Talkin' 'Bout a Revolution Revolution and Romance: Musical Masters of the 19th Century

Once a year, the city of Parma celebrates the birth of a man

revered as a founding father of the modern Italian nation.

He wasn't a king or a politician,

but a composer.

Today, musicians often pose as heroes, rebels and radicals,

but in the 1800s they truly were in the thick of the revolutions

that were tearing up the map of Europe.

In this volatile world, music reflected and even shaped events.

This was the age of Verdi and Wagner,

Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, Rossini, Chopin, Mahler, Debussy.

No other century produced more great composers.

In this series, I'm exploring the extraordinary transformation

that happened in the 19th century,

and discovering how music was at the front line of this changing world.

This was the age when music and musicians burst

out of the confines of the concert hall, and onto the public stage -

when a revolutionary song was said to be worth 10,000 soldiers,

and an opera could incite people to take to the streets

and overthrow their government.

In this film, I'll find out how music in the 19th century

became charged with political significance.

I feel like starting a revolution!

From revolutionary France to Germany's search for nationhood

and the Italian battle for independence.

Composers didn't just talk about a revolution,

they took to the barricades

and wrote works that became musical cannonballs to fire into the fray.

Our story starts in Paris,

city of culture, joie de vivre

and, at the dawn of the 19th-century,

the bloody French Revolution.

I've come here to find out how music was at the heart of a wave

of insurgency which began here, in the City of Light,

and then swept across Europe.

# Allons enfants de la Patrie

# Le jour de gloire est arrive! #

Today, La Marseillaise embodies French solidarity,

but it was born in the factional violence of the French Revolution.

Written in Strasbourg, in 1792,

by a French army officer called Rouget de Lisle,

the song quickly made its way down to Marseille

where it caught on like wildfire,

hence the name - La Marseillaise.

# L'etendard sanglant est leve. #

There, it was belted out fervently by radicals and rebels

as they made their way on the long march towards Paris

to play their part in the bloodshed of the revolution.

-OPERATIC SINGER:

-# Aux armes citoyens

# Formez vos bataillons

# Marchez, marchez! #

"To arms, citizens.

"Form your battalions."

La Marseillaise was sung by the revolutionaries

as they stormed the Royal Palace.

It may well have been ringing in Louis XVI ears,

as his head was removed at the guillotine.

The song rallied the French Revolutionary Army

as it repelled foreign invaders.

According to one army officer,

La Marseillaise was worth 100,000 soldiers.

In 1795, this hymn of violent revolution

became the national anthem of the French Republic.

MUSIC: JAZZ VERSION OF LA MARSEILLAISE

The lyrics of La Marseillaise,

celebrating citizens over tyrants,

captured the essence of the French Revolution -

that power resided with the people and not with the King.

But it was more than just the words which made the song powerful.

So, given that there were a huge number of war songs,

of protest songs, revolutionary songs,

why was it The Marseillaise that stuck,

that has stood the test of time?

If you compare The Marseillaise with

other songs of the time,

the difference lies in the tune. It's the music that's good.

It's the music that makes the difference.

There's this tremendous energy

in the phrases and the repetition.

# Aux armes citoyens

# Formez vos bataillons. #

And "citoyens" is an important word also,

because being a citizen is not being a subject,

and there lies the difference.

If you sing it on your own, it sounds totally ridiculous.

If you sing it well, it's better.

If you are part of a crowd,

then there is this sense of belonging together with

people around you and being part of a fraternity

as they say in the, said in the revolution.

The Marseillaise had demonstrated the power of music

to motivate the masses.

Victor Hugo, the most famous French author of the age,

sums up that power in his novel Les Miserables.

"It is thanks to the little man of Paris that the revolution conquered.

"He delights in song.

"Give him The Marseillaise and he will liberate the world. "

It wasn't only "the little man of Paris" that it roused.

Just as the French Revolution inspired rebels and radicals

well beyond France,

so La Marseillaise became THE revolutionary song

of 19th-century Europe.

It carried the message that ordinary citizens could rise up

and challenge tyranny.

# Marchons!

# Qu'un sang impur

# Abreuve nos sillons!

# Amour sacre de la Patrie... #

And Europe's leaders were rightly petrified

of music's potential to upset the status quo.

When Napoleon came to power, he introduced

a new civil code of law -

forbidding privileges based on birth,

allowing freedom of religious worship,

encouraging government jobs to go to those best suited to them.

So far, so good.

But he also imposed strict censorship -

on theatres, on the press

and on music.

On Napoleon's hit list was The Marseillaise.

He understood its revolutionary power

and set about replacing it with this rather less rousing hymn.

TRANSLATION:

Originally the revolutionary people's hero,

Napoleon had shown himself to be as tyrannical as the old monarchy.

Open opposition to his regime was a dangerous business,

so protesters disguised their political messages

in subversive ballads and songs.

One of the most popular was a thinly veiled satire of Napoleon,

called The King Of Yvetot -

apparently a real rabble-rouser

on the streets of Paris, at the time.

Let's do it!

-That's good.

-OK.

TRANSLATION:

HE SPEAKS FRENCH

Oui. Ok.

-HE BARKS

-Like a dog!

HE BARKS So I have to be a revolutionary...

-Yes!

-..menacing dog.

-It's terrible!

-OK, it's the...

-the revolution on the streets.

-Yes.

TRANSLATION:

OK, it might not sound like political dynamite to our ears,

but, by praising a good little king

who travels round the country by donkey

and thirsts for wine, not conquest,

this song was very much a two-fingered salute

to the power-hungry Napoleon.

It's a very jolly, happy little song.

Yes, it is happy

and, at the same time, very revolutionary...

-Why? What's going on?

-..very harsh, very...

Yes.

The...lazy king, a lazy king.

So you have this lazy king -

this fictionalised historical figure,

sitting in bed with his cotton little bonnet on.

Why did people think of Napoleon when they heard this song?

I think there is a substitution -

-une substitution...

-Mmm-hmm.

..of the figure of Napoleon and this...

-And this fictional king in history.

-..yes, fictional king.

So this is Beranger making fun of

the most powerful man in France, Napoleon.

Yes. Yes, it is very dangerous.

Et la derniere...

-Oh, OK.

-..est vraiment... Very, very happy!

TRANSLATION:

Yes!

Woo!

I feel like starting a revolution!

The King Of Yvetot was a huge hit in Napoleonic France,

and it made its writer a star.

Pierre Jean de Beranger was a former banker and university clerk

who became a thorn in the side of tyrants and kings.

But, ironically, he started out in the pay of the Bonaparte family.

Beranger grew up during the French Revolution.

He even witnessed the storming of the Bastille as a child.

Originally from a poor family, his financial situation was

drastically improved when he was given 1,000 francs

by Bonaparte's brother, Lucien,

so that he'd compose songs for him.

But Beranger was a man of the people.

He simply couldn't help himself.

Beranger's satires were perfectly timed.

Shortly after he dared to mock the Emperor,

Napoleon was ousted from power

after his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo.

But, to Beranger's horror,

all the victorious Allies did was restore the monarchy to the throne.

For the French people, it was a case of "plus ca change".

And it was the people Beranger stood for.

He turned his fire on the new regime,

attacking corrupt officials, the church, even the King.

The people loved him for it.

His songs flourished in the bars and cafes of Paris.

MAN SONGS JAUNTY SONG

The authorities tried to clamp down,

and Beranger was jailed for offence to public and religious morality.

CELL DOOR SLAMS AND RATTLES

But all it did was boost his anti-establishment credentials

and his popularity.

Beranger's genius was that he got the power of music

as a universal language.

When so many people were illiterate,

putting his words together with popular tunes of the day

caused a sensation.

Beranger said that, "There was a need for a man who

"spoke to the people in a language they understood and loved.

"I was that man."

Beranger was the founding father of the modern protest song.

His talent for addressing the big issues of the day paved

the way for 20th-century musicians like Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan.

But it wasn't just the songs of the street

that acted as political weapons.

In the 19th century,

even the most rarefied music could inspire revolution.

Today, an opera house might seem like the most refined,

genteel place on earth

but, in post-revolutionary France,

these were places of intrigue and politics -

even, sometimes, sedition.

In the 1820s, opera was big business - the Hollywood of its day.

Promoters were desperate

to cater for the growing power base in society -

the middle classes.

But they had to walk a careful line -

giving audiences the exciting stories they craved

while censoring revolutionary themes,

which were often the most popular.

So they came up with a solution.

The establishment instead encouraged a new form of opera -

grand opera, featuring lavish sets and staging,

and centred round historical stories that were

far removed from the difficulties of contemporary politics.

In 1828 the first major grand opera made its debut in Paris.

La Muette de Portici - The Mute Girl of Portici.

Composed by Daniel Auber, this was opera as epic spectacle.

Complete with huge crowd scenes and special effects,

it told the story of a heroic young fisherman who starts a revolution,

and it climaxed with an exploding volcano.

La Muette de Portici was intended as lavish entertainment

for the middle classes.

It ended up becoming part of not only musical

but revolutionary history.

And it proved you never can second-guess an audience.

So it was political, it was historical, it was a love story,

it had an exploding volcano - what's not to love?

-That's right.

-No wonder it was so popular.

But this is a really sensitive time,

so if this is a story about revolution,

why did the censors pass it?

It's a good question.

They were only interested in the text and the libretto.

And, essentially, it's a safe story

because the revolution fails at the end,

and it's set in distant time and distant place, geographically.

But, of course, they didn't bank on the visual dimension and the music,

and there's a particular number in the opera,

sung by Masaniello, the revolutionary leader,

and his comrade, Pietro, where they

decide they're going to start the uprising.

So this duet has a line from The Marseillaise -

"Amour sacre de la Patrie."

# Amour sacre de la Patrie. #

"Sacred love for the Fatherland."

Yes, exactly.

And you can see it's peppered with words like "gloire", "victoire" -

very, sort of, resonant stories -

it's better to be dead than to be slaves.

So it borrows a bit of the tune of The Marseillaise,

the words of The Marseillaise,

protest songs from the street that people would have known,

and it scoops all of that up and takes it into the opera house.

Exactly.

The music of La Muette wasn't confined to the opera house.

It spilled out into the streets,

played by barrel organists and loved by the public.

At a time when opposition to the monarchy was reaching boiling point,

the rousing duet became a popular hit.

"We are dancing on a volcano", said one French courtier.

In July 1830, the volcano erupted -

not just the one on the stage but now on the streets,

as a new revolution broke out in Paris.

The unpopular king was replaced

with a more pliable, constitutional monarch,

and La Muette now took on an even greater significance.

This poster shows us

the first performance after the July Revolution, at the opera,

of La Muette, where they just played the first four acts -

so they didn't play the fifth act where the revolution is put down.

So it's an opera about a successful revolution.

And it was given for the benefit of widows

and injured from the July Revolution.

So they actually changed the end of the opera to suit what was

unfolding, daily, in front of them?

That's right.

And then the opera goes to Belgium,

where it really does spark a revolution.

Exactly.

And this was the song that, reputedly,

sparked the Belgian Revolution.

It was this particular number that was chosen.

In August 1830, a month after the revolution in Paris,

rebels in Belgium chose a performance of La Muette de Portici

to start a successful uprising of their own,

overthrowing their Dutch rulers.

The composer, Richard Wagner, later said,

"Seldom has an artistic product stood in closer connection

"with a world event."

During the 19th century, the revolutionary waves which had

started in Paris rippled throughout Europe.

In Poland, in November 1830,

inspired by the revolutions in France and Belgium,

Polish nationalists rose up against foreign occupation.

But their revolt was brutally crushed,

and thousands of Poles were driven into exile.

Following the defeat, one composer above all came to embody

the Polish spirit in music

and his people's longing for a free homeland.

Frederic Chopin.

Chopin wasn't a revolutionary,

but he was a casualty of the insurrection and turmoil

that was sweeping across Europe in the 1830s,

one of many leading lights who fled from Poland,

which was then under a repressive Russian regime.

And he remained a fervent patriot for the rest of his life,

but he never went back to his homeland,

instead carrying with him a jar of precious Polish soil

to Paris, where he stayed for the rest of his life.

Like his precious jar of earth,

Chopin always carried

that yearning for his homeland with him in exile.

And he embedded it in his music.

Mining a rich tradition of Polish national dances,

like the mazurka and the polonaise,

Chopin transformed his longing for Poland into sound.

I mean, it's a fantastic piece, it's so bouncy,

it's got great energy to it, but what makes it Polish?

Well, I think it's to do with the characterisation of the third beat.

The rhythm is very, very close to a waltz, with the same oompah-pah,

but it should have a very sharply snapped third beat.

So, show me what you mean, then.

What do I have to do?

So it's not just a straight 1-2-3, 1-2-3...

-Yes.

-OK.

-So that's what gives it its Polish kind of...

-It's a kick.

And in this particular mazurka, a swagger.

So you've got this kind of snap, this pulse to the rhythm.

What was it that Chopin was getting at

with that sense of Polishness in his music?

It was something that was very, very important to him

and of course Poland at that time didn't have sovereignty -

it had been absorbed by wicked neighbours, so to speak.

It was a way of asserting an identity that would have

appealed to the diaspora of Poles who were living in

different parts of Europe at that time.

So in that sense, his Polish dances are quite political.

And how much did that chime with them, his music?

Well, I think a very great deal.

And it's clear that the mazurka - he wrote many, many, many

of them in different styles - they were very,

very important to him and they seemed to encapsulate

his own feelings of longing and displacement.

There's one mazurka in particular...

..where it keeps breaking off

and you're just left with one solitary voice.

Here...

disembodied.

There's a sense of loneliness

and displacement which he's actually written into the music.

Oh, it rips your heart out!

It does, because it takes you away from anywhere secure, this is music

ultimately of insecurity, and I think in the mazurkas particularly,

Chopin does this a lot.

For me at least, I understand that as Chopin telling us that

he is displaced and his people are displaced.

Chopin's heart-rending music had the power to create nostalgia -

that sense of a homeland

and the torture of not being able to return there.

But in death at least, the exile was reclaimed by his nation.

When Chopin died, he was buried in Paris,

but his heart was taken back by his sister to Warsaw.

There, it was pickled in Cognac, preserved in an urn

and buried inside a pillar in the Church of the Holy Cross.

France could have his body,

but Poland would always own Chopin's heart.

Chopin did not liberate his people.

But he did show how music could be not just beautiful,

but also powerfully political.

No wonder the composer Robert Schumann

described Chopin's music as "cannons buried in flowers".

Music had become a potent force,

not only in inspiring revolution,

but in fostering identity and nationhood.

And it would play a crucial role in the building of new nation states.

In the early 19th century, Germany was a collection

of small but separate states.

There was a rising tide in favour of uniting

the German peoples in a single nation.

In the land that had produced Beethoven and Bach,

it was natural that a unifying symbol should emerge from music.

And it did, in an opera,

Der Freischutz, by the German composer Carl Maria von Weber.

Weber wanted to create a new kind of opera, free

from French and Italian influence,

and so he wrote Der Freischutz,

The Freeshooter, in German and with exactly the kind of storyline

that his German-speaking audience would instantly recognise.

After all,

they'd grown up on Cinderella, Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel -

those tales of dark German forests

and ghouls and ghostly pacts,

and so Der Freischutz tells exactly one of those stories.

We have boy meets girl - they fall madly in love, only he has to prove

himself by shooting brilliantly in a marksman's competition.

Things do not go well

and so our hero retreats into the forest, scores some magic bullets

and goes back hoping to win his beloved's hand, only, eurgh!

It nearly goes pear-shaped and he almost shoots her, but...

in the end, they live happily ever after

and the baddies all go to hell.

Phew!

Der Freischutz opened during a craze for all things Gothic.

It came in the wake of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

and the first vampire novels,

and the supernatural horror of this opera thrilled crowds across Europe.

But most of all, it struck a deep chord with German audiences,

who heard in it a recognisable sound of nationhood.

So how did Weber create that sense of German-ness in music?

Isn't that gorgeous? It's just...

That, to me, instantly sets up Freischutz

as this lovely, comforting world.

I mean, this is the first few bars of the overture, the opening

of the opera, and it's those gorgeous,

lilting strings, lovely horns.

It sets up this idea of a German mythology, which is

one of the things that Freischutz absolutely sets out,

to do, to set up this idea

of what the good Germany is,

and you have to remember,

the idea of Germany was something that was gradually coalescing

at that time, and this is also an attempt to

manufacture, if you like, a German identity, so you have the woods,

you have the hunters and this is all in the horns...

This is an instrument that is associated with

hunters in the wood, it's outdoorsy,

it's beautiful and lovely.

So he set up this idea of a lovely lilting German folkloric

woodsman-y place,

and immediately he brings in this much darker chord, which is this...

HE BEGINS TO PLAY

It's the classic...

I mean, it's become the classic horror movie chord.

This is the diminished seventh chord, which is short and scary.

SHE REPEATS THE CHORD RAPIDLY

-Exactly!

-I'm petrified!

-Exactly.

And it's great for invoking these ideas or invoking these ideas

of the supernatural or otherness,

and of course this is the chord that Weber very specifically

attaches to the baddie of the piece, to the

evil spirit Samiel, who lives in the Wolf's Glen.

It's a way of psychologically manipulating the audience

and that's a revolutionary thing to do.

How does Weber achieve that kind of atmosphere musically?

Well, he does it using a technique that over a century later,

film composers discover, which is he's not doing very much.

SUZY LAUGHS

He's using just very, very quiet strings

and he's got a little wispy flute line which just rises

and you just sense something is going to kick off soon.

-He's sort of cranking up the tension.

-Exactly.

We don't see the demon, but we know he's there, because of the music.

And it goes on like that and Weber gradually adds more

instruments to the orchestra, he changes the tempo,

he makes it faster, he makes it louder - it's a masterpiece

of just gradually pacing a scene of increasing tension.

In music before we've had natural storms,

we've had dark places,

but the Wolf's Glen scene is one of the first places where it's

actually imbued with this emotion of fear and of, of...

of evil.

And what a brilliant contrast, then,

with that perfect, rural, idyllic Germany and the otherly,

alien outsider. You're a German, you belong to us,

you're part of this lovely world - or you're in this dark place.

Yeah, and look how that develops throughout the 19th century.

Weber's vision proved to be an inspiration for one

emerging German composer whose complex genius

still resonates today...

Richard Wagner.

"O my magnificent German Fatherland...", Wagner wrote

ecstatically about Weber's opera.

"How must I love thee if for no other reason than that

"Der Freischutz rose from thy soil - how happy I am to be German."

Following in Weber's footsteps,

Wagner believed that German nationhood could be

best expressed through art rooted in national myth and legend.

But for true German art to flourish,

he believed society itself needed to be transformed.

In 1848, the revolutionary wave that was sweeping across Europe

hit Germany, and Wagner saw his chance.

At the time, he was working as the music director

at the Royal Saxon Court in Dresden.

But in May 1849,

he gave up the prestigious job

and instead became an out-and-out revolutionary,

one of the leaders of an anti-royalist uprising in the city.

When revolution broke out on the streets of Dresden,

Wagner threw himself eagerly into the fray.

He'd already hosted political meetings at his house,

but now he was ready to get his hands dirty with

the business of insurrection, manning the barricades

and even making hand grenades.

The Dresden police issued this warrant for his arrest,

describing Wagner as,

"37-38 years old, middling height,

"brown hair with glasses."

Could have been anybody, really, which is why Wagner escaped,

fleeing on a false passport into exile in Switzerland.

Wagner had a narrow escape.

The uprising failed, many of his revolutionary accomplices

were arrested and imprisoned, one even received a death sentence.

It would be 12 years before Wagner could return to his homeland.

