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Musical time-travel… Which year would you visit if your Tardis could travel to any time in history?<\/strong><\/p> 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\u00a0through with it<\/p> At least, in real life we will.\u00a0In our imaginations, however, we can time-travel.\u00a0So, here\u2019s 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 \u2013 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.\u00a0<\/p> 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\u2019s to eavesdrop on JS Bach<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s famous meeting with Frederick the Great (1747, if that\u2019s your choice).<\/p> 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<\/a><\/strong> launched his own festival in a specially built theatre in Bayreuth to give the first staging of his complete <\/em>Ring <\/em>cycle<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p> 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<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s \u2018Eroica\u2019 Symphony<\/a><\/strong>. Or 1607, when (with all respect to that worthy but dull pioneer Jacopo Peri), the first great opera \u2013 Monteverdi<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s L\u2019Orfeo<\/em> \u2013 was performed in Mantua, Italy.<\/p> Musical time-travel: which year would you choose?<\/h3>
Musical time-travel: game-changing premieres<\/h3>