ORCHESTRA PLAYS "POKER FACE" BY LADY GAGA
'Music, one of the most dazzling fruits of human civilisation,
'is today a massive global phenomenon.'
And so it's hard for us to imagine a time when,
in centuries gone by, people could go weeks
without hearing any music at all.
Even in the 19th Century,
you might hear your favourite symphony four or five times
in your whole lifetime in the days before music could be recorded.
'The story of music,
'successive waves of discoveries, breakthroughs and inventions,
'is an ongoing process.'
The next great leap forward
may take place in a backstreet of Beijing
or upstairs in a pub in South Shields.
# Can't read my Can't read my
# No, he can't read my poker face
# She's got me like nobody... #
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.
'Music can make us weep or make us dance.
'It's reflected the times in which it was written.
'It has delighted, challenged, comforted and excited us.
'In this series, I've been tracing the story of music from scratch,
'to follow it on its miraculous journey.
'Misleading jargon and fancy labels are best put to one side.'
Instead, try to imagine how revolutionary
and how exhilarating many of the innovations
we take for granted today were to people at the time.
There are a million ways of telling the story of music.
This is mine.
'The later half of the 18th Century and the beginning of the 19th
'saw the lives and careers of some of the giants of European music.
'Haydn,
'Mozart,
'Beethoven,
'Schubert,
'Schumann,
'Mendelssohn and Chopin.
'They lived through a time of tremendous social upheaval,
'the American and French Revolutions,
'the Napoleonic Wars and yet more revolutions.
'The turmoil of the times eventually saw music transformed.
'It became bigger, louder and more ferocious.
'And yet, before around 1800, the remarkable fact is that
'the music doesn't reflect the mayhem that surrounded it.'
The period from around 1750 to 1850 brought with it
seismic social, political and artistic change.
In music, faith and morality, the watchwords of Bach and Handel,
gave way to the pleasure principle.
Rather than trying to improve their listeners,
composers like Haydn and Mozart starting pampering them instead.
And the rewards from their pampering
completely transformed the social status of the composer.
The process started with the dapper gentleman servant, Haydn,
soon morphed into the freelance star turn, Mozart,
and led to the tormented diva, Beethoven.
In just his lifetime, composers went from below stairs to high table.
The whole function of music
and the audience it was aimed at evolved, and evolved dramatically.
'The music of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert
'and their contemporaries is many things,
'but it is very rarely genuinely disturbing or unnerving.
'In their search for elegance,
'they produced a ton of music of great beauty.
'And in their search for sensuality,
'they made what might have been a grubby existence
'into something attractive, sensitive and often very touching.'
And as the pleasure principle took hold amongst Europe's aristocracy,
music turned from something morally rigorous
or spiritually haunting, to something sensual
and intellectually unchallenging, even if it was often jolly stirring.
But you could say there was a price to pay
for this abstraction in music.
A lack of meaning,
and a lack of direct relevance to the times in which it was produced,
because Haydn and Mozart's obedient following
of their favourite symphonic formulas could not have come
at a more disobedient junction in history.
'The widespread panic that gripped the European aristocracy
'at the time of the American and French Revolutions
'is, with some exceptions, very hard to detect in the bulk of the music.'
It's as if composers felt their job wasn't to join the revolutionaries
but keep the aristocracy calm.
"Don't panic, ladies and gentlemen, we'll create a virtual world
"of order and harmony in our symphonies and concertos."
If you don't believe me, listen to this.
It's what Haydn was writing, his 99th Symphony,
while the terror raged in Paris
and they were cutting off the Queen's head.
'Whereas composers of previous centuries had, on occasions,
'produced music that seems to be a cry of lamentation,
'here the music sauntered blithely on.'
What happened to musical style, then,
to reflect this change of attitude and mood?
The most noticeable difference was a new approach to chords,
the harmony that lay beneath every melody.
Complication was replaced with simplicity.
Unlike their predecessors, composers of the late 18th Century
decided there were really far too many chords available
and that they needed far fewer for their purposes.
They preferred a language that was much simpler.
They were interested in great blocks of one chord
followed by great blocks of another.
Not only did they restrict themselves
to a menu of half a dozen chords,
there were three chords they used obsessively.
I...
IV...
V.
'In the days when red, white and blue flags
'were being hoisted all over Europe,
'those colours are as good a metaphor as anything
'for these three chords.'
Let's look at an excerpt from an opera of 1762,
Orfeo ed Euridice by Christoph Gluck.
It's a dance interlude that later came to be famous,
called The Dance of the Blessed Spirits.
'Chord one, the home chord, usually starts and ends a piece.
'Here's a score of that dance with all the Chord Ones marked in red.'
You may be thinking that red is pretty powerful.
But there are still some areas of the map
not yet conquered by the red empire.
OK, so let's show the same map with the blue chords added,
eating up a bit more of the spaces that are left.
'The blue sections represent Chord Four.
'Now you can see there's not very much unoccupied territory left.
'I'll mark in the Chord Fives in white.'
So between them, our red, white and blue chords are all-conquering.
Nearly all of this music is either chord I, IV or V.
If I colour the final bits left in green,
that's for all other chords,
you'll see how tiny the remaining area now is,
roughly a quarter of the music only.
So the empires of red, white and blue
had the world of music at their feet.
This was still the case nearly 50 years later.
Here's a piece from 1808 by Beethoven.
'In this stirring section,
'Beethoven harmonises the whole thing
'with just our three main chords.
'It's as if Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were reading
'from the same very small book of chords as a no-frills rock group.'
VIOLINS PLAY "ROCKING ALL OVER THE WORLD"
# Well, here we are And here we are
# And here we go
# All aboard and we're ready to go
# Here we go
# Rocking all over the world... #
'In rock and roll, those three chords are still the Status Quo.'
# We're going crazy And we're going there today
# Here we go
# Rocking all over the world
# And I like it, I like it I like it, I like it
# I la-la-la-like it La-la-la-la
# Here we go
# Rocking all over the world
# Over the world. #
'But having a simplified palette of chords
'didn't mean composers were unimaginative or bland.
'It's simply that their concerns were different.
'Composers of this period, like its architects,
'were obsessed with clear form and structure.'
For both Haydn and Mozart, symbolism and symmetry play an important part
in how they constructed their compositions.
You couldn't just have random nice tunes with accompaniment,
you had to have an underlying logic, like a map.
Whereas in a previous era, Bach's sat nav was calibrated mainly
to seek out the meaning of the words,
for Haydn and Mozart who followed him,
finding the perfectly laid-out route was just as essential.
'The building of their musical maps had its most sophisticated
'manifestation in the growth and popularity of the symphony.
'And to introduce the symphony, we need to acquaint ourselves
'with a little-known but hugely influential composer,
'Johann Stamitz.'
Here he is on a Czech stamp. At least someone remembers him.
Stamitz worked in the court in Mannheim, Germany,
where they had an orchestra that was famous throughout Europe,
both for the unusual skill of its players
and for the fact it was big by the standards of the 1750s.
This orchestra had 20 violins, four violas, four cellos,
two basses, two flutes, two oboes, two bassoons and four horns,
as well as two new-fangled clarinets,
much to Mozart's envy when he visited in 1777.
This tally of instruments, occasionally beefed up by timpani
and trumpets, was the template for the orchestra as used by Haydn,
Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and all their contemporaries.
'Importantly, Stamitz addressed the need
'for a guiding structure in orchestral music.
'It's all to do with how he handled and shaped his tunes.
'He has a little phrase like this...'
ORCHESTRA PLAYS PHRASE
'..and then repeats it.'
ORCHESTRA REPEATS PHRASE
'And then a second phrase...
'..which he repeats almost unchanged.
'In fact, virtually every phrase you hear is repeated
'immediately after it's first heard.'
All well and good,
but too much straightforward repetition could be wearing.
The symphony needed more expert hands than this
in order to progress. The man who shaped
and developed the symphony more than any other was Joseph Haydn.
'Haydn's long career as a successful musician and composer
'spanned the entire second half of the 18th Century.
'He was notably generous in his support of younger composers
'like Mozart, a close friend who predeceased him,
'and Beethoven, who was for a time his pupil.
'The torch Haydn passed onto them
'was his crucial refining of the form of the symphony.'
Haydn took the idea of proportion and balance
and went one crucial step further.
His typical balancing phrase wasn't identical,
but slightly different in character.
It created a sense of symmetry without simply repeating itself.
So in the exquisite slow movement of his 88th symphony,
Haydn's first little phrase of six notes goes like this.
It's balancing second half takes the same shape,
but changes the notes,
so it feels like it's on a continuing journey.
Then a final part equalling in length the first two bits together,
rounds off the phrase in a satisfying and ornamented way.
This process of taking a little cell of a tune,
then building on it to create longer units
with more interesting features to them
is what Haydn taught the world to do, apparently effortlessly.
SYMPHONY CONTINUES
'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.'
The next star composer based in Vienna pushed this relationship
between public and artist to dramatic new heights.
He was Beethoven. His mission was not so much to charm
or seduce his audience as to confront it.
'To many people, Beethoven is the very model
'of the tormented, misunderstood genius,
'a caricature of the classical composer,
'complete with demonic stare and perpetual bad hair day.
'A moody, mixed-up chap, he found himself in possession
'of musical talents even he couldn't quite come to terms with.
'The reputation and the man, though, don't always tally up.'
For a start, Beethoven wasn't one composer, but three.
He starts off as a Mozart clone with a flair for playing the piano,
turns into "Haydn: The Sequel"
and ends up isolated from the world by deafness,
composing music that was to baffle, bewitch and amaze
every European musician of the next 100 years.
'While Beethoven devotees like to see him
'as a man who reinvented music from a standing start,
'the reality is that, like most composers,
'his early career finds him tuning him to the musical currents
'of the day and adapting them.
'Listen to this piece.
'This piano sonata is by a little-known Czech composer
'called Jan Dussek.
'Though he was based in London,
'Dussek's music was known to Beethoven.
'Now listen to this, a piano sonata
'written by Beethoven a year later, in 1798.
'Beethoven's 8th Piano Sonata, his Pathetique,
'was written when he was just 28
'and still making a name for himself in Vienna.
'It's not difficult to hear
'the distinctive traces of Dussek's piano style.'
Seven years after composing his Pathetique Sonata,
Beethoven has stopped sounding like Mozart or Dussek or Haydn
and started creating music beyond anything they'd imagined.
The first major sign he was breaking away from established formulas
was his Eroica Symphony of 1804.
'This was a considerable challenge for Viennese audiences of the time.
'If you were used to the regular, predictable patterns of Haydn,
'the Eroica's many noisy surprises and unexpected changes of key
'were an uncomfortable mix of titillating and alarming.
'Most of all, the Eroica was long.
'Its opening movement alone is the same length
'as an average symphony by Haydn or Mozart.
'Beethoven's ambition was growing, along with his music.'
Traditional histories like to equate Beethoven,
the colossus of music in the early 1800s,
with his contemporary, Napoleon Bonaparte,
revolutionary-turned-emperor and serial military adventurer.
'The Eroica Symphony was originally dedicated to Napoleon Bonaparte.
'Legend has it that Beethoven angrily scratched Bonaparte's name
'from the score when Napoleon declared himself emperor in 1804.
'It's a good yarn but recent research suggests
'it might instead be, alas, a myth.'
Perhaps what Beethoven was really appalled by
wasn't so much Napoleon's imperial pretensions
but the unravelling of the high-minded aspirations
of the French Revolution itself,
the descent into cruelty and unfairness,
merely dressed in new colours.
'This despair is reflected in the music,
'but it's not to be found in the opening movement.'
Musicologists love to wax on about the ambitious first movement
of the Eroica Symphony, mainly because it's unusually long,
complex and unpredictable and provides fuel
for seemingly endless analysis and scholarly scrutiny.
Beethoven takes a relatively simple tune
and builds from it a giant tapestry of ideas and musical meanderings.
But, to me, it's not the clever-clogs first movement
that carries the killer punch but the funeral march that follows it.
What's different and new about this movement is not its structure,
orchestration or technical bravado but its attitude.
Whereas both Haydn and Mozart aimed to reveal human emotions
through the filter of a gentlemanly, well-bred composure,
the Funeral March in Eroica is remarkable for its unflinching seriousness.
Grief is grief, pain is pain and music,
Beethoven seemed to be proclaiming,
was the art best placed to confront such darkness.
Within the next two decades or so, most of his educated
contemporaries gradually came to the same conclusion.
'For the first time since the death of Bach,
'the music of the moment seemed more accurately
'to be attempting to portray the sadness and fear
'that people might actually be experiencing.'
And there were horrors aplenty to keep a sensitive person
awake at night at the start of the 19th Century.
'From the Eroica Symphony onwards,
'Beethoven's music became serious-minded and earnest,
'since it was his unabashed aim to change the world through this art.
'It's debatable whether he did change the world
'but he certainly changed the whole perception of music.'
This was Beethoven's real significance,
not how he changed musical form or language,
but how he recalibrated what music was for.
Single-handedly, he turned it from genteel after-dinner entertainment
into a state of mind that no civilised person could be without.
'Beethoven subsumed his own personality into his music.
'Whereas once music was driven by faith, beauty or elegance,
'now it was fuelled by a composer's own psychology.
'By making the music about him and his feelings,
'Beethoven was taking music in a new direction.
'Not only was music co-opted into the personality of the composer,
'so was the nature all around him.
'Nature was ascribed human emotions,
'it became a metaphor for the feelings of the artist.
'In music, once again this movement starts with Beethoven
'and his 6th Symphony, the Pastoral, written in 1808.
'For the next 100 years, this Symphony would act as a template
'for how one might portray a state of mind
'in musical pictures of nature.
'This idea of using nature as a metaphor
'for a composer's deepest emotions was also the hallmark
'of Beethoven's near contemporary,
'also based in Vienna, Franz Schubert.
'For Schubert, the birds, the bees, the woods
'and the trees stand for human feelings, above all in song writing,
'at which he was simply unmatched before the 20th Century.'
'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.
'But while this appealing music was being written,
'another, very different, sort of music was also being produced.
'It was loud, long, grandiose and argumentative.
'Once again, this tendency can be traced back to Beethoven.
'Just as the age of steam
'was producing ever-greater industrial forces,
'so, too, Beethoven, in his 7th Symphony of 1812,
'was unleashing music on a newly forceful scale.
'Here, Beethoven creates a heavier, more imposing sound
'from an ever-larger orchestra.
'The symphony orchestra is now a powerful, awe-inspiring organism.
'Like the colossal industries that were roaring into life around them,
'these mighty walls of orchestral muscle
'provided a soundtrack for a daunting new age.
'But if audiences reacted with amazement
'to the magnitude of his 7th Symphony,
'it was as nothing to what Beethoven let rip 12 years later.
'His 9th Symphony single-handedly announced
'that the form of the symphony was henceforth to be on an epic scale.
'It concluded with a now-iconic anthem.'
MUSIC: "Ode To Joy"
'The Ode to Joy is based on a poem
'by the German writer, Friedrich Schiller.'
'It's nothing less than a call for universal brotherhood.
'It was revealed to the world in two subscription concerts
'a fortnight apart, one full of admirers and close friends,
'the other almost empty as the public came to grips
'with Beethoven's modernity.
'Beethoven was saying that the symphony,
'instead of being about music, should now be about the world.
'Never has an invitation to young composers
'been more enthusiastically embraced.
'The coming decades were to be about music
'taking on the task of reforming humanity,
'dreaming a new utopia and leading the arts to unite mankind.'
APPLAUSE AND CHEERING
'The irony of what happened after Beethoven's 9th
'is that what Beethoven himself did next was the exact opposite.
'He turned his back on the vast scale of the 9th Symphony
'to something smaller and more intimate.'
In the last two years of his life, now profoundly deaf
and mostly bedridden from severe illness,
Beethoven withdrew into a private sound world,
composing six string quartets of astonishing intensity and modernity.
By modern, I don't mean by the standards of 1826,
I mean by the standards of a century later.
These late quartets are almost embarrassingly private.
It's as if he was working out some tortured mind game on the page
or distracting himself from an unbearable sadness.
Most of his contemporaries
didn't know what to make of these late quartets.
Could Beethoven hear the music of the future?
If this was it, his vision was a bleak, uneasy one.
