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Published: Wednesday, 22 January 2025 at 09:30 AM
If you could time-travel to any year in musical history, which would it be?
Musical time-travel… Which year would you visit if your Tardis could travel to any time in history?
Musical time-travel: which year would you choose?
Without getting too political, I must confess that I am not terribly optimistic that 2025 will be a happy new year, especially for musicians. In fact, I fear it will be rather like a protracted visit to the dentist. It will be painful. We will undoubtedly come out of it poorer than we went in. And yet we will have to go through with it
At least, in real life we will. In our imaginations, however, we can time-travel. So, here’s a question. If you could select any year out of the past 20 centuries to direct your personal Tardis towards, which would it be? A few rules first. Your decision should be based purely on musical considerations – not the quality of drinking-water in 16th-century Milan, or the likelihood of being slaughtered by a passing Viking in 9th-century East Anglia.
On the plus side, however, your Tardis has the ability to take you anywhere in the world in your chosen year. And it also gives you the power to enter any building where music is being made, even if it’s to eavesdrop on JS Bach’s famous meeting with Frederick the Great (1747, if that’s your choice).
Musical time-travel: game-changing premieres
My initial thought was to plump for a year that contained the sort of epoch-defining premiere any music critic would love to have reviewed. For example, 1876, when the insufferable but undeniably talented Richard Wagner launched his own festival in a specially built theatre in Bayreuth to give the first staging of his complete Ring cycle.
Or 1805, when the audience at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna emerged shocked, awed and probably dazed from a revolutionary event: the premiere of Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony. Or 1607, when (with all respect to that worthy but dull pioneer Jacopo Peri), the first great opera – Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo – was performed in Mantua, Italy.
Attending any of those events would have been extraordinary. And as a time-traveller from the future you would have the added benefit of hindsight (or would it be foresight?). So, you would understand the historical significance of what you were hearing.
Musical time-travel: Bach, Handel and years of plenty
But after attending the big premiere, wouldn’t the rest of your chosen year be an anti-climax? Far better, it seems to me, to pick a year which had an array of fascinating musical events, rather than just one.
A year such as 1727, for instance. Of course, you would want to be in Leipzig in April 1727 for the first performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, and in London the following October for the coronation of George II, graced by four splendid new anthems by Handel, including Zadok the Priest.
But you would also want to hop over to Venice to see one of the four new operas composed by Vivaldi that year (he didn’t hang around), and perhaps to Dresden to hear some of the magnificent state music composed by the Bohemian composer Zelenka. And then you could nip to Paris to catch Daquin or Rameau playing their exquisitely ornamented keyboard music.
And the best year is… 1913!
All tantalising stuff. But I think even 1727 is eclipsed by my ultimate choice. Which is (you probably guessed) 1913. What a belter of a year for music! Quite apart from the big event – the premiere of The Rite of Spring, when Stravinsky’s score and Nijinsky’s choreography triggered a riot – Paris also witnessed another sensation: a woman composer, Lili Boulanger, winning the coveted Prix de Rome for the first time in history, with a beautiful cantata, Faust et Hélène.
In that same year you could also travel to Russia for the first performance of Rachmaninov’s The Bells and to see the enfant terrible, Sergei Prokofiev, pounding the ivories as soloist in his shocking new Second Piano Concerto. And in Vienna you could witness the premiere of Schoenberg’s massive Gurrelieder.
More adventurously you could also cross the Atlantic and visit a detention centre for errant boys in New Orleans. There you would find a phenomenal 12-year-old kid playing the cornet in his first band. Thus did Louis Armstrong start his half-century career in a genre that was beginning to be called ‘jazz’. ‘It’s a Futurist word which has just joined the language,’ the San Francisco Bulletin helpfully explained to its readers in April 1913.
Across the musical spectrum, then, 1913 was truly an annus mirabilis. I would love to have been there. But perhaps you can suggest a year to top it for musical interest? If so, do write in. I’m all ears.