BBC Howard Goodall's Story of Music 2of6 The Age of Invention

'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.

ORCHESTRA PLAYS: "Poker Face"
by Lady Gaga

# Can't read my
Can't read my

# No he can't read my poker face

# She's got to love nobody. #

Whatever music you're into,

Monteverdi or Mantovani, Mozart
or Motown, Machaut or mash-up,

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'm tracing
the story of music from scratch.

To follow it on its miraculous
journey, there'll be no need

for misleading jargon
or fancy labels.

Terms like Baroque, Impressionism
or Nationalism

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.

MUSIC: "Arrival Of The Queen Of Sheba
by Handel

The years 1650 to 1750 were an age
of invention and rapid innovation.

Great discoveries were made
in science and in music.

Musical structures were transformed
in the hands of composers

like Handel and Bach.

This period also saw the rise and
rise of purely instrumental music,

and the birth of what became
the modern orchestra.

It was an age of transition
where music blossomed

from being a private affair
to a public spectacle.

Small wonder that the music of
this age of invention

is still staggeringly popular
in our own 21st century,

from the shores of Tristan da Cunha,
to the concert halls of Beijing.

We live in a technological age,

so we can identify with
what it was like

to live in the late 17th century,

when innovations were also
coming thick and fast.

And to understand our music today,
we need to go back to a time

when many of its now-familiar
components simply didn't exist.

Imagine a time when leaping
from this chord...

to this chord...

was a painful experience,
or from this one...

..to this one...

Imagine a time when an oboe
and a trumpet

struggled to play
the same tune together.

Imagine a time when no-one thought
of stringing together

a chain of chords in
a pleasing sequence,

like the one that begins
this song by Keane.

HOWARD PLAYS "Somewhere Only We Know"
by Keane

# I walked across an empty land

# I knew the pathway
Like the back of my hand... #

What makes so much of the music
we enjoy today

sound the way it does
is a series of discoveries

that burst into life in the 17th
and early 18th centuries.

Laws governing the use of chords,
which chords you could use

and what instruments you could
play them on all slid into place,

like the parts of a magical
and intricate machine.

People of the period were obsessed
with the interplay of cog and wheel,

the laws of motion and gravity

and the understanding of the
dimension of time itself.

No wonder it was a period that saw
great advances in clock making.

Listen to the music of this period
and you hear the ticking of clocks,

the perfectly calibrated whirring
and spinning of cogs,

the turning of wheels and
the to and fro of pendulums.

The most striking thing about this
age of invention is how the

exhilarating speed of scientific
investigation

was reflected in constant experiment
and innovation in music.

In the 100 years between
1650 and 1750,

music underwent a massive upgrade.

It went from this...

..to this.

Though nowadays it includes
instruments of all shapes,

sizes and types,

the orchestra grew from just one
leg-of-ham-sized package.

A folk fiddle version of the violin
had been around for some time,

but the more sophisticated type
we recognise today

began its journey in Italian
workshops in the late 16th century,

only really coming in to its own as
leader of the instrumental pack

in the following century.

The violin's rise went hand-in-glove

with that of the extravagant
absolute Kings of France,

Louis XIII and XIV, who brought
in Italian experts to play

for their flamboyant royal ballets.

Louis XIV, the Sun King, was a
passionate fan of the ballet,

even giving himself
starring roles in them,

no doubt to gasps of Gallic delight
from the assembled courtiers.

The ballets were on
a fantastic scale,

often performed in palace
halls or outdoors,

so the bright, edgy sound of the
violin was just the ticket

to fill the space.

In fact, not just one violin,
but loads of them.

One violin good, 24 violins better.

You might have 10 or 12 or even 24
violins playing the same tune.

Similarly, when they started adding
in larger, deeper-toned models

of the violin family,
like violas and cellos,

they were also grouped together
to play the same musical line.

This, then, was the beginning
of the modern orchestra.

The musician in charge of the royal
violin band for over 30 years

was Jean-Baptiste Lully,

who created a thicker,
grander ensemble style

especially for this
beefed-up ensemble.

There was another important
innovation

for which dance was responsible.

Louis XIV's long colourful ballets
would begin with a self-contained

instrumental introduction,
or opening,

the French word for which
is overture.

The Italians called it Sinfonia.

These overtures were soon
borrowed by opera, too.

They then began to develop into
longer and longer orchestral pieces,

eventually becoming the symphony.

The symphony's basic structure
was also to come from dance.

Sections of different dance music,
pavannes, sarabandes, gigues etc,

began to be gathered together into
suites, often in groups of three.

That's right, the three-piece suite
was actually invented

by 17th century musicians.

But the idea of linked music at
different speeds came to dominate

the symphony, and did so until
the end of the 19th century.

In the late 17th century,
another crucial part

of the musical tool-kit
was put into place.

The composer who first introduced
many of the innovations

that Vivaldi, Bach and Handel
built on,

and which we now take for granted,
was Arcangelo Corelli.

Corelli was the first
violin virtuoso,

and he built on his love
of the violin

an idea that took off spectacularly.

He gathered stringed instruments
together into groups

and created for them a new form,
the concerto.

Now, a concerto,

where a small group of players
alternates with a larger group,

makes its impact by contrasting
loud and soft passages,

like the juxtaposition of light
and shade, chiaroscuro, in painting.

Corelli's innovation was called
the concerto grosso,

literally the big concert,

and in it he explored the contrast
between a small group,

just two violins and a cello, called
concertino, and a bigger group

of everyone else called the ripieno,
meaning the stuffing.

Every composer in Italy now had a
stab at writing concerti grossi.

One young Venetian
admirer of Corelli

was to make the concerto
as famous as pizza.

His name was Antonio Vivaldi.

Vivaldi took the big group, little
group idea one step further,

casting a charismatic solo
violin against the whole ensemble.

The solo concerto announced its
arrival on the musical stage,

with a set of pieces
that were to become,

in the 20th century,
deservedly ubiquitous.

Vivaldi's concertos introduced
a sense of drama and virtuosity

that took his contemporaries'
breath away.

In effect, he was turning his
violinists and cellists into divas,

to match the opera stars of the day.

What makes Vivaldi's music
so exhilarating

is its sense of forward momentum.

How this was achieved was in itself
a giant leap forward.

It's all about the
movement of chords,

and it's one of the most
fun things in all music.

Whatever you're playing,
just having one chord

after another in a random succession
is not really very appealing.

Which is why hardly
anyone ever does it.

So how do you decide how to string
chords together in patterns

that don't sound like
random twaddle?

In the 17th century, by
experimenting with chains

of certain chords in a sequence,
composers stumbled across a concept

students of music call
harmonic progression,

but could just have easily be
described as musical gravity.

The laws governing actual gravity
had been formulated

in the late 17th century
by Sir Isaac Newton.

Just as he revealed the inner
workings of the universe,

so too musicians, at the same time,

worked out the inner gravity
of music.

They made the important
discovery that some chords

have an attraction to other chords.

So this chord, known to every
guitarist as G7,

is drawn magnetically
towards the chord C.

To put it another way, chord five
yearns for chord one,

especially when it's corrupted
by the 7th note.

Here's chord five,

and here it is with the corrupting
7th note,

and here is where it
wants now to go.

The same law of magnetism

applies to every key family,
no matter which one you chose,

so A flat 7...

..leads to D flat.

B7...

leads to E.

F7...

leads to B flat.

And so on.

In the 1600s, musicians became
obsessed

with these laws of attraction.

Composers found that stringing
sequences of chords together

to trigger this attraction
drove the music along.

A master of this technique was
English composer Henry Purcell.

Born just around the corner
from Westminster Abbey,

where he later worked,
Purcell survived the plague

and the Great Fire of London,

so he knew a thing or two
about moving on.

His music makes creating imaginative
chains of chords look effortless.

All he needed was a short sequence
that repeated itself a number

of times and he'd constructed
for himself a whole song.

In his Evening Hymn,
published in 1688,

he sets up a simple sequence
of chords.

This sequence he then repeats five
times, followed by a middle bit

where he has a second sequence, then
he returns to his original chord

sequence for another 13 times,
to finish the song off.

The amazing thing is you don't get
bored with the sequence,

despite its repetition.

That's because Purcell overlays onto
it a ravishingly beautiful melody

that follows its own meandering
path across the top.

# Now, now that the sun

# Hath veil'd his light

# And bid the world good night

# To the soft bed

# To the soft

# The soft bed

# My body I dispose

# But where

# Where shall my soul repose?

# Dear, dear God. #

Look at this painting by Vermeer,
which was finished in 1664.

At first sight, the colours appear
to be vivid and well-defined.

But look closer and we discover that
Vermeer creates this effect

by layering colour upon colour,
each subtly blending into the next.

This melding of colours is like
the way harmony works in music.

Notes are laid on top of each other,
to make constantly shifting chords.

# ..praise the mercy

# That prolongs thy days. #

The chord progression in Purcell's
Evening Hymn was to pop up

in countless other pieces by other
composers

in the decades that followed.

Indeed, composers went back to the
same few archetypes time and again.

The most popular sequence by
far even had its own name,

the circle of fifths.

This sequence used the seventh note
to trigger chord after chord

to jump ship from chord five
to chord one.

On a piano keyboard you could even
make a circle of fifths

include every note
and chord there is, like this.

Starting on B, I add
the seductive seventh,

to take me to E.

I add the seventh, to take me to A,

and so on.

Arriving back where I started on B.

A chain of 10 moves like that
would be excessive,

and, in fact, not possible
on the keyboard instruments

of Corelli's time.

But he, and all his colleagues,
would happily string

a sequence of three or four
or five moves together.

Here is the circle of fifths in a
Christmas concerto by Corelli.

Here's the same thing
in a piece by Vivaldi.

And again, in Handel.

What may surprise you is
that the dozen or so

favourite chord sequences beloved
of composers around 1700,

are still the top dozen
harmonic sequences

mined by composers
of all styles today.

Here's just one example,
a sequence that evolves

a downward stepping bass progressing
from chord one to chord five.

MUSIC: "Air On The G String"
by JS Bach

MUSIC: "A Whiter Shade Of Pale"
by Procul Harum

# We skipped the light fandango

# Turned cartwheels
'cross the floor... #

MUSIC: "Go Now"
by The Moody Blues

# Go now

# Go now, go now

# Go now. #

MUSIC: "No Woman, No Cry"
by Bob Marley

# No woman, no cry

# No woman, no cry. #

MUSIC: "Piano Man"
by Billy Joel

# Sing us a song
You're the piano man

# Sing us a song tonight

# Well, we're all in the mood
For a melody

# And you've got us
Feelin' all right. #

The magic of these evergreen chord
sequences wasn't lost on the 17th

and 18th century composers
who discovered them.

Before long, they were able to
construct whole sections of music

without a melody at all.

Once again, it was Vivaldi
who set the gold standard.

In the opening of one of the
concertos in his best-selling

collection published in 1711,

unashamedly labelled
L'estro armonico,

the inspiration of harmony,
Vivaldi takes us

on a gripping suspenseful journey
through chords alone.

Vivaldi's music was in demand
all over Europe,

and he often conducted it in person,

to great acclaim
in the major cities.

Indeed, the years from 1600 to 1700
had been completely dominated

by Italian taste, expertise,
sensuality and flair.

Along with Corelli and Vivaldi,
practically all the other composers

who dominated the 1600s
were Italian.

What's more, they all
had names ending in I.

Vivaldi, Corelli, Albinoni,
Monteverdi, Cavalli,

Bonnoncini, Steffani,
Vitali, Manelli,

Torelli, Locatelli, Valentini,
and the brothers Scarlatti.

But then the musical world
began to tilt on its axis,

and Italy began to be eclipsed
in the musical firmament.

Vivaldi himself was to become
a victim of this redrawing

of Europe's musical map.

The popularity Vivaldi enjoyed
during his middle age did not last,

and after living most of his life
in Venice, he decided

to move to Vienna in his 60s, where
he died lonely and impoverished.

For the next 200 years, his prolific
body of music, including 500

concertos and over 40 operas, would
stay silent, his career forgotten.

Almost.

Vivaldi's legacy survived in the
somewhat surprising influence

he had on two other composers,

Johann Sebastian Bach
and George Frideric Handel.

The centre of gravity of the musical
world had moved north,

over the Alps, to Germany.

From the home of Roman Catholicism,

to the well spring
of the Reformation.

Bach and Handel both learnt
from the Italians,

especially Corelli and Vivaldi.

They also took what they fancied
from the French violin bands

and proto-orchestras.

They incorporated the inventions

and technological advances
of their time,

and created something extraordinary
of their own, that grew out of

the particular north German Lutheran
culture that they were born into.

Lutheran congregations were active
participants in the church service,

with communal hymn singing
being given high status.

Just as the Reformation swept away
the elaborate decoration

favoured in Roman Catholic Churches
at the time,

so too in Protestantism, the music
was always in service

of the message, making the Gospel
radiant, unfussy and clear.

A huge amount of what Bach wrote,

including virtually all his 300-plus
cantatas, and his vast output

of organ music, is based one way
or another on German Protestant

hymn tunes, or chorales.

He would weave a tapestry
of sound around a hymn,

being sung or played slowly through
the centre of the work,

as he does here in Jesus
Bleibet Meine Freude -

Jesu, Joy Of Man's Desiring.

# Jesus bleibet meine Freude

# Meines Herzens Trost und Saft

# Jesus wehret allem Leide

# Er ist meines Lebens Kraft. #

All Bach's vocal music
is focused on one thing,

devotion to God in the human form
of Jesus of Nazareth.

Whatever he does musically,
however complex,

he does to enhance the
meaning of the words.

Take this aria from his St John
Passions, Zerfliesse Mein Herze.

If we deconstruct its opening
instrumental phrase,

we see that it's a series
of exquisite chords,

with a gently descending bass line.

That's 15 chord changes
in about 10 seconds.

But when the voice joins in, Bach's
harmonies become even more daring,

allowing notes to clash against each
other in swiftly moving discords.

Here are the dissonances tucked into
just the first short vocal phrase.

The dissonances may be
cleverly disguised,

but they're still there, because
Bach wants to create a feeling,

subliminally, of anguish and grief,

which is exactly what the words
of this aria are trying to convey.

# Zerfliesse, mein Herze

# In Fluten der Zaehren. #

If Bach's aim in his choral music
is to move and inspire,

in his instrumental music,
he wants to dazzle.

He's the undisputed master of all
time of the musical technique

of counterpoint, the interweaving
of different tunes.

And the quintessential Bachian
form of counterpoint was the fugue.

A fugue, which means flight
in Italian,

is a complicated form of canon,
or round.

So here is a round that any child
in late 17th century London

would have known only too well.

# London's burning, London's burning

# Fetch the engine, fetch the engine

# Fire, fire! Fire, fire!

# Pour on water, pour on water. #

In a canon or round, the same tune
is sung by different groups

at different points,

allowing each new entry
to fit on top of the others.

A fugue is essentially a
more complicated version,

with multiple lines,
some coming in backwards,

or in reverse or upside down.

If this sounds freakishly clever,

something Einstein might have done
in a physics seminar,

well, Bach is the closest thing
music has to Einstein,

who, by the way,
was a massive fan of Bach.

Let's look at a fugue by Bach that
shows him at his Einstein-like best.

First of all,
we have the basic theme.

It would be too easy just
to have this theme repeated

and played on top of itself,
so brainbox Bach

has it super-imposed in
a number of other ways.

One option is to have
it play at double speed,

and starting on a different note.

Not bad, except that he manages
two other tricks at the same time.

One of them
is to turn it upside down,

known in the trade as the inverted
version, also at double speed.

And another is to play
it at half the speed,

that is, twice as slow
as the original.

There are four main voices
or parts in this fugue,

and as it progresses, all of the
above techniques cascade over

each other, upside down,
reversed, speeded up,

slowed down and played at different
positions on the keyboard.

It is a miraculous musical jigsaw.

Now composing something
as complex as this structure,

you'd think would be hard enough
when you've got it all laid out

in front of you on the page,
like a graph.

But here's an amazing thing.

Bach could improvise fugues
like this at the keyboard.

From just one fragment of tune,
Bach has built an edifice

of seven minutes of
contrapuntal invention.

Bach's mastery of counterpoint
wasn't about solving crossword

puzzles or cracking enigmatic codes
for the sake of it.

He believed what he was doing was
the musical embodiment of God's

master plan for humankind,
a recognition of the intricate

mathematical beauty of the natural
order as ordained by the Almighty.

The towering achievements of Bach's
career are his settings

of the trial, crucifixion and
resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

CHOIR SINGS "St Matthew Passion"
by Bach

At the climax of this monumental
opening of The Passion,

with two adult choirs and
a double-sized orchestra

already in full sway, he introduces
a new, majestically slower tune,

on top of the entire structure.

Like a phalanx of trumpets
announcing the arrival

of a mighty ruler, it's a children's
choir singing a hymn chorale,

O Lamm Gottes, Unschuldig -
O innocent lamb of God.

In these Passions, Bach employs all
the techniques we've encountered

in this survey of the music of the
17th and early 18th centuries.

Vivaldi's concerto style with
large and small forces,

juxtaposed in a
musical chiaroscuro.

Fugal counterpoint,
vast choral effects,

musical gravity driving
harmonic progressions

of which the circle of fifths
is but one,

dance rhythm patterns and a
string-led orchestra made of members

of the violin family joining forces
with woodwind and brass instruments.

The St Matthew Passion,
well over three hours of it,

is a supreme example of how
the musical innovations

worked out in the preceding 100
years could be brought to bear

on a work of epic size,
and powerful emotion.

But there's one other invention
made in this period

we haven't yet looked at, and it's
the most important appliance

of musical science of them all.

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

in all western music.

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

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

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

so I can play this...

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

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

or in the key of G.

Or C.

Or, for that matter, F#.

Moving from key family to key family
like that - the posh name

is modulation - on one instrument

is what Equal Temperament
made possible.

It also made it possible for lots
of different instruments

to play in tune with each other,

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

So it's worth finding out
how this happened.

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

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

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

This is the thing.

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

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

This is what they sound like.

For some instruments,

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

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

by sliding your finger by tiny
degrees along the string.

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

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

It's like the difference
between this swannee whistle,

with its flexible pitch...

..and this recorder,
with its fixed pitch.

What Equal Temperament did was
effectively to abolish

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

that would swallow up the
other little notes.

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

became one all-purpose note
that accommodated both.

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

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

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

What Equal Temperament did

was to equalise the distance
between notes.

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

as often as you liked.

The new system of tempering,
or tuning, worked.

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

presented the most conclusive
evidence that it worked.

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

12 standardised keys,
both major and minor.

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

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

instruments and our ears were
calibrated to Equal Temperament.

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

and mysterious to western ears,

is because it uses a different
system of tuning.

Traditional music apart, though,

Equal Temperament has now been
adopted all over the globe.

It's hard to exaggerate the
importance of the arrival

and triumph of Equal Temperament

as a standard across
the industrialised world.

Like the adoption of the Greenwich
Meridian, which made everyone

perceive the map and their place
in the world differently,

Equal Temperament altered
the mindset

of everyone who enjoyed music.

The modern population of the world
now hears all music

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

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

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

before Equal Temperament
became the norm.

Towards the end of his life,

Bach was involved in another new
invention that was, in the next

century, to be the emperor and
empress of the whole world of music.

The piano.

What we now call simply the piano
was invented in around 1700,

by a Florentine instrument
builder and restorer,

called Bartolomeo Cristofori.

The unique selling point
of the new instrument,

making it different from all
the previous harpsichords,

clavichords, spinets and virginals
that went before it,

was its ability to play
soft and loud,

or in Italian, piano e il forte.

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

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

Cristofori's invention,
instead of plucking the strings,

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

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

resulting potentially in different
levels of volume for every note.

A friend of Bach's,
Gottfried Silbermann, began

manufacturing pianos, and although
Bach played on a few prototypes

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

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

who was to become the champion
of the new instrument,

30 or so years later.

Thus paving
the way for the young Mozart

and others to follow his lead.

By the time this early
piano piece was written,

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

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

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

unperformed composer,

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

If Bach had written operas
rather than church music, it might

have been a different story.

Opera composers have always
been accorded more respect

and fame than church composers.

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

at least to start with.

Handel and Bach were
born just 80 miles

and four weeks apart in 1685,
but never met.

Whilst Bach stayed firmly
rooted his whole life in his native

North Germany, Handel was more
the adventurer and entrepreneur.

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

and stylistic advances in music
that swept across Europe

in the early 1700s.

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

The arrival of you, the audience.

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

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

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

Now, commercial opera houses
and concert halls

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

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

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

most of his masterpieces after
moving to London in 1710.

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

Handel had two
reasons for coming to London.

One was that his former
boss in Germany had become

King George I, in 1714.

The King and his successor,
George II,

commissioned music for royal
pageants from Handel,

including still famous
works, like Zadok The Priest,

the Water Music and
Music For The Royal Fireworks.

Handel also settled in London
because it was

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

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

and for a while, they were swept up

in a Europe-wide craze
for Italian opera.

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

and diva began at that time.

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

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

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

The Beggar's Opera,
produced in 1728.

The black musical comedy of
Polly Peachum, Jenny Diver

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

parody of the posh folks'
mania for Italian opera.

It was a huge, long-running success.

It didn't do Handel
any favours, though.

His earnestly serious
Italian-style operas

now seemed out of sync
with the public mood.

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

unwitting ally in
the shape of the Pope.

As well as banning
women from singing in church,

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

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

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

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

The singers didn't have
to act anything out,

they just stood there and sang.

Oratorios were originally
performed in church,

and they drew their subject
matter from the Old Testament.

And no-one could object to that.

So when Handel's luck
with opera ran out,

he turned to English language
oratorio instead.

It was an inspired move.

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

Handel's first ever
oratorio in English, Esther,

was performed in 1732.

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

Handel wrote 16 more oratorios,

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

In these works, Handel took
elements from Italian operas,

oratorios and concertos, added
in the Lutheran Church music style

and grafted them on to the
local English choral tradition,

aiming to seduce an audience
eager for musical excitement.

He succeeded triumphantly.
Hallelujah.

# Hallelujah, hallelujah

# Hallelujah, hallelujah

# Hallelujah

# Hallelujah, hallelujah

# Hallelujah, hallelujah

# Hallelujah

# For the lord God
omnipotent reigneth

# Hallelujah, hallelujah

# Hallelujah, hallelujah

# For the lord God
omnipotent reigneth... #

Handel brilliantly brought together,
in a wholly accessible way,

all the musical idioms
of the previous 50 years.

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

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

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

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

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

with plenty of emotional
impact, but without

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

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

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

though based on religious stories,

were essentially
commercial productions,

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

Unlike the St Matthew or
St John Passions of Bach,

which were aimed at
a congregation who

would have attended church anyway,
Handel was trying deliberately

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

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

# King of kings... #

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

relationship with his audience,
patriotism.

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

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

success found their celebration
in Handel's patriotic choruses,

in which God and King
were more or less

interchangeable objects of praise.

# King of kings and lord of lords

# King of kings and lord of lords

# And He shall reign
for ever and ever

# For ever and ever

# For ever and ever

# Hallelujah, hallelujah

# Hallelujah, hallelujah

# Halle-lu-jah. #

Music showed it could become
the collective voice of nationhood.

This, for good and for ill,

has been an important
function of music ever since.

Handel donated all
the earnings from his Messiah

and most of his considerable
estate to an orphanage,

The Foundling Hospital,
gestures which give us

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

compassion.

One of his final oratorios, Solomon,

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

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

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

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

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

self-indulgent misery,

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

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

Time doesn't stand still,

so cherish every moment of joy
and beauty with gratitude.

The Queen of Sheba knew
she would never encounter

a man of Solomon's wisdom again.

It's debatable whether music has
every surpassed the creative

ingenuity and spiritual
candour of the masterpieces

of Bach and Handel either.

In the next programme -

the profound moral
dimension that Bach

and Handel embedded in music gives
way to the pleasure principle.

In the era of Haydn,
Mozart and Beethoven,

the composer stopped being a servant
and became a kind of God, game on.

MUSIC: "The Marriage Of Figaro" -
Overture - by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd