Classical Music

What giveth, O little droogies? O what a terrible grahzny vonny world, really O my brothers. (Okay, enough of that; I’m never going to be able to keep it up.)

This week sees the opening of the Stanley Kubrick film season at the Barbican, and one movie in particular set me thinking about the connections between violence and classical music. Thirty-six years ago ‘A Clockwork Orange’, Kubrick’s adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ novel about the delinquent Alex, was released. Gangs of young men starting wearing bowler hats, drinking milk and listening to old Ludwig Van. And because too many of them downloaded Beethoven from the BBC Radio 3 website, Kubrick felt compelled to withdraw the film from British cinemas within the year.
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And he was right to do so, for only 18 years later Leonard Bernstein and David Hasselhoff, tanked up on the gorgeousness and gorgeosity of the grumpy master, knocked down the Berlin Wall using the Glorious Ninth, allowing a subsequently united Germany to win the 1990 World Cup.

This caused legions of disappointed soccer thugs to invade the opera houses desperate to see ‘Turandot’, and widescale disruption was only averted when they were allowed to sing along to ‘Nessun Dorma’. Maestro Puccini was so incensed that he laid down his pen and hasn’t written a decent tune since. At least, I think that’s what happened.

Anyway, the point is that while classical music is routinely presented as either a benign ‘relaxing’ medium for babies, lovers and taxi drivers, or healing the wounds of history, it has also been a catalyst for civil disorder.

In Italy, the monarchistic Italians took the very name of Verdi as an acronym for revolt (Vittorio Emanuele Re D’Italia), and the ‘Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves’, from his opera ‘Nabucco’, was hummed seditiously until the naturally shy Italians were confident enough with the tune to burst into full voice at the composer’s funeral.

Meanwhile, in Germany, Richard Wagner used to get up in fine silks and plenty of aftershave, before writing the music for the Second World War. And he has been the soundtrack of every conflict since – his ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ blaring out of tanks in Iraq and previously helicopters in Vietnam, courtesy of the napalm-loving Colonel Kilgore. And so we’re back to film; this time Coppola’s ‘Apocalypse Now’.

Also on celluloid, the Italians get a look in again with the Intermezzo from Mascagni’s ‘Cavalleria Rusticana’, which accompanies Jake La Motta beating the hell out of his opponents in the ring, in Scorsese’s ‘Raging Bull’.

But it is Ludwig Van who inspires the most thuggery. ‘I love those calm little moments before the storm. It reminds me of Beethoven,’ says mobster Gary Oldman in Luc Besson’s ‘Léon’, before butchering an entire family.

Back in the real world, if you think Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies getting jeered at the Proms is uncivilised, you should have been around in Vienna in the 1920s when the police were regularly on standby as Schoenberg, Webern and Berg roused the Viennese to regular scuffles with their singalong 12-tone ditties.

But the most notorious riot caused by classical music happened in Paris in 1913 at the premiere of Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring’. Of course, the ensuing fisticuffs did nothing to diminish the work’s reputation.

So, be warned, O my brothers, as I said, it is a terrible grahzny vonny world out there; enjoy its music responsibly.

'Stanley Kubrick 2008: A Film Odyssey' is at the Barbican Feb 21-28.