20 класичних музичних творів, що їх має знати кожна освічена людина (за версією The Times)
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/music/classical/article3873825.ece
The Times quick guides to culture, day 5 - the 20 works that have shaped the history of classical music
1. Mass for Four Voices
William Byrd 1592
Between the dawn of notated harmony in the 12th century and the last gasp of the Renaissance in about the 16th, composers across Europe produced thousands of sacred choral pieces, many of stupendous complexity and surpassing beauty. These Masses and motets were the aural counterparts of the soaring cathedrals built at the same time. Can a single work stand for them all? The answer is no, but William Byrd’s Mass for Four Voices has acquired an emblematic power - especially in Britain. Byrd was a Catholic, brilliant enough (and, presumably, discreet enough) to flourish in Elizabeth’s sometimes murderous Protestant England. Composing three settings of the Latin Mass in the 1590s was incredibly dangerous, even though they were published without title pages and performed in secret. The music is masterly: a fusion of biting English harmonies (often harking back to Byrd’s great predecessor, John Taverner) and the continental style perfected by Palestrina, in which voices echo and interweave. The end of the Agnus Dei - a series of anguished, seemingly unresolving dissonances - is said to be a special plea for peace on behalf of English Catholics.
What to say: A volatile mix of Renaissance polyphony and deeply felt anguish
2. L’Orfeo
Claudio Monteverdi 1607
Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo emerged out of a musical revolution. About 1600 a group of aristocratic Italian musicians and poets overthrew what they saw as the inexpressive old ways of setting words to music. Instead they experimented with a style in which the singer, over a supportive bass line embellished with chords (the “basso continuo”), had much more freedom to declaim the text, and many more notes in which to do so. Monteverdi’s genius was to fuse these new ideas to the old, contrapuntal style of the Renaissance madrigal, add unprecedented instrumental colours (he specifies no fewer than 41 different instruments), and use it to tell the story of Orfeo’s descent into Hell with terrific emotional directness. As a musician, Orfeo himself is given wonderfully ornate, virtuosic arias. Monteverdi went on to write nine more operas (only two others survive), nine books of madrigals and much church music including an incomparable collection known as the Vespers of 1610. He established the parameters of the flamboyant Baroque style, which dominated music for the next 150 years.
What to say: Not the first opera but certainly the first operatic masterpiece
3. St Matthew Passion
Johann Sebastian Bach 1727
The Good Friday tradition of singing the story of Christ’s arrest, trial and crucifixion wasn’t invented by Bach. It dated back centuries before him, and was particularly developed by German Lutheran composers such as Heinrich Schütz. It was the ambitious cantor of Leipzig, however, who lifted the Passion format to new heights of grandeur, particularly in his St Matthew Passion, into which Bach incorporates two choirs and two orchestras, an operatic array of principal characters, impassioned arias, astonishingly theatrical choruses, a narrator (or Evangelist), and chorales (or hymns) that would involve the entire congregation. Nearly every work by Bach demonstrates his mastery of counterpoint (the art of interweaving vocal or instrumental lines so that they seem to echo or answer each other), but in his Passions and cantatas he applies this stupendous musical technique to a greater overriding purpose: proclaiming the Christian message in which he fervently believed. For this he developed an expressive language that operates almost as a code: certain melodic or harmonic ideas stand as aural metaphors for specific emotions, such as grief, guilt, hope or joy. Listening to, or performing, the St Matthew Passion on Good Friday is still a rite for many music lovers - even if they aren’t themselves Christians.
What to say: They must have had amazingly talented choirboys in 18th-century Leipzig
4. Messiah
George Frideric Handel 1741
Though they were countrymen, exact contemporaries and twin giants of the Late Baroque, Bach and Handel never met. There’s something symbolic about that. Bach hardly travelled, was a prickly character, and never wrote for the theatre. Handel, by contrast, plied his trade as a jobbing operatic composer in Italy and England, was a dedicated bon viveur, and largely lived in the world of preening castrati, prima donnas and the cobbled-together pragmatism of London’s theatreland. Yet with Messiah he created a sacred oratorio of such power and profundity that it gripped the audiences of his day and has never lost its popular appeal. Though nearly three hours long (it reflects on Christ’s story from Old Testament prophecy to Last Judgment), it was famously composed in just 24 days and premiered (in Dublin) by a choir of only 32 men and boys - a far cry from the choruses of thousands that performed it in the Victorian era. Everyone knows the Hallelujah Chorus, but some of Messiah’s gems - the arias He was despised and I know that my Redeemer liveth, for instance - are the opposite of grandiose: they show Handel’s supreme ability to translate emotion into irresistibly arching melody.
What to say: Hallelujah isn’t even the best bit: Worthy is the Lamb ..... Amen is where Handel really lets rip
Erwin Schrott as Figaro and Miah Persson as Susanna in a 2006 production of The Marriage of Figaro
5. The Marriage of Figaro
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1786
Wodehouse’s Jeeves is a hundred times smarter than his boss, Bertie Wooster - but for the Imperial Court in late 18th-century Vienna, terrified by the revolutionary fervour fermenting in France, the notion of servants outwitting their masters was anathema. So the 20-year-old Mozart was taking a huge risk simply by setting to music Pierre Beaumarchais’s 1784 comedy, about the manservant Figaro getting the better of his aristocratic employer, who wants to seduce Figaro’s fiancée. However the resultant opera, with a witty, worldly-wise libretto from Lorenzo da Ponte (who would later collaborate with Mozart on Così fan tutte and Don Giovanni ), is less concerned with political upheaval than with showing how human beings are led astray by their own foibles and sexual urges. What’s truly revolutionary is the music. The bubbling overture is the greatest ever written; the Acts II and IV finales interweave the feelings of up to eight characters simultaneously; and many of the brilliantly tuneful arias have become stand-alone classics. Best of all is the sublime moment, cloaked by Mozart in music of transcendental beauty, when the Countess - humiliated by her boorish husband throughout the opera - has the grace to forgive him for his gross philandering.
What to say: You can see this opera a hundred times (and many do) yet still find something new and wonderful each time
6. Symphony No 104, London
Joseph Haydn 1795
The concept of the symphony as a substantial four-movement orchestral work evolved in the 18th century, and nobody did more to bring that about than the Austrian composer and friend of Mozart, Joseph Haydn. Over five decades he wrote more than 100 symphonies, mostly for the court orchestra of the aristocratic Esterházy family, in whose employ Haydn spent most of his adult life. However, as his fame spread he was allowed to travel, and it was for ecstatic London audiences that he wrote his last 12 symphonies. The final one, randomly, is actually nicknamed the London Symphony, and it was premiered, with Haydn directing from the keyboard, to rapturous audiences at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, in 1795 - though Haydn, a professional musician to his fingertips, was more interested in the box-office takings than the applause. “I made 4,000 gulden on that evening,” he wrote. “Such a thing is possible only in England.” With its famous “drone” finale (said to be based on a Croatian folktune) the piece epitomises Haydn’s style and indeed the whole Classical period: witty, tuneful, elegant, it is music designed to entertain and dazzle rather than shock and awe. It was Haydn’s unruly pupil, Beethoven, who would drive the symphony in the latter direction.
What to say: That love affair with a gorgeous English widow really pepped up old “Papa” Haydn
7. Die schöne Müllerin
Franz Schubert 1823
Just 31 when he died, probably of syphilis, Franz Schubert wrote nearly 600 songs (as well as wonderful symphonies, Masses and chamber music). Glorious tunes simply flowed out of him, yet in his lifetime he was almost unknown outside a small circle of music-making friends, constantly penniless, and wracked with increasingly severe illnesses. The authentic Romantic hero, then - and in his two great song-cycles, Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise , he created timeless templates of Romantic despair captured in melodies of melting beauty and accompanied by piano parts that supply their own anguished subtexts. Both are settings of poems by Schubert’s contemporary, Wilhelm Müller. Die schöne Müllerin traces an arc of inexorably gathering gloom. An impoverished youth hopes to woo a beautiful miller’s daughter, but his hopes are dashed by the appearance of a glamorous huntsman and that leads him towards jealousy, obsession, surreal hallucinations and then the only consolation left to him - the eternal peace of suicide. Oddly, though, when you hear a good performance the effect is not morbid but mesmerising and strangely transcendental. “All other songwriters have followed in Schubert’s footsteps,” Dvorák wrote in 1894. More than a century of great songs later, the same could still be said.
What to say: Who can’t relate to the story of a youngster tormented by unrequited love?
8. Symphony No 9, Choral
Ludwig van Beethoven 1824
Each of Beethoven’s nine symphonies is a revolution. In No 3 he doubled the length of the classical symphony with audacious structures; with No 5 he introduced trombones into the symphonic world, and the darkness-to-light journey that so many later composers would follow. The Sixth, the Pastoral , is the first “programme” symphony, depicting country life. It’s the Ninth, however, that rocked the musical world. After three colossal movements, turbulent, pulsating and sublime, Beethoven decides that instruments alone aren’t enough to express his heaven-storming ideas. So in the massive finale - a symphony within a symphony - he introduces four solo voices and a chorus, roaring out Friedrich Schiller’s 1785 Ode to Joy . Its optimistic evocation of a paradisical future in which “all men become brothers” hasn’t stopped it from being misappropriated by, among many others, the Nazis (who played it in the death camps) and as the national anthem of apartheid Rhodesia. Despite this - and the stamina-sapping choral writing - the work remains the most admired of all symphonies, and the masterpiece that most powerfully expresses Beethoven’s idealistic hopes for mankind.
What to say: How tragic that Beethoven never heard a note of the first performance, even though he was conducting
9. Octet for Strings
Felix Mendelssohn 1825
At the age when English schoolchildren are taking their GCSEs, Felix Mendelssohn composed one of the 19th century’s most dazzling pieces of chamber music. Born into a rich, cultured Jewish family, in a happier period of German history when anti-Semitism was not yet a lethal prejudice, Mendelssohn and his sister Fanny (also a fine pianist and underrated composer) were true child prodigies: putting on Shakespeare productions in the garden, voraciously reading poetry, and developing musical skills that astonished all who heard them. Even so, Felix’s Octet in E flat, for four violins, two violas and two cellos, was a bolt out of the blue. Constantly interweaving eight instruments, it has the technical mastery that suggests a mature composer, yet the bubbling high spirits of an ebullient teenager. Even when compared with the other chamber music written in the miraculous 1820s - Schubert’s Quintet in C, or Beethoven’s late string quartets - it has genius stamped on every bar. Indeed, only one other work of that era rivals it for precocious vivacity, and that was also by Mendelssohn: the overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written two years later.
What to say: No teenage angst here: it’s wall-to-wall high jinks
10. Symphonie Fantastique
Hector Berlioz 1830
The extraordinary Symphonie Fantastique, composed for what was then the largest orchestra ever assembled, has it all. It is also the work of a man obsessed. Hector Berlioz, then a little-known 27-year-old composer in Paris, saw the Irish actress Harriet Smithson as Ophelia in Hamlet, and was smitten. At the time she didn’t respond to his letters, so Berlioz poured his feelings into this extraordinary orchestral melodrama which, in five movements, depicts a young man who has “poisoned himself with opium” because of unrequited love, and experiences increasingly macabre hallucinations including his own execution and a witches’ Sabbath. As the conductor Leonard Bernstein said: “Berlioz tells it like it is. You take a trip, you wind up screaming at your own funeral.” As sensational as his subject was Berlioz’s highly original handling of the vast orchestra. He used instruments in combinations that shocked his Paris Conservatoire professors (and many later academics), but his shaping of symphonic form to tell a vivid, indeed lurid, story greatly influenced later Romantic composers.
What to say: Sex, drugs, and the 19th-century equivalent of rock’n’roll
11. Études
Frédéric Chopin 1833
Though he composed almost exclusively for his own instrument, the piano, Frédéric Chopin achieved international fame in his short life (1810-1849) and an influence that stretches to our own day. He revolutionised keyboard technique and, although he hated playing in public halls, his many performances in the fashionable salons of Paris (where he settled after his exile from his Polish homeland) established him as the first of a new breed: the hero-worshipped virtuoso. He is also often labelled as the first “nationalist” composer, mainly because his fellow Polish émigrés detected a political subtext in his music - particularly his development of the Polish mazurka dance into an outpouring of fervent emotion. His 27 marvellous études, published in three batches, in 1833, 1837 and 1841, were primarily written to teach his pupils his own revolutionary piano-playing technique - each study concentrating on a different skill. So far, so conventional. Chopin’s genius, however, was to turn these dry classroom exercises into magnificently impassioned soundscapes, or dreamily beautiful melodies. The most popular is probably the so-called Revolutionary Étude, Op 10 No 12, which has become an emblem of Poland’s unbreakable spirit.
What to say: Nobody thought a pianoforte could sing before Chopin came along
Frankfurt Opera’s production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle
12. The Ring
Richard Wagner 1876
Because The Ring lasts fifteen hours spread over four evenings, and because it and its composer have generated more analysis, controversy, obsession and loathing than anything or anyone else in music, many newcomers feel so daunted that they shun these epic operas altogether. That’s a pity. The story - a power struggle involving gods and mortals, treachery and love, murder and theft - is like a blockbuster novel, only set to music that combines a network of symbolic themes (leitmotifs) with the elemental power of a huge orchestra underpinning the world’s biggest voices. Wagner took 26 years to write it, drawing his plot from Norse myth and his structure from Greek tragedy. His musical language, however, is his own invention. It dispenses with set-piece arias and is saturated with rich chromatic harmonies (using notes outside the tonic scale). Wagner strove to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, a “total artwork” combining all disciplines. With lavish backing from “mad” King Ludwig of Bavaria he came closest to achieving that with The Ring, for which he had a new theatre purpose-built at Bayreuth. Staging the cycle is still the biggest challenge an opera house can undertake.
What to say: How did George Bernard Shaw describe it? “Sublime moments; terrible half-hours”
Ambrogio Maestri as Falstaff in 2001
13. Falstaff
Giuseppe.Verdi 1893
Verdi’s 26 operas, composed over 54 years, not only dominated Italian theatre in his day, they continue to dominate the opera repertoire today. One reason for that is their tunes - once heard, never forgotten. But they have more profound qualities too: unflagging dramatic energy, arias that define character as deftly as a portrait painter’s brush, and (although Verdi is unfavourably compared with Wagner in this respect) their own unique orchestral and harmonic worlds, colouring each drama’s mood. All these qualities reach their zenith in his final opera, Falstaff - miraculously, since Verdi was nearly 80 when he wrote it. A masterly libretto by Arrigo Boito (who also adapted Othello for Verdi) condenses action from Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsorinto one bubbling three-act span. Verdi responded with a portrait of the fat knight that, paradoxically, manages to be true to Shakespeare and the finest Italian comic opera ever written. The score culminates in a sizzling fugue that not only displays the old master’s undimmed contrapuntal skills, but also articulates his attitude to life: “Tutto nel mondo è burla ..... Tutti gabbati!” (“Everything in the world is a jest”).
What to say: Whisper it - but actually, Boito’s libretto is better crafted than Shakespeare’s original
14. Symphony No 6: Pathétique
Pyotr Tchaikovsky 1893
No symphony has triggered so much sensational speculation as Tchaikovsky’s last completed work. He died, aged 53, nine days after conducting its premiere in St Petersburg - possibly from cholera accidentally contracted, possibly from suicide. As his leading biographer says: “We may never know.” We do know that he was a homosexual in a society that inflicted severe penalties on male relationships, and that this tension between inner nature and social propriety caused Tchaikovsky much unhappiness. Whether the possibility of exposure drove him to suicide is one of the most debated questions in musicology, but the Pathétique (the Russian title is better translated as “impassioned”) is arguably the nearest thing in music to a suicide note: a surreal, five-in-the-bar waltz and a hyper-manic march bookended by two of the most despondent adagios ever penned. Even amid this gathering gloom, however, Tchaikovsky’s supreme qualities - as possibly the finest melody-maker in history; as a fabulous orchestrator, and as a highly original shaper of musical form - are overwhelmingly obvious. It used to be obligatory for snobs to deride Tchaikovsky. No longer.
What to say: Mass popularity and creative genius are not mutually exclusive
A 1900 caricature of Mahler
15. Symphony No 5
Gustav Mahler 1904
Leonard Bernstein called him “the last great composer” - which is depressing, since he died in 1911. Yet in his lifetime Mahler was much more highly respected as a conductor than for his own music, which was largely written during his summer holidays. The astonishing thing is that this part-time composer produced gigantic masterpieces encompassing whole worlds. They draw on songs he had composed earlier, on folksong and popular music, on his inside-out orchestral knowledge - and, for their emotional content, on the tragedies and joys of his life. As a child Mahler witnessed the deaths of seven siblings. As a Jew he was the butt of prejudice. As a man he fell in love with Alma Schindler, the most desired (and promiscuous) woman of her era. As a mortal, he knew his body was all too frail. All of this is written into his symphonies. The Fifth starts with an apocalyptic trumpet call heralding a colossal funeral march, but finishes in blazing affirmation, preceded by the glorious Adagietto - Mahler’s wordless lovesong for Alma. He wasn’t always this optimistic.
What to say: Mahler said we wouldn’t understand the Fifth Symphony until he had been dead 50 years, and he was right
Kenneth MacMillan’s 2005 Royal Ballet production of The Rite of Spring
16. The Rite of Spring
Igor Stravinsky 1913
Its Paris premiere, 100 years ago, triggered a riot. Whether that was because of Vaslav Nijinsky’s radical choreography, the sensationalist advance publicity craftily generated by the impresario Serge Diaghilev, or Igor Stravinsky’s music, is a matter for debate. What’s indisputable is that with his three huge pre-First World War ballet scores - The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring - Stravinsky changed the musical world for ever. And it was with the last of these that the young exiled Russian made his biggest leap into the future. Though recent research has revealed that the score is thoroughly grounded in Lithuanian folksong (just as the ballet’s story is derived from accounts of pagan rituals in ancient Russia), the music struck listeners as completely revolutionary in tonality, structure, orchestration and, particularly, rhythm. Sometimes Stravinsky changed from one irregular metre to another a dozen times in a few seconds; in other places the orchestra was used like a gigantic sledgehammer. Whereas his Austrian contemporary, Schoenberg, worked towards atonality by systematically pushing Wagnerian chromaticism to its logical conclusion, Stravinsky’s savage score operated more like dynamite: blowing apart all preconceptions about how music should sound, and under what laws it should operate.
What to say: The soundtrack to humanity hurtling towards the catastrophe of world war
Johan Reuter as Wozzeck at the Royal Opera House
17. Wozzeck
Alban Berg 1925
Alban Berg was a brilliant pupil of Arnold Schoenberg, the uncompromising Austrian who turned his back on tonality (the system of major and minor keys underpinning music since the 17th century) and instead developed 12-tone music, in which every semitone in the scale had equal importance in the “tone-row” that organised each piece. Berg’s genius was to use Schoenberg’s atonal advances more flexibly, incorporating tonal elements and expressive resources more characteristic of Late Romantic music. Wozzeck was his first opera, based on a bleak, incomplete play by Georg Büchner. The title role is a simpleton soldier, bullied by his captain, experimented upon by the sadistic doctor and cuckolded by the drum major - the latter betrayal leading Wozzeck to murder Marie, the mother of his child, and drown himself. Not an evening of light comedy, then - but the underlying themes (humiliation of a misfit, callousness of society, madness and mindless brutality) and the remarkable way in which Berg arranged his material, incorporating ancient forms such as fugue and passacaglia to give each scene an inner coherence, made Wozzeck the most influential opera of the early 20th century.
What to say: Not sordid enough for you? Try Berg’s second opera,Lulu
Shostakovich at the piano, with the creators of the satirical ballet The Bedbug in Moscow in 1929
18. Symphony No 5
Dmitri Shostakovich 1937
At the height of Stalin’s Great Terror, when many millions were incarcerated in the gulags and half a million shot dead, Shostakovich was one of those living in daily dread. His grim opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District had been denounced by Stalin’s cultural henchmen. This public humiliation, plus fear of imprisonment or worse, led Shostakovich to withdraw his coruscatingly dissonant Fourth Symphony. The new, ostensibly much “simpler” Fifth was, he told a journalist, “a Soviet artist’s creative response to justified criticism”. The authorities took this apparently cowed description, and the symphony’s seemingly optimistic finale, at face value. For more discerning listeners, however - both in Leningrad at the time, and up to the present day - the piece carries a very different message: one of despairing struggle and (in the elegiac Largo) comfortless grief, culminating in forced rejoicing. A covert web of quotations to other pieces seems to support this interpretation. Either way, the magnificent Fifth has become Shostakovich’s most popular symphony, and compelling evidence of the power of the creative spirit to flourish under extreme duress.
What to say: Ironic that Russian composers have produced nothing since perestroika to equal the masterpieces of the Soviet Union’s worst years
19. Gruppen
Karlheinz Stockhausen 1957
Egotistical, eccentric, deluded and frequently preposterous, Stockhausen was nevertheless one of the giants of the post-1945 avant garde. He experimented with electronic sound well before the synthesiser had been invented; he developed ways of structuring music that went light years beyond the 12-tone serialism deployed by Schoenberg’s disciples; and he integrated these new approaches with “traditional” vocal and instrumental forms to produce vast structures to which he imparted a cosmological significance - most self-importantly in his seven-day opera Licht. Gruppen was conceived while Stockhausen was staying in the Swiss Alps, and he declared, “whole envelopes of rhythmic blocks are exact lines of the mountains”. Don’t expect anything pictorial, however: he puts his material through a mind-boggling mathematical wringer, designed to produce a complex interplay between the three orchestras (each with its own conductor) who play at different speeds. In performance, however, the mathematical structure is forgotten, as the ear is blitzed by primordial screams, jagged splinters of brass from three directions and surprisingly delicate passages where a couple of notes can convey whole worlds of irony, nostalgia, anger or farce.
What to say: Five years after his death, we are still only starting to appreciate Stockhausen’s vision
Benjamin Britten conducting his War Requiem at the Proms in 1965
20. War Requiem
Benjamin Britten 1962
After its medieval cathedral was bombed to a shell in the Second World War, Coventry consecrated a new cathedral in May 1962. For that occasion, Britten - a pacifist and conscientious objector during the war - was commissioned to write a large-scale work. Then at the peak of his creative powers, he responded with a typically original concept: a setting of the Requiem Mass, but interspersed with the poems of Wilfred Owen, who died in the First World War. Two male soloists, symbolically English and German, would sing these poems accompanied by a chamber orchestra, while (in the original conception) a soprano from the third major European combatant, Russia, would sing with the gigantic choir and orchestra. In addition, boy choristers intone liturgical-style chants from a gallery. It was a dangerously complex work to present in a barely finished building, and the premiere was a famously fraught affair. The power and originality of the music, however - and the way it caught the antiwar mood of the 1960s - brought immediate acclaim from critics and the public, and today it is regarded as Britten’s finest non-operatic work.
What to say: The English choral tradition gets a passionate, pacifist makeover
The Times quick guides to culture, day 5 - the 20 works that have shaped the history of classical music
1. Mass for Four Voices
William Byrd 1592
Between the dawn of notated harmony in the 12th century and the last gasp of the Renaissance in about the 16th, composers across Europe produced thousands of sacred choral pieces, many of stupendous complexity and surpassing beauty. These Masses and motets were the aural counterparts of the soaring cathedrals built at the same time. Can a single work stand for them all? The answer is no, but William Byrd’s Mass for Four Voices has acquired an emblematic power - especially in Britain. Byrd was a Catholic, brilliant enough (and, presumably, discreet enough) to flourish in Elizabeth’s sometimes murderous Protestant England. Composing three settings of the Latin Mass in the 1590s was incredibly dangerous, even though they were published without title pages and performed in secret. The music is masterly: a fusion of biting English harmonies (often harking back to Byrd’s great predecessor, John Taverner) and the continental style perfected by Palestrina, in which voices echo and interweave. The end of the Agnus Dei - a series of anguished, seemingly unresolving dissonances - is said to be a special plea for peace on behalf of English Catholics.
What to say: A volatile mix of Renaissance polyphony and deeply felt anguish
2. L’Orfeo
Claudio Monteverdi 1607
Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo emerged out of a musical revolution. About 1600 a group of aristocratic Italian musicians and poets overthrew what they saw as the inexpressive old ways of setting words to music. Instead they experimented with a style in which the singer, over a supportive bass line embellished with chords (the “basso continuo”), had much more freedom to declaim the text, and many more notes in which to do so. Monteverdi’s genius was to fuse these new ideas to the old, contrapuntal style of the Renaissance madrigal, add unprecedented instrumental colours (he specifies no fewer than 41 different instruments), and use it to tell the story of Orfeo’s descent into Hell with terrific emotional directness. As a musician, Orfeo himself is given wonderfully ornate, virtuosic arias. Monteverdi went on to write nine more operas (only two others survive), nine books of madrigals and much church music including an incomparable collection known as the Vespers of 1610. He established the parameters of the flamboyant Baroque style, which dominated music for the next 150 years.
What to say: Not the first opera but certainly the first operatic masterpiece
3. St Matthew Passion
Johann Sebastian Bach 1727
The Good Friday tradition of singing the story of Christ’s arrest, trial and crucifixion wasn’t invented by Bach. It dated back centuries before him, and was particularly developed by German Lutheran composers such as Heinrich Schütz. It was the ambitious cantor of Leipzig, however, who lifted the Passion format to new heights of grandeur, particularly in his St Matthew Passion, into which Bach incorporates two choirs and two orchestras, an operatic array of principal characters, impassioned arias, astonishingly theatrical choruses, a narrator (or Evangelist), and chorales (or hymns) that would involve the entire congregation. Nearly every work by Bach demonstrates his mastery of counterpoint (the art of interweaving vocal or instrumental lines so that they seem to echo or answer each other), but in his Passions and cantatas he applies this stupendous musical technique to a greater overriding purpose: proclaiming the Christian message in which he fervently believed. For this he developed an expressive language that operates almost as a code: certain melodic or harmonic ideas stand as aural metaphors for specific emotions, such as grief, guilt, hope or joy. Listening to, or performing, the St Matthew Passion on Good Friday is still a rite for many music lovers - even if they aren’t themselves Christians.
What to say: They must have had amazingly talented choirboys in 18th-century Leipzig
4. Messiah
George Frideric Handel 1741
Though they were countrymen, exact contemporaries and twin giants of the Late Baroque, Bach and Handel never met. There’s something symbolic about that. Bach hardly travelled, was a prickly character, and never wrote for the theatre. Handel, by contrast, plied his trade as a jobbing operatic composer in Italy and England, was a dedicated bon viveur, and largely lived in the world of preening castrati, prima donnas and the cobbled-together pragmatism of London’s theatreland. Yet with Messiah he created a sacred oratorio of such power and profundity that it gripped the audiences of his day and has never lost its popular appeal. Though nearly three hours long (it reflects on Christ’s story from Old Testament prophecy to Last Judgment), it was famously composed in just 24 days and premiered (in Dublin) by a choir of only 32 men and boys - a far cry from the choruses of thousands that performed it in the Victorian era. Everyone knows the Hallelujah Chorus, but some of Messiah’s gems - the arias He was despised and I know that my Redeemer liveth, for instance - are the opposite of grandiose: they show Handel’s supreme ability to translate emotion into irresistibly arching melody.
What to say: Hallelujah isn’t even the best bit: Worthy is the Lamb ..... Amen is where Handel really lets rip
Erwin Schrott as Figaro and Miah Persson as Susanna in a 2006 production of The Marriage of Figaro
5. The Marriage of Figaro
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1786
Wodehouse’s Jeeves is a hundred times smarter than his boss, Bertie Wooster - but for the Imperial Court in late 18th-century Vienna, terrified by the revolutionary fervour fermenting in France, the notion of servants outwitting their masters was anathema. So the 20-year-old Mozart was taking a huge risk simply by setting to music Pierre Beaumarchais’s 1784 comedy, about the manservant Figaro getting the better of his aristocratic employer, who wants to seduce Figaro’s fiancée. However the resultant opera, with a witty, worldly-wise libretto from Lorenzo da Ponte (who would later collaborate with Mozart on Così fan tutte and Don Giovanni ), is less concerned with political upheaval than with showing how human beings are led astray by their own foibles and sexual urges. What’s truly revolutionary is the music. The bubbling overture is the greatest ever written; the Acts II and IV finales interweave the feelings of up to eight characters simultaneously; and many of the brilliantly tuneful arias have become stand-alone classics. Best of all is the sublime moment, cloaked by Mozart in music of transcendental beauty, when the Countess - humiliated by her boorish husband throughout the opera - has the grace to forgive him for his gross philandering.
What to say: You can see this opera a hundred times (and many do) yet still find something new and wonderful each time
6. Symphony No 104, London
Joseph Haydn 1795
The concept of the symphony as a substantial four-movement orchestral work evolved in the 18th century, and nobody did more to bring that about than the Austrian composer and friend of Mozart, Joseph Haydn. Over five decades he wrote more than 100 symphonies, mostly for the court orchestra of the aristocratic Esterházy family, in whose employ Haydn spent most of his adult life. However, as his fame spread he was allowed to travel, and it was for ecstatic London audiences that he wrote his last 12 symphonies. The final one, randomly, is actually nicknamed the London Symphony, and it was premiered, with Haydn directing from the keyboard, to rapturous audiences at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, in 1795 - though Haydn, a professional musician to his fingertips, was more interested in the box-office takings than the applause. “I made 4,000 gulden on that evening,” he wrote. “Such a thing is possible only in England.” With its famous “drone” finale (said to be based on a Croatian folktune) the piece epitomises Haydn’s style and indeed the whole Classical period: witty, tuneful, elegant, it is music designed to entertain and dazzle rather than shock and awe. It was Haydn’s unruly pupil, Beethoven, who would drive the symphony in the latter direction.
What to say: That love affair with a gorgeous English widow really pepped up old “Papa” Haydn
7. Die schöne Müllerin
Franz Schubert 1823
Just 31 when he died, probably of syphilis, Franz Schubert wrote nearly 600 songs (as well as wonderful symphonies, Masses and chamber music). Glorious tunes simply flowed out of him, yet in his lifetime he was almost unknown outside a small circle of music-making friends, constantly penniless, and wracked with increasingly severe illnesses. The authentic Romantic hero, then - and in his two great song-cycles, Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise , he created timeless templates of Romantic despair captured in melodies of melting beauty and accompanied by piano parts that supply their own anguished subtexts. Both are settings of poems by Schubert’s contemporary, Wilhelm Müller. Die schöne Müllerin traces an arc of inexorably gathering gloom. An impoverished youth hopes to woo a beautiful miller’s daughter, but his hopes are dashed by the appearance of a glamorous huntsman and that leads him towards jealousy, obsession, surreal hallucinations and then the only consolation left to him - the eternal peace of suicide. Oddly, though, when you hear a good performance the effect is not morbid but mesmerising and strangely transcendental. “All other songwriters have followed in Schubert’s footsteps,” Dvorák wrote in 1894. More than a century of great songs later, the same could still be said.
What to say: Who can’t relate to the story of a youngster tormented by unrequited love?
8. Symphony No 9, Choral
Ludwig van Beethoven 1824
Each of Beethoven’s nine symphonies is a revolution. In No 3 he doubled the length of the classical symphony with audacious structures; with No 5 he introduced trombones into the symphonic world, and the darkness-to-light journey that so many later composers would follow. The Sixth, the Pastoral , is the first “programme” symphony, depicting country life. It’s the Ninth, however, that rocked the musical world. After three colossal movements, turbulent, pulsating and sublime, Beethoven decides that instruments alone aren’t enough to express his heaven-storming ideas. So in the massive finale - a symphony within a symphony - he introduces four solo voices and a chorus, roaring out Friedrich Schiller’s 1785 Ode to Joy . Its optimistic evocation of a paradisical future in which “all men become brothers” hasn’t stopped it from being misappropriated by, among many others, the Nazis (who played it in the death camps) and as the national anthem of apartheid Rhodesia. Despite this - and the stamina-sapping choral writing - the work remains the most admired of all symphonies, and the masterpiece that most powerfully expresses Beethoven’s idealistic hopes for mankind.
What to say: How tragic that Beethoven never heard a note of the first performance, even though he was conducting
9. Octet for Strings
Felix Mendelssohn 1825
At the age when English schoolchildren are taking their GCSEs, Felix Mendelssohn composed one of the 19th century’s most dazzling pieces of chamber music. Born into a rich, cultured Jewish family, in a happier period of German history when anti-Semitism was not yet a lethal prejudice, Mendelssohn and his sister Fanny (also a fine pianist and underrated composer) were true child prodigies: putting on Shakespeare productions in the garden, voraciously reading poetry, and developing musical skills that astonished all who heard them. Even so, Felix’s Octet in E flat, for four violins, two violas and two cellos, was a bolt out of the blue. Constantly interweaving eight instruments, it has the technical mastery that suggests a mature composer, yet the bubbling high spirits of an ebullient teenager. Even when compared with the other chamber music written in the miraculous 1820s - Schubert’s Quintet in C, or Beethoven’s late string quartets - it has genius stamped on every bar. Indeed, only one other work of that era rivals it for precocious vivacity, and that was also by Mendelssohn: the overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written two years later.
What to say: No teenage angst here: it’s wall-to-wall high jinks
10. Symphonie Fantastique
Hector Berlioz 1830
The extraordinary Symphonie Fantastique, composed for what was then the largest orchestra ever assembled, has it all. It is also the work of a man obsessed. Hector Berlioz, then a little-known 27-year-old composer in Paris, saw the Irish actress Harriet Smithson as Ophelia in Hamlet, and was smitten. At the time she didn’t respond to his letters, so Berlioz poured his feelings into this extraordinary orchestral melodrama which, in five movements, depicts a young man who has “poisoned himself with opium” because of unrequited love, and experiences increasingly macabre hallucinations including his own execution and a witches’ Sabbath. As the conductor Leonard Bernstein said: “Berlioz tells it like it is. You take a trip, you wind up screaming at your own funeral.” As sensational as his subject was Berlioz’s highly original handling of the vast orchestra. He used instruments in combinations that shocked his Paris Conservatoire professors (and many later academics), but his shaping of symphonic form to tell a vivid, indeed lurid, story greatly influenced later Romantic composers.
What to say: Sex, drugs, and the 19th-century equivalent of rock’n’roll
11. Études
Frédéric Chopin 1833
Though he composed almost exclusively for his own instrument, the piano, Frédéric Chopin achieved international fame in his short life (1810-1849) and an influence that stretches to our own day. He revolutionised keyboard technique and, although he hated playing in public halls, his many performances in the fashionable salons of Paris (where he settled after his exile from his Polish homeland) established him as the first of a new breed: the hero-worshipped virtuoso. He is also often labelled as the first “nationalist” composer, mainly because his fellow Polish émigrés detected a political subtext in his music - particularly his development of the Polish mazurka dance into an outpouring of fervent emotion. His 27 marvellous études, published in three batches, in 1833, 1837 and 1841, were primarily written to teach his pupils his own revolutionary piano-playing technique - each study concentrating on a different skill. So far, so conventional. Chopin’s genius, however, was to turn these dry classroom exercises into magnificently impassioned soundscapes, or dreamily beautiful melodies. The most popular is probably the so-called Revolutionary Étude, Op 10 No 12, which has become an emblem of Poland’s unbreakable spirit.
What to say: Nobody thought a pianoforte could sing before Chopin came along
Frankfurt Opera’s production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle
12. The Ring
Richard Wagner 1876
Because The Ring lasts fifteen hours spread over four evenings, and because it and its composer have generated more analysis, controversy, obsession and loathing than anything or anyone else in music, many newcomers feel so daunted that they shun these epic operas altogether. That’s a pity. The story - a power struggle involving gods and mortals, treachery and love, murder and theft - is like a blockbuster novel, only set to music that combines a network of symbolic themes (leitmotifs) with the elemental power of a huge orchestra underpinning the world’s biggest voices. Wagner took 26 years to write it, drawing his plot from Norse myth and his structure from Greek tragedy. His musical language, however, is his own invention. It dispenses with set-piece arias and is saturated with rich chromatic harmonies (using notes outside the tonic scale). Wagner strove to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, a “total artwork” combining all disciplines. With lavish backing from “mad” King Ludwig of Bavaria he came closest to achieving that with The Ring, for which he had a new theatre purpose-built at Bayreuth. Staging the cycle is still the biggest challenge an opera house can undertake.
What to say: How did George Bernard Shaw describe it? “Sublime moments; terrible half-hours”
Ambrogio Maestri as Falstaff in 2001
13. Falstaff
Giuseppe.Verdi 1893
Verdi’s 26 operas, composed over 54 years, not only dominated Italian theatre in his day, they continue to dominate the opera repertoire today. One reason for that is their tunes - once heard, never forgotten. But they have more profound qualities too: unflagging dramatic energy, arias that define character as deftly as a portrait painter’s brush, and (although Verdi is unfavourably compared with Wagner in this respect) their own unique orchestral and harmonic worlds, colouring each drama’s mood. All these qualities reach their zenith in his final opera, Falstaff - miraculously, since Verdi was nearly 80 when he wrote it. A masterly libretto by Arrigo Boito (who also adapted Othello for Verdi) condenses action from Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsorinto one bubbling three-act span. Verdi responded with a portrait of the fat knight that, paradoxically, manages to be true to Shakespeare and the finest Italian comic opera ever written. The score culminates in a sizzling fugue that not only displays the old master’s undimmed contrapuntal skills, but also articulates his attitude to life: “Tutto nel mondo è burla ..... Tutti gabbati!” (“Everything in the world is a jest”).
What to say: Whisper it - but actually, Boito’s libretto is better crafted than Shakespeare’s original
14. Symphony No 6: Pathétique
Pyotr Tchaikovsky 1893
No symphony has triggered so much sensational speculation as Tchaikovsky’s last completed work. He died, aged 53, nine days after conducting its premiere in St Petersburg - possibly from cholera accidentally contracted, possibly from suicide. As his leading biographer says: “We may never know.” We do know that he was a homosexual in a society that inflicted severe penalties on male relationships, and that this tension between inner nature and social propriety caused Tchaikovsky much unhappiness. Whether the possibility of exposure drove him to suicide is one of the most debated questions in musicology, but the Pathétique (the Russian title is better translated as “impassioned”) is arguably the nearest thing in music to a suicide note: a surreal, five-in-the-bar waltz and a hyper-manic march bookended by two of the most despondent adagios ever penned. Even amid this gathering gloom, however, Tchaikovsky’s supreme qualities - as possibly the finest melody-maker in history; as a fabulous orchestrator, and as a highly original shaper of musical form - are overwhelmingly obvious. It used to be obligatory for snobs to deride Tchaikovsky. No longer.
What to say: Mass popularity and creative genius are not mutually exclusive
A 1900 caricature of Mahler
15. Symphony No 5
Gustav Mahler 1904
Leonard Bernstein called him “the last great composer” - which is depressing, since he died in 1911. Yet in his lifetime Mahler was much more highly respected as a conductor than for his own music, which was largely written during his summer holidays. The astonishing thing is that this part-time composer produced gigantic masterpieces encompassing whole worlds. They draw on songs he had composed earlier, on folksong and popular music, on his inside-out orchestral knowledge - and, for their emotional content, on the tragedies and joys of his life. As a child Mahler witnessed the deaths of seven siblings. As a Jew he was the butt of prejudice. As a man he fell in love with Alma Schindler, the most desired (and promiscuous) woman of her era. As a mortal, he knew his body was all too frail. All of this is written into his symphonies. The Fifth starts with an apocalyptic trumpet call heralding a colossal funeral march, but finishes in blazing affirmation, preceded by the glorious Adagietto - Mahler’s wordless lovesong for Alma. He wasn’t always this optimistic.
What to say: Mahler said we wouldn’t understand the Fifth Symphony until he had been dead 50 years, and he was right
Kenneth MacMillan’s 2005 Royal Ballet production of The Rite of Spring
16. The Rite of Spring
Igor Stravinsky 1913
Its Paris premiere, 100 years ago, triggered a riot. Whether that was because of Vaslav Nijinsky’s radical choreography, the sensationalist advance publicity craftily generated by the impresario Serge Diaghilev, or Igor Stravinsky’s music, is a matter for debate. What’s indisputable is that with his three huge pre-First World War ballet scores - The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring - Stravinsky changed the musical world for ever. And it was with the last of these that the young exiled Russian made his biggest leap into the future. Though recent research has revealed that the score is thoroughly grounded in Lithuanian folksong (just as the ballet’s story is derived from accounts of pagan rituals in ancient Russia), the music struck listeners as completely revolutionary in tonality, structure, orchestration and, particularly, rhythm. Sometimes Stravinsky changed from one irregular metre to another a dozen times in a few seconds; in other places the orchestra was used like a gigantic sledgehammer. Whereas his Austrian contemporary, Schoenberg, worked towards atonality by systematically pushing Wagnerian chromaticism to its logical conclusion, Stravinsky’s savage score operated more like dynamite: blowing apart all preconceptions about how music should sound, and under what laws it should operate.
What to say: The soundtrack to humanity hurtling towards the catastrophe of world war
Johan Reuter as Wozzeck at the Royal Opera House
17. Wozzeck
Alban Berg 1925
Alban Berg was a brilliant pupil of Arnold Schoenberg, the uncompromising Austrian who turned his back on tonality (the system of major and minor keys underpinning music since the 17th century) and instead developed 12-tone music, in which every semitone in the scale had equal importance in the “tone-row” that organised each piece. Berg’s genius was to use Schoenberg’s atonal advances more flexibly, incorporating tonal elements and expressive resources more characteristic of Late Romantic music. Wozzeck was his first opera, based on a bleak, incomplete play by Georg Büchner. The title role is a simpleton soldier, bullied by his captain, experimented upon by the sadistic doctor and cuckolded by the drum major - the latter betrayal leading Wozzeck to murder Marie, the mother of his child, and drown himself. Not an evening of light comedy, then - but the underlying themes (humiliation of a misfit, callousness of society, madness and mindless brutality) and the remarkable way in which Berg arranged his material, incorporating ancient forms such as fugue and passacaglia to give each scene an inner coherence, made Wozzeck the most influential opera of the early 20th century.
What to say: Not sordid enough for you? Try Berg’s second opera,Lulu
Shostakovich at the piano, with the creators of the satirical ballet The Bedbug in Moscow in 1929
18. Symphony No 5
Dmitri Shostakovich 1937
At the height of Stalin’s Great Terror, when many millions were incarcerated in the gulags and half a million shot dead, Shostakovich was one of those living in daily dread. His grim opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District had been denounced by Stalin’s cultural henchmen. This public humiliation, plus fear of imprisonment or worse, led Shostakovich to withdraw his coruscatingly dissonant Fourth Symphony. The new, ostensibly much “simpler” Fifth was, he told a journalist, “a Soviet artist’s creative response to justified criticism”. The authorities took this apparently cowed description, and the symphony’s seemingly optimistic finale, at face value. For more discerning listeners, however - both in Leningrad at the time, and up to the present day - the piece carries a very different message: one of despairing struggle and (in the elegiac Largo) comfortless grief, culminating in forced rejoicing. A covert web of quotations to other pieces seems to support this interpretation. Either way, the magnificent Fifth has become Shostakovich’s most popular symphony, and compelling evidence of the power of the creative spirit to flourish under extreme duress.
What to say: Ironic that Russian composers have produced nothing since perestroika to equal the masterpieces of the Soviet Union’s worst years
19. Gruppen
Karlheinz Stockhausen 1957
Egotistical, eccentric, deluded and frequently preposterous, Stockhausen was nevertheless one of the giants of the post-1945 avant garde. He experimented with electronic sound well before the synthesiser had been invented; he developed ways of structuring music that went light years beyond the 12-tone serialism deployed by Schoenberg’s disciples; and he integrated these new approaches with “traditional” vocal and instrumental forms to produce vast structures to which he imparted a cosmological significance - most self-importantly in his seven-day opera Licht. Gruppen was conceived while Stockhausen was staying in the Swiss Alps, and he declared, “whole envelopes of rhythmic blocks are exact lines of the mountains”. Don’t expect anything pictorial, however: he puts his material through a mind-boggling mathematical wringer, designed to produce a complex interplay between the three orchestras (each with its own conductor) who play at different speeds. In performance, however, the mathematical structure is forgotten, as the ear is blitzed by primordial screams, jagged splinters of brass from three directions and surprisingly delicate passages where a couple of notes can convey whole worlds of irony, nostalgia, anger or farce.
What to say: Five years after his death, we are still only starting to appreciate Stockhausen’s vision
Benjamin Britten conducting his War Requiem at the Proms in 1965
20. War Requiem
Benjamin Britten 1962
After its medieval cathedral was bombed to a shell in the Second World War, Coventry consecrated a new cathedral in May 1962. For that occasion, Britten - a pacifist and conscientious objector during the war - was commissioned to write a large-scale work. Then at the peak of his creative powers, he responded with a typically original concept: a setting of the Requiem Mass, but interspersed with the poems of Wilfred Owen, who died in the First World War. Two male soloists, symbolically English and German, would sing these poems accompanied by a chamber orchestra, while (in the original conception) a soprano from the third major European combatant, Russia, would sing with the gigantic choir and orchestra. In addition, boy choristers intone liturgical-style chants from a gallery. It was a dangerously complex work to present in a barely finished building, and the premiere was a famously fraught affair. The power and originality of the music, however - and the way it caught the antiwar mood of the 1960s - brought immediate acclaim from critics and the public, and today it is regarded as Britten’s finest non-operatic work.
What to say: The English choral tradition gets a passionate, pacifist makeover