'The small scale and intensity of feeling
'that bleeds through these late quartets
'was echoed by some of the composers who followed Beethoven
'after his death in 1827.
'One such was to become a very different kind of piano virtuoso
'to the crowd-pulling pyrotechnical maestro
'that Beethoven had been at the start of his career.
'The Polish composer, Frederic Chopin.'
Of the generation that followed immediately after Beethoven,
Chopin is the one whose influence was slowest to make its impact.
The reason being that, like Beethoven's Late Quartet,
Chopin's music is unusually intimate.
Because he preferred not to perform in large concert halls, loudly,
as was the vogue, but in small salons and private homes, quietly,
his fame spread person by person, fan by fan.
In this respect, he's more like a novelist than a composer,
as people fell for his music like they would a secret love.
'Chopin was an exile from his Polish homeland,
'at that time swallowed up in the Russian Empire.
'His longing for his country is expressed with exquisite melancholy
'in nearly all of his pieces for solo piano.'
Chopin's music was the flip side of the concert hall,
symphony orchestra experience,
music to be shared amongst a few mates
in the privacy of your front room,
a pursuit that lasted in many homes till the Second World War.
This was the beginning of an era of amateur musicianship,
a mass movement of music making
which centred indispensably on the piano.
'From the early 19th Century on,
'the new middle class proudly installed factory-made pianos
'in their drawing rooms and needed music to play on them.
'To meet this new market, a tidal wave of sheet music was published,
'of both classical and popular music.
'Before gramophones and radios,
'the piano was the only source of music in many a middle-class home.
'Here was a chance to make music for a large body of people
'who, up to now, had been excluded from playing in orchestras
'and from composing -
'women.'
Whilst it might be possible - with good reading and writing -
to become the author of a novel,
as Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters or George Eliot proved,
it's practically impossible to write a symphony or an opera
without years of instruction and specialist knowledge.
'Playing the piano became a social accomplishment for middle-class women
'but, more importantly, it gave them a chance to compose.'
'Here's a tantalising example, a sparkling vignette
'composed by Felix Mendelssohn's talented older sister, Fanny.
'As with her brother's music, it conjures up a picture in sound,
'a chilly February day.'
'One of the most famous concert pianists of the 19th Century
'was a close contemporary and friend of Fanny Mendelssohn's, Clara Wieck,
'who later married the composer, Robert Schumann.
'Whereas Schubert's love songs
'are about women as unattainable objects of desire,
'Schumann's were written with a real, flesh-and-blood woman in mind,
'and an equal partner.
'Clara was the inspiration
'for some of Schumann's most achingly beautiful love songs.'
'As one of Europe's leading pianists,
'Clara Schumann tirelessly promoted her husband's works.
'She also championed the works of Chopin
'and travelled the world to perform his subtle, deceptively complex music.
'Perhaps no other composer ever made the hours of practice
'necessary to play his music more worth the candle.'
Chopin's rich and ambiguous harmonies,
interwoven intricately between the hands,
look to the future, leaving behind the primary-colour certainties
of Mozart, Haydn and early Beethoven once and for all.
After a period of simplicity,
music's pendulum was swinging back towards complexity again.
There's a delicacy and gentleness to his music, though,
that represents the final curtain call
of the Age of Elegance and Gracefulness,
of Sense and Sensibility.
His heroes were Mozart and Bach,
composers for whose music dignity was everything.
One of Chopin's very last pieces was a barcarolle,
a lilting gondola song.
He admitted being terrified of death.
Perhaps he dreamed up this soothing boat ride to calm his anxiety
or to remind himself of simpler times.
After Beethoven's death in 1827,
a kind of parting of the waves took place between two versions
of what a composer might do, whether to curry favour with an audience
or become a misunderstood martyr suffering for your art.
It's a rift that took nearly 200 years to heal.
In the next programme, in the hands of Berlioz and Wagner,
music became louder, angrier, more self-important and more tempestuous.
The second half of the 19th Century saw a craze for music
that was obsessed with death, doomed love and destiny.
Even popular Italian opera succumbed to it
in the brilliant, passionate musical dramas of Giuseppe Verdi.
The future belonged to the beautiful and the damned.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd