Party Like It's 1899 Revolution and Romance: Musical Masters of the 19th Century

In this series I've been on a musical journey

back to the 19th century,

exploring the era when the modern world was being forged.

CLASSICAL MUSIC

This was Europe's great revolutionary age

when the political shock waves of the French Revolution

were reverberating across the continent,

when there was a revolution in thinking and imagination

that became known as Romanticism,

and when the Industrial Revolution created new technologies

that were radically changing people's everyday lives.

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.

The dawn of the 19th century saw composers

and musicians bursting out...

beyond the boundaries of the concert hall

and onto a bigger public stage.

They became influential in politics and revolution,

earnt vast sums of money and were famous across the globe.

I've been looking at how music mirrored the seismic changes

that were happening in the 19th century,

as musicians became powerful, influential stars...

Yeah, it's very Keith Richards, that kind of showing off to the audience.

..finding out why composers became national heroes,

revered to this day...

-Viva Verdi.

-Viva Verdi!

..and discovering that music could spark revolution.

HE SPEAKS FRENCH

..woof, woof - like a dog!

..and in this final episode, I'll look at how music

was at the forefront of another revolution,

with the sweeping transformation of technology...

MUSIC: Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss

..creating new industrially manufactured instruments

and futuristic ways of listening.

I'll explore how music was seen as the essence

of progress and modernity,

but how it also aroused suspicion, anxiety and moral outrage.

As the 19th century drew to a close people began to ask, "What next?"

And music came to the front line in that battle between fear

and optimism. On the one hand, there was worry about decay

and decline. On the other, it was time to party like it was 1899.

CAN-CAN MUSIC

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

100 years after the French Revolution,

the streets of Paris were once again raging.

But this time no gunshots or cannon fire were heard -

this was a mass celebration.

In 1889, the city was hosting a world fair -

Exposition Universelle -

and it aimed to be the most ambitious,

global and most musical event the world had ever seen.

It was a celebration of the past,

with the main attractions located on the Champ de Mars -

the site of the first Bastille Day commemorations.

But this was also a celebration of the present,

glorifying the industrial progress

and creative success that France had enjoyed throughout the 19th century.

This is all that remains of the vast complex of buildings

that were specially created for the exhibition.

The spectacle lasted for six months

and attracted 35 million visitors from across the world.

The Eiffel Tower, constructed from rolled iron -

a brand-new engineering material - was a beacon to the world.

Like the exhibition itself, it spoke of confidence and optimism.

Music was central to that message.

String quartets could be heard drifting down from the first floor

of the Tower. The recently rebuilt Opera National hosted events

and everything from marching bands to folk music could be heard

in boulevards, concert halls and cafes.

As the newspaper described it, Paris was swept up in an orgy of music.

So this is a view of the exhibition site.

The Eiffel tower right in the middle, new for the exhibition.

Across the Seine, Le palais du Trocadero,

which was the concert hall that had a 4,000 seat -

a concert hall with a Cavaille-Coll organ in it.

Down the Champ de Mars, the Beaux-Arts,

the liberal arts, the industrial area

and the machine gallery right at the southern end.

So the Exposition physically changed the way Paris looked.

-How important was music to all of it?

-Oh, hugely important.

Music and music education had been central to republican values

for a very long time.

With this exhibition, they set up a commission early on,

headed up by the conservatoire director Ambroise Thomas,

with all the great composers of the time that we know about -

Gounod, Saint-Saens, Massenet, Delibes - as well as others.

Two programmed series of events that showcased French music but that also

invited foreign countries to bring in concerts of their own music

as well and their own performers.

So what was the range of the kinds of music you could hear?

In the concerts in the Trocadero you could hear French music

from, really, the last century.

You could hear Russian music, American music,

choirs from Finland and Norway.

It went even further than that, though, this was a global project.

Yes, of course. There were lots of exotic musics available

in both the colonial exhibition and elsewhere on the exhibition site.

So the colonial exhibitions, most famously,

we know about the Javanese village with the dancers and the gamelan.

And we know about the Theatre Annamite

which was the Vietnamese theatre with music performed,

and then elsewhere you could go down the road and go and have a mint tea

or a coffee in a kasbah somewhere with dancing and singing.

It must have stunned people to hear this stuff.

Stunned them, shocked them. They didn't know the real exotic music

and when they came to the exhibition for the first time,

they got a taste of something that was a little bit more authentic

than they were used to,

and quite often it didn't fit with what they were expecting.

The Paris exhibition capitalised on a long-standing European

fascination with far-flung corners of the globe.

For centuries France, along with other European powers,

had engaged in an imperial land grab that spread across the globe,

gathering pace through the 19th century in a race

to dominate the world's stage.

With political conquests abroad,

Oriental influences flooded back into Europe,

and by the 1870s anything culturally exotic became de rigueur.

Orientalism had become the height of fashion.

Trend-setters would go and buy a little Oriental painting

or a piece of furniture.

They'd wear an exotic headdress or visit a trendy cafe.

And what they would encounter there would be a complete mishmash

of Turkish and Greek and Middle Eastern

and Indian and Chinese influences.

It was like the cultural equivalent of going out and eating a kebab,

a curry and sweet and sour chicken all in one sitting.

Not remotely an authentic experience

but nonetheless a rather enjoyable one.

Mm, don't mind if I do.

Mm!

What people saw at the Paris exhibition in 1889 was different.

It had a degree of authenticity few had ever experienced.

For the first time,

a European audience could encounter shockingly different cultures

with languages and sounds that were completely alien to Western ears.

The Javanese gamelan, for example, caused -

as contemporary accounts put it -

"the froth on one's beer to dissolve away and ice creams to melt."

Spectators were transfixed.

-OK, this is called a what?

-This is called a saron,

it's one of the loudest metallophone instruments in the gamelan.

I can see numbers here,

which I like cos that suggests that it's not too difficult.

One, two, three, five, six...one.

-Why are there two ones?

-So we have a low one at the bottom

-and then you have an octave higher.

-Can I hit it?

-Yeah.

RESONATING TONES

Oh, gorgeous sound.

-And what am I playing?

-So we're going to play a piece today called

Mugi Rahayu and it's a lovely piece

that goes around and round and round.

-I do have some notations if you'd like some?

-Yeah!

Well, I don't know it, so I'm going to need...

It's very basic notation, it's a notation that uses numbers.

Each number correlates to one of the keys on this.

This doesn't really make any sense to me yet.

We have a very different tuning system

so we don't correlate to A, B, C, D.

I don't do 3, 6, 1, 3, 6, 1, 2.

-I know A, B, C.

-Yeah.

-OK.

Er...

Shall I have a quick practice?

RESONATING TONES

Perfect.

Goes on quite a long time, doesn't it?

You can hear that the notes are all kind of resonating -

melding together.

So, to make your life even harder,

we're going to introduce a damping technique.

So if you play your first note, the 3, and let it ring on...

-NOTE RINGS ON

-..when you play the 6,

with your other hand you're going to pinch the 3 at the same time.

Then when you play the 1, you pinch the 6.

Exactly.

But that means I have to read these numbers,

play the notes and my other hand is one note behind.

-That's right. It's a bit multitasking.

-That's really...

6, 1...

-OK.

-If you pinch with your thumb on top and really grip the keys,

that's a much better way of doing it.

I will be gripping them for dear life. OK, let's do that.

I'm really looking forward to playing this, I want to hear it. OK.

GENTLE MUSIC

Javanese gamelan created a sensation at the exhibition in 1889.

It was one of the most popular attractions

with over 500,000 people coming to listen to it,

enthralled by a powerful,

beautiful and unique music that was completely new to them.

One composer in particular, Claude Debussy,

was so entranced by the gamelan that it profoundly changed the way

he thought about and wrote music.

Debussy was captivated by the possibilities for new tones

and rhythms that gamelan offered,

and by the fact that the Javanese musicians he heard

played without any formal training.

For them, music was an instinct.

As he put it,

"These musicians learned to play as easily as one learns to breathe."

It's such beautiful music. It's so full of Oriental flavour.

What do you think that Debussy heard in the gamelan that so inspired him?

A completely different focus on expression, for a start,

a different set of gestures, different pitches, of course,

from Western ones. Just another world, and complete refreshment.

So he calls the piece Pagodes and...

how is one going to convey the outline of a pagoda?

What does a pagoda roof do?

-So it goes...

-Going up already.

-Yeah, it's beautiful, going up like that.

-Typical for him,

the top of the texture whispers with little arabesques,

melodies in the middle

and different layers in his music going at different speeds.

He would have heard this in gamelan and loved it.

So he falls in love with this sound,

how does he turn that into Western music?

How does he create a piano piece from that?

With Debussy, I think, it's gestures here.

There's that gesture of the pagoda roofs,

there's various gamelan-like gestures there -

the interlocking of the various gongs.

He approximates it at the beginning of the piece.

And that syncopated one off the beat

he marks with a little accent each time.

And he always insisted on people playing him precisely in time

so that you'd catch these little rhythmic nuances.

So he's really, from the inside out, reworking the whole notion

of what a Western musical ear would be used to.

How much of a shock do you think this must have been for Debussy,

the people in Paris at the Exposition, listening to this?

It must have seemed like a totally different musical world.

Oh, yes, the West was looking towards Asia

and the rest of the world for new colours and new ideas and...

wondering how we could refresh the air, really.

Gamelan gave Debussy a new path, a way of breaking free

from the maximal, overwhelming style of Richard Wagner

that was dominating European music.

By taking elements of the Indonesian percussion orchestra and fusing them

with traditional Western music,

Debussy realised he could create something understated

yet truly magical and modern-sounding.

GENTLE MUSIC

This is Debussy's Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune,

an orchestral portrait of a young deer wandering in a sun-lit forest.

It doesn't sound remotely Indonesian

but, like the gamelan, there are no obvious melodies here,

no clear rhythms to tap along to, it's not in any apparent key,

and the different sections of the orchestra move at their own

distinct pace. It's got the same rippling resonance

that Debussy heard in the Javanese band.

The piece has been described as

"the awakening of music to the modern world."

And it had only come about

because of the technology of the Industrial Age,

with steam ships to transport Javanese musicians

across vast oceans to perform in Paris,

trains whisking visitors to glittering urban centres.

With ever-increasing mobility came bigger audiences for music

than ever before. In the first half of the 19th century,

the number of concert-goers in Paris alone tripled,

and the explosion in popularity was mirrored across Europe.

To cater for demand, cities vied to outdo each other,

building bigger and better music venues.

The biggest and most ambitious of them all -

our very own Royal Albert Hall of Arts and Sciences,

a homage to cutting-edge construction techniques.

The vast domed roof spanned 20,000 square feet,

constructed using 338 tonnes of industrially-produced iron girders

and 279 tonnes of plate glass.

So no comfortable promenade for me - just a rather steep climb.

Oh, my goodness. Ah!

OK! Er...

Ahh...!

Oh, don't bounce!

-Am I standing on steel mesh?

-You are, yes.

-I don't like it!

How high up are we?

About 43.5 metres high.

43.5 metres between me and plunging to my death.

OK, I'm not going to look down.

Welcome to the corona, which is the crown of the Hall.

What purpose does the corona serve?

This was the ventilation system and, literally, all the hot air

that was created by the public was dragged up through this shaft

and out of the oculus above us.

So this is where the hot air was dispersed into the atmosphere.

So we're standing, essentially, at the top of this newfangled

ventilation system that the Royal Albert Hall had.

I've lived to experience the steel mesh 43 metres up, can we go now?

-CHUCKLING:

-Fine.

Well done.

When this building first opened,

people were blown away by its beauty and its audacious modernity.

Even Queen Victoria, who was due to speak here on the opening night,

couldn't say a word because she was so overcome with emotion.

This temple to arts and sciences was a feast for all the senses,

not least because of its cutting-edge ventilation system,

which not only piped in fresh air but also, on the opening night,

Rimmel perfume - the sweet smell of industrial success.

SHE INHALES Ah!

With so much invested in this monumental project,

the Royal Albert Hall's opening night

had to be a musical show stopper.

One of the most popular composers of the day, Arthur Sullivan -

Gilbert's partner in crime -

premiered this specially commissioned piece

called On Shore And Sea.

And it certainly drew in the crowds.

Along with Queen Vic, the hall was filled to capacity -

5,000 bums on seats and another 5,000 standing,

packed in like sardines.

Not bad considering the venue was only half finished.

They were actually painting right until the last minute.

The organ didn't fully work and, actually,

there weren't even toilets in the building.

So what happened if all these thousands of people needed a wee?

What did they do?

They had to actually nip outside the building to a huge conservatory

that was attached to the south entrance at that time,

which actually belonged to the Royal Horticultural Society.

It needed so much infrastructure, it wasn't just about the building,

it was about getting people there, things like the loos,

the refreshments - all those things needed to work. They had to have

-a whole master plan for it.

-Absolutely. And they didn't.

One of the biggest problems the Hall had was transport,

it was getting the 5,000-10,000 people -

as shown in this picture - actually getting them there.

People would turn up on the train or bus then they'd have to walk

for a fair old way.

Walking up from the tube station, a lot of people didn't enjoy that.

As they still don't today.

How did they imagine they were going to fill this hall night after night?

Obviously after the glamorous,

glitzy opening, you've then got to fill the place up.

Well, that was the problem. They hadn't really got a master plan

for what they were going to do with it. So what they did find were

things like big works like Handel's Messiah were really popular

and then they gave their hand at these people's concerts.

We've got a programme here for one of them.

So this is threepence to get in and we have the instrumentalists,

at the pianoforte - Mr William Carter and his pupils

Miss Rowe and Mr Smith Puddicombe.

I've no idea if these people were great stars in their day.

When I think of the Royal Albert Hall,

I do think of music.

I think of the Proms but also events like boxing and circus

and tennis happens here.

What kind of range of entertainment was there on offer then?

Actually we have a constitution which set out exactly what we could

-and couldn't do.

-The Royal Albert Hall

has its own written constitution?

How wonderfully Victorian! That's great.

It's been amended somewhat so we can have things like sport,

but the original one really limited it, that was problem with it,

so it actually restricted it to things like musical concerts,

scientific lectures and meetings.

So, for instance, the things we could have were scientific events.

So this was actually a display of limelight that was held here,

which is a rather magical picture, happened in the 1870s.

So this is people coming to see a display of the latest

-lighting technology.

-Absolutely.

So they had these four limelights,

powered by batteries held in the gallery.

-And it was a wonder to see.

-Look at the number of people crammed in.

There's news reports saying there was about 10,000 people

and today we have 5,500. So they were really crammed in.

-They didn't do health and safety.

-They really didn't!

OK, so the nearest underground station was a fair old walk away

and if you needed to pee urgently you were in trouble.

But it was worth it

because simply to visit this magnificent building,

which screamed modernity,

must have been a thrill for the very first audiences

who came to the Royal Albert Hall.

As the technology of the concert hall was being transformed

so too was what happened inside.

Entrepreneurial concert managers had to really pack in the punters

to make these massive new venues pay.

And composers also had to impress,

filling those vast spaces with glorious sound.

In 1800, your average symphony was scored for around 50 instruments.

By 1900, that figure had more than doubled,

and technological advance didn't just give composers the opportunity

to experiment with scale,

it gave them the chance to push the complexity of their music to

new limits as the tools they worked with underwent their own revolution.

The factories of the Industrial Revolution weren't just

turning out rivets and bolts and parts of bridges or sewer systems,

those grand Victorian building projects,

mechanisation was also having a profound impact

on the musical world.

Take this, for example, number 621 in this cabinet.

It's an early 19th century clarinet.

It was made in Paris and it's quite a simple-looking instrument.

You just blow into it and you place your fingers over holes that have

been bored directly into the wood and that's what changes the pitch,

the note that you're playing.

Then, take a look at this.

Also a clarinet. This one was made in London in the 1870s

and it is a beautiful bling of a thing. I love this instrument.

All of that gorgeous metal work allows you to make sure

you're always going to put your fingers on the keys in exactly

the right place, so you always play in tune,

and it gives you the added possibility of just being able to

play fast. You can whiz your way up and down those keys, you know

you're always going to be spot on as a player.

So what this enables you to do as a musician is to go on flights

of fancy, the kind of athleticism in playing

that simply wasn't available just decades earlier.

Industrial manufacturing techniques

improved the musical scope of the entire orchestra.

If wind instruments had been invigorated as a result of new,

precision machining,

the entire brass section was even more profoundly transformed.

With the advent of valves they could now change key

without needing to add or take away extra bits of tubing -

a fiddling exercise during a performance.

The relentless march of technology didn't stop with perfecting

instruments that already existed.

This was the age when inventors pushed boundaries

further than ever before.

If towers had Eiffel,

bridges Brunel

and glass palaces had Paxton,

then music had Adolphe Sax.

One of the unacknowledged geniuses of the 19th century,

he was a Belgian inventor who moved to Paris in 1841.

When Sax arrived in Paris he had only 30 francs in his pocket

and was so poor he had to live in a shed.

But this was one determined man.

After all, he'd survived a childhood

where he'd fallen from a three-storey window,

swallowed a pin, been burned by gun powder, drunk sulphuric acid,

been hit on the head by a cobblestone

and nearly drowned in a river.

"If I can get through all that,"

thought Sax, "I can conquer the world."

Adolphe Sax was born into a family of traditional instrument makers,

but once in Paris he abandoned conventional design,

instead pioneering a radical new instrument

that still bears his name today.

I'm visiting the Selmer sax factory

on the outskirts of the French capital,

which took over Sax's company in 1885,

to find out how the saxophone made its mark.

So what happens in this part of the factory?

So here this is the traditional assembly shop,

where we make the instruments like they were made 100 years ago

or 150 years ago. The people who are working here,

they do exactly the same as it was done

in the Adolphe Sax workshops in the 1850s.

So what was it that Sax really did that was new?

He has invented this instrument combining, I would say,

the advantages of the brass instruments

and of the wood instruments,

and to be able to be very flexible like the strings.

So he made this saxophone which is really

a combination between the clarinet, flute, trumpet and trombone.

So...he's got the brass, the winds, the flexibility of the strings -

it's almost like a whole orchestra in one instrument.

Absolutely. This is probably the most flexible instrument ever made.

Sax was a brilliant mind, a genius inventor,

but he was also lucky enough to be born at the right time.

This is the machine age, the Industrial Revolution.

Yeah. Because it's so complicated to make, there are so many pieces,

you have to count about 800 pieces for a saxophone, which is crazy,

and you also need to get a very high level of precision

and so this period was perfect because this was the time

when the machine could make these pieces so precise.

So if Sax had turned up even 20, 30 years earlier

he couldn't have created the instrument that took off.

Probably it was not...

because the machines necessary to make all these pieces

wouldn't have been possible before.

The saxophone, when you see it, when you look at this instrument,

it still looks like a futuristic instrument,

and so probably in the 1840s it was more true than it is now.

He wanted to revolutionise everything.

Sax was at the forefront of innovation in instrument design,

and he numbered among his fans composers like Berlioz

and the opera maestro Meyerbeer.

He even got imperial patronage.

But not everyone was in favour of his new invention.

Sax's genius had the instrument makers of Paris running scared.

They feared his saxtubas, saxtrombones and saxophones

would put them out of business, and so they formed an alliance

against him, stealing his workers, burning down his factories.

They even tried to have him assassinated - twice.

But Sax survived and, in the 1840s,

he got the opportunity he desperately relished -

to validate publicly once and for all that he was a genius.

It was a battle of the bands.

SHE PLAYS ADEQUATELY

MARCHING BAND MUSIC

Standing up to his detractors, Sax agreed to a musical standoff.

Two brass bands were set up to compete against each other -

one from Paris' Musicians Guild playing traditional brass

and wind instruments,

the other, led by Sax, starring his new saxophones.

On the 22nd of April, 1845, the band-off commenced.

20,000 people came to see what was described as a "Napoleonic battle."

The pressure was on.

The rival traditional band had a strong, almost radical,

set of supporters,

drawn mostly from the ranks of Parisian instrument makers.

Sax's group, the self-styled Saxons, were more flamboyant...

..but had fierce enemies,

evident from the fact that seven of the saxophonists failed to

turn up on the day, reportedly having been scared away.

Sax came out triumphant

and his brilliant newfangled instruments sold in their thousands.

Sax's success was a 19th century industrial phenomenon,

made possible by an ever-increasing musical appetite

and the newly mechanised mass production of instruments.

Across Europe, from Britain to France and Germany,

music was getting louder,

instruments were being pimped up and supercharged,

concert halls were now stadiums to be filled with sound.

Acoustic music was about to reach its limits.

TENSE MUSIC

In 1896, the composer Richard Strauss

wrote a piece of music that heralded the dawn of a new era.

He subtitled it Symphonic Optimism,

dedicated to the 20th century.

THEY PLAY ALSO SPRACH ZARATHUSTRA

Also Sprach Zarathustra was as much a philosophical as it was

a musical epic, exploring man's quest for enlightenment

at the beginning of a new age.

To pull off such an ambitious project,

Strauss needed to produce a monumental wall of sound...

..only possible because he had an arsenal

of industrially engineered instruments at his disposal.

So in Also Sprach

Strauss uses the full sonic potential of the orchestra.

He's got eight trombones, four horns, four trumpets, eight oboes,

a mass of other wind instruments, there's a bass drum,

a timpani, more than 60 strings.

This is Strauss pushing the orchestra to its limits.

By the end of the 19th century,

technology had entirely changed the musical landscape.

But there was one invention above any other

that would change music forever.

In 1889 audiences at the Paris exhibition not only heard live music

that was bigger, bolder and more international than ever before,

they were also introduced to a truly futuristic experience.

With the phonograph they were given the opportunity to listen

to a recording for the first time ever.

The man behind this incredible achievement -

the inventor Thomas Edison.

Hailed as Le Roi or "the king" by the French press in reviews

of the event, people were stunned by his new invention.

Edison had first experimented with recorded sound in 1877

when his aim wasn't to record music at all

but to capture the human voice.

Here we have the first machine.

It's called Tinfoil

because it uses tinfoil,

the same tinfoil we can find today and use today to cook chicken.

SHE LAUGHS

So when does this machine date from?

1878.

And this is the very first time...

-The first time when you can record and listen back.

-How does it work?

You must first put the tinfoil on it. You have the fly wheel.

The most important thing is to turn it, to have the right speed.

And then you must really...

-LOUD AND CLEAR:

-..talk and shout clearly,

strongly, otherwise you have nothing

because you need your vibration.

-So you really need to shout to make this work?

-Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If you talk, like we are speaking now, it will record nothing.

So how does the recording happen?

Your voice goes through that hole there, what happens next?

-The vibration will push the needle.

-There's the needle.

And so you talk through this hole, your voice makes vibrations,

the needle wobbles, what happens next?

Then you play back with the same needle.

You can do it once or twice. That's it.

You can never remove the tinfoil and put it back to listen again.

That's why it was really experimental.

So what did people make of this really new technology?

Even at the time, people were really not able to realise

it's really true. Because they think it was a ventriloquist in the room.

People thought there was a ventriloquist there,

-that it wasn't real, it was a fake?

-Of course.

It was too complicated to understand.

The mechanics of this radical new technology

WERE difficult to understand, even for Edison himself.

It took another 11 years before he would perfect his machine.

But by the time he visited the Paris exhibition,

the phonograph had begun to show off its musical potential.

That's the evolution of the Edison machine 11 years later.

How does this one work?

From the cylinder it's recorded here on the wax cylinder.

You can record and listen back.

You can shave it to record again.

Its playback was here, the listening tube.

So what did the machine sound like?

The sound, it's really simple. You listen to what I'm saying.

It's really high fidelity. I'm talking like that.

It's amazing quality.

It's incredibly clear for such early technology.

-How many people could listen to this at one time?

-From 12 to 18.

It was really used as an attraction.

They wait until 18 people were around, have paid one cent,

then they make it play.

What would they have been able to listen to, what music?

They record anything familiar.

They never record something new.

If you listen to something you know already and you like already

-you follow easily.

-Like pop records today.

So what kind of music could you listen to on a machine like this?

In the beginning, it was the national song, popular songs mostly.

All people from the opera, major singers, they refused to record.

Why did the opera singers not want to be part of this technology?

For them it was not good quality, it's not good for the future.

So they were worried about their ticket prices, worried that people

-wouldn't pay for the tickets to come to the opera house.

-Exactly.

What kind of reaction did the machine get?

They still think it's someone in behind,

someone under the machine covering,

because normally it's represented with big cloths around.

-A cloth?

-Yeah. And you think it's someone here under the machine.

It must have been like magic.

It was really exciting for the people

because the advertising around it was,

"Come to listen to the invisible singer and invisible musician."

And that was something really new.

At that time for them, it was magical.

Edison chose sure-fire hits to get those early audiences hooked.

There was the French national anthem...

MUSIC PLAYS

..a number from Bizet's Carmen... MUSIC PLAYS

..a little bit of Wagner. SONG: Ride Of The Valkyries

..all guaranteed to get the punters going home whistling a tune

and wondering at the marvel of recorded sound.

But getting music recorded at all was easier said than done.

So what do I need to do to make my very first recording?

We set the phonograph up here to record and the horn you see here

is going to conduct your efforts from the piano

down to the recorder here.

The recorder has a sharp stylus and a very thin diaphragm,

very thin disc, and you've gotta vibrate that

to cut the groove in order to record your efforts.

One of the things is, it's purely mechanical, it's all

of your efforts, so we need you to play a lot louder than you'd expect.

So the machine is not going to help me here, I just need to belt this?

-Yes. Exactly.

-OK.

So I'll give you a signal when the cutter has been lowered

and then if I don't think you're playing loud enough

I'll wave my arms around to get you to be louder.

-OK.

-We're trying to get the maximum amount of energy into the thing.

I'll need to be facing the machine

and I'll be blowing the swarf - the thin strands of wax -

off the blank

so that we can keep the stylus clear, stop it clogging up

-while you're recording. So I'll have my back to you.

-Shall we have a go?

-It's as easy as that.

-OK!

So just play loudly all the time?

-Yes.

-OK, let's have a go.

Let's have a go at a 19th century medley. You tell me when.

So this'll be my signal here...

when I've lowered the cutter.

SHE PLAYS BEETHOVEN'S 5TH SYMPHONY

SHE PLAYS LOUDER

SHE PLAYS VARIOUS PIECES

SHE PLAYS LOUDER

SHE PLAYS LOUDER

How did I do?

-Ah, very good.

-I'm exhausted!

-Very good.

I can see it. Yes, excellent.

Cos the advantage of these machines is you can play it back

pretty much immediately.

Just need to change this from recording to playback.

Take out the sharp point.

Put in the round point on the reproducer.

Put on a playback horn.

-Come round here.

-Let's have a listen.

Off we go, see what we've got.

PLAYBACK BEGINS

I made my first recording!

I'm now officially a recording artist.

I love that.

-You don't look happy.

-Oh, no, you've got to remember...

-You're so exacting.

-Hm?

-You're so exacting.

Oh, well, yes, I would do all sorts of things to make that work better.

The sound quality wasn't exactly Dolby Surround

but the advent of recording still caused panic among musicians

worried that live performance would disappear and with it their careers.

Meanwhile instrument makers believed that they'd be put out of business

by entrepreneurs like Adolphe Sax.

And those worries mirrored wider fears about the unstoppable march

of progress. Was society sliding into moral decline?

After all, the sleazier side of metropolitan life

wasn't hard to find.

In the same year that Eiffel Tower was unveiled as a monument

to civilisation and progress,

a very different Parisian landmark also opened its doors.

The organisers of the Paris exposition had prided themselves

in turning the whole city into an orgy of music,

but the Moulin Rouge took that description somewhat too literally.

Today we've got a rather misty eyed nostalgia about the glitz

and seedy glamour of the Moulin Rouge,

but back in the 1890s this was a world pitched

halfway between the brothel and the lunatic asylum.

It was said the wild abandon of the can-can could inspire insanity,

moral degeneracy in those who watched it.

It's rather tame by today's standards,

but in its day this place was shocking,

famed for that riotously naughty dance, the can-can,

where girls with bad reputations would show off their wares.

It wasn't just for the seamier elements of Parisian society,

this was a place of mainstream entertainment

where respectable Parisians came in their droves.

Almost as soon as it opened, this dance hall sat alongside the Louvre

and the Eiffel Tower on Parisian maps - an essential place to visit.

More worryingly, music with added sexual frisson

wasn't confined to seedy cabaret clubs.

Even the waltz, today seen as the epitome of dance floor refinement,

had been raising eyebrows with its fast, furious and flirtatious moves.

When the waltz first became popular in the early 19th century

it caused a moral panic.

This new dance craze relied on couples

getting up close and personal.

There were no rules about how to dance it

and often amorous pursuits got in the way of the waltz itself.

Thank you, help me.

-Hm?

-Thank you.

-Oh, sorry, yeah.

-Thank you so much.

-Um...

INDISTINCT CHAT

I'm going to grip it...

Igniting passions that could cause a dangerous loss of self-control,

music and dancing began to be seen as corrupting influences.

But while you may think it takes two to tango, or indeed to waltz,

in the 19th century it wasn't the men everyone was worried about.

No, it was us delicate ladies

who needed protection from the ravages of music.

So it seems like people were getting increasingly worried about music

as the 19th century went on. What was going on?

Music, I think, has always been on the edge

of how people view creativity and sanity

and morality, which are all tied up together.

What did people think would happen to women

if they did have contact with this dangerous stuff, with music?

Well, women are known to be very emotional and irrational creatures

so we need to look after them and make sure they're not exposed to

things that are going to completely wreck their fragile mental health.

So we have, for example, George Beard in the mid century,

who is an American physician. He coined the term neurasthenia.

It's an illness that the majority of people afflicted were women.

And they were fainting and very pale and having headaches and weak.

So George Beard thinks that music is one of the main causes

of neurasthenia because if women are indulging in music

they're not doing all the things they're supposed to do

-to keep their place.

-Simply, you listen to too much music

-you're in danger of having a nervous breakdown?

-Correct.

So the idea that women's nerves are too fragile to deal with music

has been growing throughout the century.

For example, Fanny Hensel, Mendelssohn's sister,

spent a year in Italy with her husband and son.

Had a wonderful musical experience, writes very lyrically about this in

her letters home but at the end we get the little sentence that says,

"Don't worry, this has not had any affect on my nerves."

And they were worried, weren't they, even about things like

women's sexual reproductive capacity

if they had too much music in their lives. What was the concern?

Well, they couldn't win on that one

because there were two schools of thought.

So either too much indulgence and listening to music

and performing music was going to cause premature menstruation,

which meant that she would dry up early and be infertile

and it would be early sexualisation because her emotional nature

meant that the emotional content of music was too much to cope with.

Or, alternatively, it would delay menstruation

and she'd be infertile that way

because music is too intellectual and her emotional nature

couldn't cope with the intellectual and dry aspects of music.

GENTLE MUSIC

As the century progressed, there was a growing idea that music wasn't

just faintly dangerous or decadent

but that it was a pathogen capable of infesting and destroying

the very fabric of society.

Unchecked, it might lead to chaos and anarchy.

Now, all this talk of medicalisation and music and madness might seem

faintly ridiculous to us today,

but people's lives were devastated by this phenomenon.

One Parisian pianist...

spent 15 years in an asylum.

There she was forced to endure freezing cold water

tipped on her head, she was isolated, bullied,

sometimes tortured, and all because her doctors declared

she was insane through an excess of music.

Probably best to stop practising for the day.

You might think that the possibility of being locked in an institution

would put people off playing the piano, but surprisingly not.

Because on the one hand, while the piano was

seen as a kind of Trojan horse, an infiltrator into the home,

taking women away from their familial duties,

on the other it was fast becoming

the ultimate aspirational piece of furniture.

Pianos looked beautiful.

They brought an immediate sense of cultural elevation

and education into one's home.

Mass production meant the prices were dropping

and soon everyone wanted their very own Joanna.

Whether you were a doctor or a lawyer, a coal miner

or a factory worker, you could now get your hands on your own piano.

Between 1840 and 1875, British demand for them quadrupled.

Up to 17,000 elephants every year were slaughtered for their ivory

to make piano keys.

But nobody seemed to worry about that.

The rage for music was simply unstoppable.

Technology had revolutionised every area of the musical landscape,

creating vast stadiums of sound,

transforming how you could get access to music,

democratising who could play it and how it could be heard.

The conventional wisdom about what music was

was changing and one composer

injected that sense of uncertainty into his music.

In 1878, the conductor and composer Gustav Mahler moved to Vienna,

taking up the position of conductor at the city opera.

Vienna already had a reputation as a centre of modernity.

At the beginning of the 19th century its residents,

Beethoven and Schubert, had transformed the musical landscape.

Now Mahler wanted to created music that equally

reflected the world around him, music of the now, not the then.

Mahler's Vienna was a very different city from the one

earlier composers like Beethoven and Schubert had lived in.

Now it was a centre of progressive modernity

with radical new architecture, electric trams,

high-speed trains that could whisk you across the globe.

This was the era of Freud unpicking our dreams,

when you could see moving images - films - for the very first time.

Mahler reflected all that modernity in his music.

In Mahler's hands the symphony becomes a very different beast.

Just think of his predecessor, Beethoven.

For him, symphonies were a kind of progression, a journey,

often from darkness into blazing light.

For Mahler, the symphony is much more like a collage where he takes

bits of pieces of musical material

and layers them on top of one another.

It's a swirling, surreal, emotionally disturbing piece,

capturing the uncertainty of a new world at the turn of a new century.

Nothing like the big, blustering,

confident orchestral sound of Strauss' Zarathustra.

We're in this strange dream-like world...

..the ethereal harp, the celeste,

all adding to that other worldly atmosphere.

In Mahler's hands the symphony is something of the modern world.

And what the modern world demanded was the new.

The march of progress was unstoppable.

Orchestral music had reached its zenith

and orchestral composers would never surpass the success

and status they had enjoyed in the 19th century.

In 1906, the same year Mahler conducted

the premier of his 6th Symphony,

a very different kind of concert was held at the Royal Albert Hall.

The new god of music was not a man...but a machine.

A sell-out audience of almost 10,000 people crammed into the venue

to listen not to a performer they could see, but to a phonograph.

A defining moment in the history of music,

as the 19th century was laid irrefutably to rest

with the advent of the recording era.

It was the close of 100 years of seismic change,

a century where music had come into its own, assuming a power

and potency that still endures.

The 19th century had created the stadium gig, the recording industry,

the star performer.

It had made musicians richer and more powerful

than they could have dreamt possible.

And it had transformed music itself.

More than just entertainment

it was now a way of life for its legions of fans.

And that's a legacy we're all still enjoying today.

MUSICAL RECORDING

MUSIC: Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss