It seems like the BBC is now just as in thrall to the cult of celebrity as the rest of the country's media. While David Dimbleby's series on Britain's Architecture has been running on BBC One (and not exactly to glowing reviews), James Naughtie has been given the chance to tackle the history of Western Classical Music on Radio Four, in a programme entitled The Making of Music.
On one level, the BBC is to be highly praised for producing a large scale series on music, presented by one of its most respected journalists. And with the first part having seen a fifteen-minute programme every weekday for six weeks and the 'abridged' audio book release on review here still running to six-and-a-half hours on six CDs, it certainly represents a significant commitment to classical music on the Radio Four schedule.
When originally broadcast, each episode was followed by an hour-long programme on Radio Three, playing key works mentioned. That is partly where the problem lies with this audio book and I have to say I'm not quite sure who it is aimed at. As introductions to full performances of works that are referred to, each episode is interesting, illuminating the historical and social context in which the work was produced. However, in the audio book form, the whole thing seems to take on a much grander purpose and one which, to put it frankly, is hopelessly overambitious. The fact that it sets itself such a goal, to show how 'our broader history is entwined in all the sounds we know', makes the experience rather exhausting. It's a whistle-stop tour which simply doesn't give us the opportunity to catch our breath.
I found this especially in the earlier episodes. The first two hours cover a period of around five hundred years from the simplest forms of chant to Monteverdi and the birth of opera; this is a lot of music and history to cover at a rate of around five years per minute. Naughtie makes a very reasonable stab and throughout the whole series does well to keep the language interesting and to pepper his history with the usual anecdotes (Lully stabbing himself in the foot while conducting, the story of Haydn's 'Farewell' Symphony, Rossini and Mozart dashing off overtures in a day), but so often his journalistic flair gets the better of him and to slightly tiring effect. At one stage, while he was talking about the 'Eroica' Symphony, I found the music and the words blending so that Naughtie's flowery descriptions and slightly soporific tones (maybe a Pavlovian response to the voice that sends me back to sleep in the morning when listening to Today) became somewhat perfunctory; a melodrama where the music just took over.
On the programme's website, Naughtie gives a couple of interviews and in one he admits he received a 'basic education but no more'; this background means that he's inevitably better at describing the context of the music than its details. This leads to some duff phrases (on Haydn: 'he'd take a theme and build layers of music on it'), semantically muddled statements ('Opera is sometimes characterized as Music Drama that takes you out of the world'), and perfunctory value judgements - Bach's Matthew Passion 'approaches perfection' while 'Non so più cosa son' from Mozart's Figaro is perfect (even if the Naxos recording that is used for the excerpt falls well short of that ideal). It is clear with this aria as with other extracts that, either through budgetary constraints or indifference, there was no quality control regarding the recordings used. This means that the hopelessly drab performance of Beethoven's 'Eroica', by the CSR Symphony Orchestra or Zagreb Philharmonic (it's not clear from the website), slightly undermines Naughtie's account of it as trail-blazing and revolutionary, likewise the performance of Chopin's ('a different character [to Liszt] but a virtuoso all the same') 'Revolutionary' Etude is played about a third slower than I've ever heard it - distinctly un-virtuosic. Then when he gets on to bel canto, we have Callas, whose recordings are now conveniently in the public domain but presumably a specific if predictable choice by Naughtie - she and her colleagues are, along with James Bowman (another Naughtie favourite?), the only artists to be credited in the script.
I also worry that the emphasis sometimes shifts too heavily towards historical events and the narrative stops being driven by the music itself. There is time for discussions of music by Méhul and Boccherini (in relation to Napoleon and the French Revolution) and Thomas Linley, Arne and Stephen Storace (discussing music making in late eighteenth-century England) while there is no mention, for example, of Schumann or Mendelssohn (although given the chronological muddle with which the thing ends, I wouldn't be surprised if they featured at the start of the next part). This is probably a symptom of a certain Anglocentric tendency which culminates, in the final episode about 'Albertopolis', with what amounts to an extended trailer for the Proms, complete with anachronistic wheeling out of the Elgar 'Cello Concerto to tie in with its performance at the First Night, the same day as the broadcast.
Unfortunately there are problems too in the form of straightforward errors, which, for me at least, undermine the whole enterprise. In the space of a couple of minutes in the episode on Schubert, Naughtie describes the G flat Impromptu as the 'Impromptu in F minor, "Rosamunde"' and speaks of the composer's eight completed symphonies (a point for remembering the most famous unfinished symphony in history, but Schubert's Seventh is nothing more than a fragment). It might seem churlish, but I couldn't help but begin to doubt the factual accuracy of the earlier programmes which, being less familiar with the works and history discussed within them, I'd taken for granted. Not only this but even more bizarrely, the actor reading a passage from Wagner's writings on Weber reads 'Freischütz' without the 'F' as "Reischütz" and does so unmistakably five times in the extract. Granted, that example can be put down to poor editing - presumably it appeared in the actor's script as such - but responsibility for the other errors must ultimately lie with Naughtie and, after having a completely open mind, that made me ask the question: is this man really qualified to be writing a history of Western Music?
I also found myself wondering where the boundary between the writer's work (Naughtie's) and the contribution of the Researchers and Chief Historical Consultants on the programme should be drawn. I suspect Naughtie's role was to piece together in Radio Four-friendly language the facts and historical interpretation of others, yet I found this sense of authorial ambiguity disconcerting. Once my belief in Naughtie's authority was eroded, I longed to hear the voice of someone who I was confident really knew what they were talking about; couldn't there have been interviews with musicians or acknowledged experts along the way? As a final comment, I think it's an unforgivable oversight that the booklet wasn't better produced, to include at least details of the pieces played in each episode. Admittedly that information is available on the website, but if you're going to go to the website you might as well listen to the episodes there instead.
Although Naughtie's obviously a knowledgeable and passionate music lover, I felt the overall exercise was summed up by a passage in his biography (on the website and the CD booklet) which reads: 'From the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall to opera at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and from theatres and concert halls across Europe, he has brought music alive.' That's ultimately where my biggest problem lies: the belief of BBC schedulers that music cannot speak for itself and that it requires someone like Naughtie, like the breath of God vivifying the inanimate Eve, to bring it to life. It's not celebrity endorsement that's going to bring classical music to a wider audience but enthusiastic voices of genuine authority. Naughtie no doubt possesses enthusiasm, but this 'Landmark' series ultimately lacks authority.
By Hugo Shirley