Classical Music

I like classical music, and Stephen Fry is a humorous sort of fellow. Put those together, and I eagerly bought this book that supposedly tells us the history of classical music. Now pretend you are locked up in a room with someone, and must spend the next 10 hours conversing with each other. To your dismay you find that this new acquaintance mouths nothing but wisecracks and silly remarks. After an hour you are pulling your hair out, and after two hours you have been reduced to a mindless, blubbering hulk.

Somehow I survived a similar experience reading this book. Now that I have recovered sufficiently I’ve decided to warn you about the dangers of reading it. First of all there is very little about classical music to be found in these 300 pages. We trudge through history, and are told what happened on various dates. Take 1764 for example. We are informed that Kenwood house was built in Hampstead, and La Madeleine went up in Paris. House numbering started for residences in London. A discussion ensues on how this made things easy for the postal service. Oh yes. This was also the year that Mozart wrote his first symphony. More about Mozart later, says the author as he skips on to 1772 to tell us that that was the year that Captain Cook discovered Botany Bay.

Oh yes, about the “humor”. Here’s a sample:

“Bach, in a breathtaking display of foresight, wrote the music for a mobile telephone incoming call alert, although he called it the Anna Magdalena Notebook. But hey, where exactly are we? What age is it now? Who’s in, who’s out, who’s up, who’s down? And why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near?”

Please, someone get the hook, and get Mr. Fry off the stage.

Now for a full confession. My rule is that I don’t write reviews unless I’ve read the entire book. I’d reached page 187 of this one, and could no longer stand this frenetic foolishness. So, for the sake of my mental health I tossed it in the trash.

Rating: 1 / 5

Don’t get me wrong; I love Stephen Fry’s work. His The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within is one of the best three books on poetry I’ve ever read. So my hopes for this were high. What I can’t be sure of, but discerned by reading between the lines, is that this is essentially transcriptions from a series of radio shows that probably were tremendously entertaining listening, but don’t really hang together as a book. Jokey devices that were funny once — once — pop up again and again, and there’s a disjointedness to the entire work that is vaguely unsettling and largely unsatisfying. Allow me to distill from the book its one best bit, thereby not only saving you money and time, but turning you on to a terrific piece of music. When you’re done with this review, go to the mp3 section and download Gavin Bryars’ “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet – 4. Tramp with Orchestra (full strings),” or better yet, get the full album. I hadn’t known about the piece until reading about it in Fry’s book and it *almost* redeemed what otherwise is a fairly forgettable bonbon of an “as told to” book.
Rating: 2 / 5

I will keep this short, as a previous reviewer has already aptly summed up how excruciatingly bad this book is. That’s the drivel part of this review. On to the lies!

What pissed me off is actually the fact that the entry here gives no obvious indication that the book is actually NOT written by Stephen Fry. Some hack wrote it “as told by Stephen Fry” (take a close look at the front cover, if you can, and you’ll see I tell the truth), which explains why although it bears the form of Fry’s work, it rings hollow and, uh, well, bad.

Shame on Amazon for not mentioning this (or even alluding to it) in their so-called “Editorial Review”, which sounds like it was copied directly from the book’s press release.
Rating: 1 / 5