Music, one of the most dazzling fruits of human civilisation,

can make us weep, or make us dance.

It's reflected the times in which it was written,

it has delighted, challenged, comforted and excited us.

In this series I've been tracing the story of music from scratch.

To follow it on its miraculous journey,

misleading jargon and fancy labels are best put to one side.

Instead, try to imagine how revolutionary and how exhilarating

many of the innovations we take for granted today were

to people at the time.

There are a million ways of telling the story of music, this is mine.

MUSIC: "The Rite Of Spring" by Stravinsky

In the 31 years between the death of Richard Wagner in 1883

and the outbreak of the First World War

music was shaken by a series of rebellions.

"Pictures At An Exhibition" by Mussorgsky

MUSIC: "The Firebird" by Stravinsky

Russian music swept westwards exuberantly,

as did the exotic sounds of distant continents.

"Voiles" by Debussy

And symphonies and operas of astonishing intensity

amazed and startled audiences.

Modernism in music was born.

The world was becoming a smaller place,

with millions of poor European immigrants seeking refuge

in the New World,

to join the white settlers, African Americans and Chinese workers already there.

From this rich mix of musical cultures,

soon to be heard on newfangled record players and radios,

would spring the blues, ragtime and jazz.

"Maple Leaf Rag" by Scott Joplin

In just over three decades music underwent a series of gigantic convulsions.

Change came in many different forms, some exciting, some bewildering.

Revolution was in the air

and all of music's laws and traditions were about to be shaken to their roots.

What happened was a series of musical rebellions.

MUSIC: "The Rite Of Spring" by Stravinsky

The first was aimed at displacing the musical giant of the late 19th century, Richard Wagner.

His ideas, his style and his musical philosophy

had been such a pervasive presence in classical music

that what might have followed him was a plague of pseudo-Wagners.

In fact what followed in his wake was an explosion of musical activity

that sought to do things very differently indeed.

It may not always have been deliberate

but there was a kind of not-Wagner renaissance.

All the things he hated most came to life. The French, for a start.

MUSIC: "Carnival Of The Animals" by Saint-Saens

In France a new wave of composers made it their business

to write music of deliberate simplicity and clarity

and to banish pretention and earnestness of all kinds.

The French were about to enjoy a musical golden age

thanks to their reaction against Wagner.

Their best 50 years ever in music blossomed

after he went off to his personal Valhalla,

with Faure, Debussy and Ravel leading a glorious riposte

to German musical dominance.

MUSIC: "Gymnopedie Number 1" by Satie

The movement was set in train by one of the most remarkable figures in music, Erik Satie.

Erik Satie's first Gymnopedie of 1888,

as well as sounding like a long, hot afternoon after a boozy lunch,

can be seen as the first shot in a war

to debunk pomposity and declutter French music.

Satie, described by his tutors at the Paris conservatoire

as "the laziest student ever", was an eccentric intellectual

who hung out with other arty dreamers in Montmartre.

Satie's music could hardly sound less like Wagner

and what the Germans were up to.

The irony is that there was a German influence

on the work of Satie's Parisian contemporaries.

Here's a clue. Composers like Cesar Franck, Charles-Marie Widor,

Camille Saint-Saens and Gabriel Faure were all trained organists,

and playing the organ means above all

knowing one particular composer's work inside out - JS Bach.

MUSIC: "Toccata" by Widor

More than a hundred years after his death,

these organist-composers in France

were invigorated and inspired by Bach's clarity and economy.

Even the master himself might have admired

Charles-Marie Widor's famous Toccata.

It was first performed by Widor himself

at the Trocadero Palace in Paris in 1889

and it's given a rousing send-off

to many a newly hitched bride and groom ever since.

The dignity and dexterity of Bach can also be heard

in the music of Gabriel Faure,

perhaps the most talented of these French organist-composers.

Listening to Faure after Brahms, Liszt, Wagner or Tchaikovsky,

it's as if someone has spring-cleaned and redecorated

a teenage boy's bedroom.

Gone are the posters of death, psychological torment,

superheroes and tragedy.

The augmented piles of clothes have been put away

and the windows have been opened

to dispel the diminished sneaker-smelling air.

Faure's exquisite music simply says, "Chill,"

or, perhaps, refrigerez-vous.

The exquisite pieces of Satie, Saint-Saens, Faure

and the new wave of French composers were mostly small in scale.

The next important step in the non-Wagner rebellion took place

in the realm of symphonic music.

And the composer who carried the torch

for large-scale orchestral and vocal music after Wagner

was about as different from him as a human being could be.

Though he championed Wagner's operas

as music director of the Vienna State Opera House,

Wagner would have despised him because he was Jewish.

He was Gustav Mahler.

The hallmark of Mahler's music is that of openness.

Unlike Wagner, Mahler invited into his music

all the sounds and rhythms and the noisy diversity

of the bustling East European communities at Vienna's doorstep,

capital of the sprawling Austro-Hungarian empire.

As an outsider in Vienna - a Jew, a Czech,

a poor country boy in a profession full of toffs -

it's not surprising that Mahler should identify

with the folklore and music of his small-town childhood.

In his symphonies it's possible to identify, for example,

the Klezmer style of strolling Jewish folk musicians.

His music encompasses passing military bands.

And he's not afraid to include boisterous children's choruses.

Mahler's symphonies are music's gateway to the 20th century,

a musical equivalent of New York's Ellis Island,

where Europe's exhausted and oppressed peoples

sought refuge and a new start.

The musical cultures they left behind in Europe

found a home in Mahler's generous symphonic embrace.

One way we can see a modern perspective emerging in his music is

its sense of reality, of truthfulness, warts and all.

The frankness of his approach is a major break with the past

and is much more characteristic of the 20th than the 19th centuries.

How can music be honest?

Well, before Mahler if you were composer

and you wanted to write a piece about loneliness or despair or depression,

you'd call it something generic like a nocturne, or a sonata pathetique.

In an opera you could have singers act out emotional or political issues

pretending to be someone from another era, in a fancy costume.

But Mahler stopped all this role-playing.

He wanted to evoke the real, contemporary world

with all its actual suffering and joy, without pretence.

He told it how it was.

Mahler took our worst fears and set them to music.

This may seem an unremarkable concept to us

but in 1900 it was shockingly, distressingly new.

The unflinching honesty of Mahler's approach is at times unbearable.

From 1901, for example,

he set to music five German poems called Kindertotenlieder -

Songs On The Death Of Children.

The sentiments of the songs are those of a parent's most unspeakable nightmares.

MEZZO SINGING IN GERMAN

In Mahler's unflinching settings,

these distant people of another century suddenly become like us.

He's made them real.

In a horrible irony, four years after he wrote the songs

Mahler's own five-year-old daughter, Anna-Maria, died of scarlet fever,

and Mahler himself was diagnosed with a terminal heart condition.

When he died in 1911 he was laid to rest in her grave.

But despite the understandable sadness and alienation we hear in his music

there is, incredibly, hope of something better,

usually associated with childhood and youth,

as in his Song Of The Earth.

The final chord of The Song Of The Earth was described

by the mid-20th century English composer Benjamin Britten

as being "imprinted on the atmosphere."

STRINGS, HARP AND OBOE CREATE A WASH OF SOUND

MEZZO: # Ewig... #

MUSIC FADES

But there's something else going on in Mahler's music

that wasn't perhaps obvious at the time.

It's deceptive.

Because of its all-inclusive style

with its borrowings from ethnic folk music

and because of the intensity of feeling he wanted to convey,

Mahler's music began to destabilise

the centuries-old Western musical system he'd inherited.

His pupils in Vienna, led by Arnold Schoenberg,

actively wanted to dismantle completely

the familiar systems that had underpinned all music

for hundreds of years

and replace them with a brand new system.

This academic rebellion was later labelled serialism, or atonality,

and it produced decades of scholarly hot air, books, debates and seminars.

And, in its purest, strictest form, not one piece of music

that a normal person could understand or enjoy in 100 years.

That's not to say that serialism hasn't always had a cultish following

but for sure these composers weren't courting a mainstream audience.

Had serialism had any chance of appealing to a paying public,

one composer who would surely have opted into it

was the musical magpie Richard Strauss,

Germany's leading composer after Mahler's death.

But he had other, far more mischievous plans up his sleeve.

He began his career conventionally enough

in a musical style that owed much to Liszt

and a little to Wagner.

Thus Spake Zarathustra is pretty typical,

with its now legendary opening, Sunrise, made even more famous

by Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Kubrick uses the power of the piece

to underscore a momentous leap forward in the evolution of Man.

The power of the idea the film wants to convey,

man's discovery of weapons, needs equally portentous music.

No one did it better than Strauss.

And yet, the ever-versatile Strauss

could also write songs of heart-breaking, Mahlerish delicacy,

like the song Tomorrow, composed as a wedding present for his wife.

On the surface of it the words of Morgen! seem

to be optimistic about the future.

"And tomorrow the sun will shine again."

But it's also strangely melancholy.

It seems to suggest, in fact, that there will be no tomorrow.

It seemed at this point as if Strauss would continue to compose

in this wistful but fairly traditional manner.

But then he suddenly catapulted himself into musical notoriety

with an opera of savage, erotic power

that shocked bourgeois society and created a sensation.

In one fell swoop,

from being the genteel Kapellmeister of the Austrian Belle Epoch,

Strauss had transformed himself into the Che Guevara

of the musical rebels.

The opera in question was Salome, staged in 1905.

It was immediately banned in several countries

and it gave new meaning to the term discord...

..even before Salome herself had stripped off

for the Dance Of The Seven Veils

and scandalised the first night audience.

Salome's final, passionate solo,

addressed to the severed head of John the Baptist,

which she then kisses, was the Quentin Tarantino moment.

You can either read Salome as a strong, independent young woman

who gets what she wants by exploiting her sexuality,

cleverly outwitting her stepfather the king in the process,

or as a kind of demented junkie

who lowers humanity's moral standards to rock bottom.

Take your pick.

Strauss apparently hedges his bets,

giving the first mention of the necrophiliac kiss

possibly the most dissonant chord ever used in music at that point.

It's like the final howl of a busted civilisation.