This television series is being shown in Australia at the moment.
Having been very impressed with Goodall's earlier TV programs, I found
this review from The Sunday Times.  I thought it would interest listers
not only for the review of the program, but for the optimistic statistics
quoted in the early paragraphs.  Incidentally, for 1894, read 1874 -
Wagner died in 1883!

Over the past week, we've lapsed into one of our periodic flaps about
the future of classical music.  Surveys published by the Arts Council
and Policy Studies Institute reveal that the proportion of concert-goers
under 50 has plummeted, while Classic FM's magazine informs us that 65%
of 611 children between the ages of 6 and 14 could not name a classical
composer, and 77% did not know a French horn from their elbow.  Cue the
doom-sayers and their jeremiads.

Now they've had their wail, let's calm down and consider.  I wouldn't
deny that there are genuine causes for concern, most of them connected
to the Tories' disgraceful cuts in state school music-teaching, but let's
not jump to hysterical conclusions.  To misquote Disraeli, there are
statistics, damned statistics and lies, so I prefer to trust the evidence
of my own eyes.  Late-night concerts at the Edinburgh Festival filled
the Usher Hall with a palpably younger, different crowd. At the Proms
last Sunday, I was amazed at the percentage of people in their teens and
twenties queuing for Mendelssohn's Elijah, of all things.  The number
of Friends of Covent Garden under 26 has increased from 524 to 802 over
the past 12 months.  These are observations and facts, not statistics,
and they speak for themselves.

One can also turn the Classic FM figures around and end up being rather
impressed: 40% of those questioned played an instrument, and 78% of them
took music lessons at school; 77% identified a violin, 79% a trumpet.
Those figures seem quite high.  But sampling from an age group that
stretches from a pre-literate 6 to bordering-on-GCSE 14 surely renders
the whole exercise meaningless in any case.  Another element that sends
the doom-sayers apoplectic when such surveys are debated is the baneful
influence of television and declining quality of its art coverage.  Give
us more classical concerts, opera and ballet they say, without pausing
to reflect on the way that the flat, square proportions of the box drain
so much of the excitement, atmosphere and spontaneity out of live
performance.

There is, of course, some merit in broadcasting a great occasion such
as the Last Night of the Proms, but it's not enough just to plonk a
camera in front of high culture and expect millions to kowtow.  The
problem is how to make better television out of the arts, not just to
pump them into the schedule as a means of raising the tone.

At which point I want to recommend a tremendously good series starting
on Channel 4 on September 15. Howard Goodall's Great Dates presents a
truly fresh, lively and intelligent use of the medium that combines the
informative with the imaginative and stands as a subtle retort to the
doom-sayers.  Focusing on crucial years in four composers' lives - 1564
for Palestrina, 1791 Mozart, 1894 Wagner and 1937 Shostakovich - Goodall
vividly sketches social and historical contexts as well as making brilliant
use of visual imagery to illustrate his lucid explanations of the
technicalities of fugue, sonata form, chromaticism and letimotiv.

Despite an occasional lapse into Schama-esqure slickness (some landscaped
gardens are meaninglessly described as "more Britney Spears and Bjork"),
he is neither prompous, patronising nor faux-populist.  He communicates
easily with the camera and pitches his discourse at an amicable but
stimulating level.  "I imagine I'm at a dinner party, being questioned
by friends who have curiosity but no expertise," he told me.  "There's
no point aiming at those who aren't interested.  If you don't like
gardens, nothing is going to make you enjoy Gardener's World".

What I like best about Goodall's approach is that, without resorting
to the embarrassed jokiness that infected Harry Enfield's well-meaning
television introduction to opera a few years back, he doesn't let his
subject send him po-faced.  Instead, he sells Palestrina and Shostakovich
to the viewer without apology or special pleading and happily suggests,
for instance, that "at one level, The Magic Flute is 'Harry Potter, The
Musical'" (Note the important qualification.) That sort of remark makes
the doom-sayers uncomfortable.  For them, all "classical music" must be
fetishised as good art, on a par with cod-liver oil, while "popular
music" is bad art and as corrupting as cheap milk chocolate.  Mozart and
Harry Potter can't mix.  This leads to the idea that classical music is
something to be preserved as a separate canon, rather than music composed
in the past which lives on in the present, and that's where the barriers
come up.  Whatever those surveys suggest, the real problem isn't that
kids don't like Beethoven and Wagner any more - it's that dreary and
snobbish phrase "classical music".

Richard Pennycuick
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