea.

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