Being overwhelmingly a dead art form rather than a living one, classical music relies more heavily than it ideally should on anniversaries for its marketing. With the start of 2009, that dependence is about to escalate. Over the next five years, concert and opera life will be dominated by a series of unusually lustrous anniversaries. These musical birthdays will direct programme planning as well as stand as a reprimand to the more modest achievements of the art form in the present day.
The years 2009 to 2013 will see the centenary of a number of works and events that shaped the entire span of classical music in the 20th century. Coincidentally, they also mark the 200th anniversaries of the births of a generation of 19th-century composers whose works remain at the heart of the repertoire today.
The only surprise in this oncoming tsunami of commemorations is that so little of it involves either Bach or Mozart or Beethoven—apart from the bicentenary of the Emperor concerto later during 2009. In all other respects, the next five years are predictable, with concert schedulers following the calendar and Radio 3 airing any number of single-composer days along the lines of their previous saturation efforts on the works of Bach, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky.
The new year gets the process off to a solid start, with Mendelssohn's bicentenary, the 200th anniversary of the death of Haydn and the 250th of the death of Handel. And, as 1909 was one of the threshold years of musical modernism, it will also be 100 years since the first performances of works such as Strauss's Elektra, Schoenberg's Erwartung and Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit. Those are followed by what may be the most fruitful of all the year's centenaries—the anniversary of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, through which so much vibrant music and dance flowed over the ensuing decades.
The following year, 2010, will be piano-lovers' heaven, with the bicentenaries of both Chopin and Schumann, as well as the centenary of Samuel Barber. Then comes more piano, with the bicentenary of Liszt in 2011, a year which also provides endless opportunities for the symphonies of Mahler, whose death occurred in 1911. After that 2012 will be a more modest year—the centenary of the death of Massenet somehow doesn't quite match up (Massenet, as Hugh Canning of the Sunday Times observed, is music for consenting adults in private). On the other hand, 2012 will also mark 100 years since the first performances of Pierrot Lunaire, Daphnis et Chloë and Mahler's 9th.
The climax and the biggest anniversary year of the five will come in 2013, which marks the Wagner and Verdi bicentenaries as well as the Britten centenary, along with the 100th anniversary of the premiere of the Rite of Spring and of Arthur Nikisch's ground-breaking recording of Beethoven's 5th symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic.
One looks forward to much of this—perhaps the Wagner anniversary will at last move Covent Garden to mount a proper production of the composer's greatest neglected work, his 1842 political opera Rienzi. But this concentration of anniversaries underscores the reality that the creativity of the art form is increasingly of historical rather than contemporary interest. We cannot know, of course, which musical prodigies born between now and 2013 may be commemorated in the centuries to come. But if we look back at the year just finishing, it is hard not to wonder what lasting musical achievements it has bequeathed to the concert programmers of 2108.
The death in November of Richard Hickox (pictured, right, in 2006), coming so soon after the death in September of Vernon Handley, has robbed British music of two of its most committed and remarkable conductors. Between them, Handley and Hickox must have championed and recorded more of the English repertoire than any conductors since the death of Adrian Boult a quarter of a century ago. Though both were great interpreters of established figures like Elgar, Delius and Vaughan Williams, it was as advocates of lesser composers that the musical public is most in their debt. Few of us would have heard many live performances of the works of Alwyn and Arnold, Bax and Bantock or Stanford and Simpson without their efforts.
As individuals, the two men were not in any way alike—Handley was an introvert and Hickox very much the opposite. Handley's career perhaps also faced more hurdles, notably the BBC's modernist-influenced hostility to British music in the William Glock era, so that Hickox in many ways benefited from the older conductor's pathbreaking efforts. Hickox also had a much more international career, including as a controversial music director of Opera Australia.
Together, though, the two conductors leave a grievous gap in British music. Hickox's passing is particularly cruel, coming when he was at the height of his powers and in a year when he had done more than anyone to promote the year's Vaughan Williams anniversary. Hickox died three days before he was to conduct Vaughan Williams's Synge-inspired opera Riders to the Sea at ENO in a production by Fiona Shaw. He had been due to conduct The Beggar's Opera at the Royal Opera in January 2009. The performance will go ahead in his memory—but it is unlikely that either would have been scheduled in the first place without Hickox.