As the dust of the Dresden Revolution settled,

Wagner spent his years of exile deep in thought -

perhaps violent uprising wasn't the answer.

Maybe his composer's pen would prove to be mightier than the sword.

So he put down the guns and instead picked up the books.

Wagner wasn't just a composer. He was a true thinker and intellectual.

This is his vast library - just part of an enormous collection

of books, and it shows us a voracious reader,

particularly of philosophy.

Nietzsche, Kant, Hegel -

all of them fuelled Wagner's desire for a socialist utopia.

Inspired by his studies,

Wagner decided he was the man to build utopia on earth.

He set out on a revolutionary mission of extraordinary ambition,

to redeem corrupt humanity as he saw it through the power of his own art.

He would bring together music, words, costume, lighting, scenery

- a feast for all the senses that would overwhelm

his audience, bringing them to a new state of enlightenment.

And for these total artworks to have their full redemptive impact,

Wagner decided he needed a special performance space,

free from the distractions of the wider world.

He chose not an urban centre, like Munich or Berlin,

but the remote town of Bayreuth in upper Bavaria.

Today, Bayreuth is Wagner town.

His likeness is everywhere.

The key building is not in the town centre, but perched

high above on a hill, the Festspielhaus -

Wagner's Festival House,

where every detail was built to his exacting specifications

to showcase his music and provide a transcendent experience,

if not a comfortable one.

People wait for years to get hold of tickets for this place,

despite the fact that it's a byword for discomfort.

There are no armrests, virtually no padding on the hard wooden seats,

certainly no air conditioning

in the stifling hot Bayreuth summers.

And once you're in, you are in it for the long haul -

six or so hours of bottom-numbing entertainment.

Legend has it that if you die during a performance here, as people

have done, no-one's going to call an ambulance until the interval.

It's all about the music and the house that Wagner built.

Wagner made all sorts of new theatrical innovations.

Nothing is allowed to get in the way of what's happening onstage,

even the orchestra is hidden in a specially designed sunken pit.

The wooden walls and ceiling improved the acoustics.

Everyone here got an equally good view.

Unlike the Paris Opera,

the house lights were dimmed as the music started.

After all, you were here to see the performance, not to be seen.

Bayreuth is part theatre, part temple, a sacred space

dedicated to the transformative power of Wagner's total artworks.

After five years of planning,

the first Bayreuth Festival opened in the summer of 1876.

Just a few years earlier, Wagner had been a wanted man,

chased out of his homeland as a traitor.

Now, he was fawned on by the crowned heads of Europe,

including the German Emperor, Wilhelm I.

Through the power of his music and the scale of his ambition,

Wagner had transformed the role of the artist in society.

He wrote, "Though it was not unknown for an artist to be

"summoned before an emperor and princes,

"no-one could recall that an emperor and princes had ever come to him."

Today, people still travel from across the globe in their thousands

to this remote temple to experience Wagner's music as he intended it.

WOMAN SINGS

Wagner lived to see Germany unified in the 1870s.

But he had set his sights on a revolutionary musical mission

that transcended borders.

Had his ambition to redeem humanity been a success?

Here we are in the Great Hall

and there he is, Richard Wagner.

His bust, at least.

So Wagner is a man who conceived of a better society,

-tries in some way to bring that about...

-Yes.

-..through his operas.

How much would you say he was successful in that aim?

Um, he certainly was not successful in the sense that he made

a specific society change

or anything like that,

but he was probably very successful

in the sense that his art is

still very relevant until today.

So I think in that sense, they were successful.

He's as much a writer as he is a composer.

And he commits himself to all sorts of views.

-Very virulent anti-Semitism, vegetarianism...

-Mm-hm.

How much is he then an easy figure to make sense of?

Yes, he's certainly not an easy figure, but he is also

representative of the 19th century - a child of his time, I think.

Wagner created lasting musical monuments

and a powerful cult of personality that lives on today.

But despite his attempts, his music didn't achieve

universal enlightenment or transform German society.

Ironically, it was a composer with little interest in politics,

born 500 miles to the south of Germany, in 1813,

the very same year as Wagner,

who would become one of the great heroes of 19th-century nationalism.

Like Wagner in Germany,

this composer grew up in an Italy that didn't yet exist on the map.

Instead, it was a collection of small states

dominated by foreign powers,

and its people yearned for unity and independence.

They found their inspiration in the great opera composer,

Giuseppe Verdi.

Today, Verdi is still honoured for his political legacy in Italy.

To find out more, I've come to his home region of Parma,

where I've gained access to one of Italy's most exclusive clubs.

-MEN SING:

-# Va, pensiero

# Sull'ali dorate

# Va, ti posa sui clivi Sui colli... #

With only 27 members, to join, not only do you have to be invited,

you have to wait for someone else to die.

Today, the club is celebrating the 202nd anniversary of the birth

of their hero...

..by singing Verdi's anthem to freedom, Va, Pensiero,

from his opera Nabucco.

# Di Sionne

# Le torri atterrate... #

Grazie, grazie mille!

"Un Giorno di Regno".

'Each member takes the name of one of Verdi's 27 operas.'

Hello!

'Whichever one happens to be vacant.'

-Fabio Macbeth.

-Macbeth. Suzy!

-Falstaff.

-Buongiorno!

-Nicandro Nabucco.

-Nabucco, OK.

Angelo Traviata.

-Mi chiamo Suzy...

-Stefano Aida.

Oh, hello, Aida, good to meet you!

'I can't help noticing there's rather a shortage of women here.

'Unless you count La traviata and Aida, of course.'

Thank you so much for having me here. Stefano,

can you tell me, does Verdi to you

feel like the sound of Italy,

does he feel very Italian? And why?

It's that hot Latin kind of anima,

-spirit, in your DNA.

-Esatto.

Jealousy, love, hatred...

'It's not exactly the Illuminati,

'but there is one secret - the lurid drinks, so coloured in honour

'of Verdi - a composer whose name in English is Joseph Green.'

Segreto! (Secret recipe!)

-No!

-No!

-Acqua, acqua - solo acqua.

It's only water?

Viva Verdi! Cin cin!

Oh, that's not water!

The Club of the 27 aren't the only Italians to revere Verdi.

The Va, Pensiero chorus

has become almost a second national anthem in Italy.

But this music was very nearly not composed at all.

It was born of the darkest moment in Verdi's life.

By the time he was 27 years old,

Verdi has lost his young wife

and two infant children to sudden death from disease.

Thrown into depression, he resolved to give up composing.

But fortune intervened.

Verdi was offered the chance to write a new opera,

telling the biblical story of

the exile of the Jews from their homeland.

Initially, he refused, said he wasn't interested,

but he did take the book home and he later said he threw

it down on his desk and one page opened - the words leapt out at him.

"Va, pensiero, sull'ali dorate" -

one line of the poetry in particular

fired his imagination, it read, "O mia patria -

"si bella e perduta."

"O my homeland - so beautiful and lost".

Verdi was captivated and his opera Nabucco was born.

The premiere of Nabucco took place here,

at La Scala in Milan

on the 9th of March 1842.

Verdi was so nervous that when the first ovation erupted,

he thought it was a cheer of derision.

He needn't have worried - the opera was an instant triumph.

At the moment when Italians were most desperately craving

their own Italy,

an opera telling the story of an oppressed people,

yearning to find their place in the world

was bound to be a sure-fire hit.

Verdi himself admitted that Nabucco had been born under a lucky star.

Verdi was convinced that Italy could only flourish

if it was both unified and free from foreign control.

And in 1848, as revolution broke out across Europe, he believed

Italy's moment to throw off foreign occupation had finally come.

"Honour to all of Italy", he wrote, "the hour of her liberation is here.

"There cannot be any music welcome to Italian ears

"in 1848 except the music of the cannon."

But it was the foreign cannons that prevailed

and Italian hopes were ruthlessly dashed.

The revolutions might have failed,

but Verdi's career soared to new heights.

He had a genius for putting into music the passions

and frailties of human life, stories of real people, far from the gods

and monsters of somebody like Richard Wagner.

Verdi's success with operas such as Rigoletto and La traviata

made him rich - enough to buy

this vast estate in the Parma countryside.

He was here when, in 1859, a new war of liberation broke out

and the fighting reached almost to the borders of his land.

Verdi was hardly a brother in arms, though.

He spent many of the revolutionary years here at his lavish estate,

doing up his des res.

The only action these guns ever saw was on one of his

many hunting trips, shooting ducks.

Unlike Wagner, Verdi wasn't an active revolutionary who manned

the barricades and spent his evenings fashioning hand grenades.

His weapons were the pen

and the baton - and, in a final twist of fortune, even his name.

Now, he'd been a supporter of Victor Emmanuel, the man who was

frontrunner to become king if and when Italy was unified.

So when "Viva Verdi" was scrawled on walls everywhere,

it had a double meaning.

Yes, it was a celebration of the composer,

but it also read Viva - "long live" - Vittorio Emanuele, Re D'Italia.

Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy.

And in 1861, an independent Italy was finally declared with

King Victor Emmanuel crowned head of the new nation.

To find out how history and a dose of good luck were on Verdi's side,

I've come to the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan.

Started in the 1860s, to celebrate the new Italy,

and named after its first king, it was designed to link

symbolically the two most important buildings in the city -

the opera house and the cathedral.

How much is Verdi intentionally injecting a kind of national

Italian flavour into his music and how much is that just a question

of the fact that the audience desperately wanted

-to hear something Italian?

-I think it's both.

He is willing to put in his operas music that is stirring,

that is about building of nations,

uniting of people,

political discourse, but also

the audience was particularly attuned

to what might transpire in his operas.

So how willing a participant is Verdi in this sort of groundswell,

this tidal wave of nationalism?

He definitely was a willing participant,

he knew that he was so famous that people listened to him.

He didn't say much, but he was there when it mattered,

he was there particularly in those crucial years, 1859 to 1860,

1861, when most of Italy was unified.

So Verdi is a genius composer, there's no doubt about that.

But how much do you also think it's true that he's just lucky,

he comes about as Italy needs a massive hero?

Absolutely, that's EXACTLY what it is.

He comes about at the right time and he's the right man for the job.

He's the most famous Italian artist and the nation needs him

to build itself and he knows it, and he runs with it.

He definitely runs with it.

Verdi was there just when Italy most needed a unifying cultural symbol

to bring the nation together.

It's something the Italian people have never forgotten.

At the annual festival to celebrate Verdi's music, held here

in Parma, the centrepiece is a chorus of Va, Pensiero.

That anthem of national belonging,

sung from one generation to the next since Verdi's time.

Verdi's music had helped to forge modern Italy.

It remains to this day a symbol of the best of Italian culture.

MUSIC: Ma Vlast by Smetana

In the 19th century, music had played a vital role in the

surge of nationalism and revolution that forged modern Europe.

It bound together the citizens of new nations like Italy

and Germany and helped heal the old wounds of revolution

in countries such as France.

And, at the century's end, as Europe moved from an age

of violent uprising to one of global commerce and empire,

in place of the slogans of "revolution or death",

now came national pride and stability.

In 1889, Paris marked the 100-year anniversary

of the French Revolution with a huge international exhibition.

The Eiffel Tower was the centrepiece

and there were rousing renditions of The Marseillaise.

Once banned as dangerously subversive,

it was now restored as France's national hymn.

The Marseillaise was no longer the musical equivalent

of a Molotov cocktail - an incitement to revolution.

Now, it was the proudly patriotic anthem of the new France,

a country eager to take its place on the modern international stage.

# Aux armes, citoyens

# Formez vos bataillons

# Marchons, marchons!

# Qu'un sang impur

# Abreuve nos sillons! #

MUSIC: Also Sprach Zarathustra by Johann Strauss

In the final episode, I'll discover how music

was at the forefront of another great revolution...

..the sweeping transformation of technology.

With new industrially manufactured instruments...

..and futuristic ways of listening.

MUSIC: Echoes of France (La Marseillaise) by Django Reinhardt