Product Description

'Hello, I'm Stephen Fry. Now time for the first outing of a brand, spanking new feature here on The Incomplete and Utter History of Classical Music... putting some unsuspecting figure in music under the spotlight.'

In his Incomplete & Utter History of Classical Music, Stephen Fry presents a potted and brilliantly rambling 700-year history of classical music and the world as we know it. Along this musical journey he casually throws in references to pretty much whatever takes his fancy, from the Mongol invasion of Russia and Mr Khan (Genghis to his friends), the founding of the MCC, the Black Death (which once again became the new black in England), to the heady revolutionary atmosphere of Mozart's Don Giovanni and the deep doo-doo that Louis XVI got into (or 'du-du' as the French would say).

It's all here - Ambrose and early English plainsong, Bach, Mozart (beloved of mobile phones everywhere), Beethoven, Debussy, Wagner (the old romantic), right up to the present day. Entertaining and brilliantly written, this is a pretty reckless romp of a history through classical music and much much more.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #66942 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

About the Author

Stephen Fry is a writer, comedian, presenter, actor, half-man, half-demi-god.

Tim Lihoreau regularly writes with Stephen Fry and is the muli-award winning scriptwriter for the Classic FM The Incomplete & Utter History of Classical Music. He is also Creative Director for Classic FM, and lives in Cambridge.

Customer Reviews

Just like Classic FM...
Beware. This book isn't actually written by Stephen Fry, but by Tim Lihoreau of Classic FM. And, like Classic FM, it can be entertaining but also incredibly irritating. And, sadly, it tries to be funny in the wrong way, at the wrong moments.

However. It contains enough useful information to keep me hooked, and occasionally some of Stephen Fry's wit shines through.

Don't buy this book just because it's written by Stephen Fry - because it isn't. But if you have an interest in classical music and can live with Classic FM in book form, it's recommended.

unreadable
I felt as though I was being arched and punned and whimsied to death. An insult to any reader any age any amount of previous knowledge. Just awful.

The worst kind of puerile excrement
I will start by echoing what has been mentioned already by at least one reviewer: this book was not written by Stephen Fry - I'm amazed he has allowed his name to be associated with such an amateurish, school-paper-like piece of work.

Mr Fry's own books have on the whole been well researched and written with deftly chosen words and a real knack for narrative. This book, on the other hand, reads like it was written by the protagonist Adrian Healey from Fry's The Liar - i.e. a pretentious adolescent with the gift of the gab but no fathomable intellectual substance. Indeed the book's author, a Mr Tim Lihoreau, has presented a poor impersonation of a fifteen year old Stephen Fry.

Examples of where stylistically this book is likely to irritate literate adults would include the joke about "Georges Bizet, whom my computer spell-check wants to call George's bidet", the interminable number of ways the author draws attention the fact that Richard Wagner wrote works that are around the four hour mark - not to mention the habit he has of following the title of any Wagner piece with tags like "The Ring, or to give it its full kennel name, The Ring of Lady Benedictine-Trixibelle, the Third." - and references to Donizetti's "Lucia di Ilkley Moor". One could forgive humour this crass if it were sporadically dotted throughout the text and the reader were allowed occasional respite from it, yet almost every paragraph is bursting at the seams with gags - most of which wouldn't sound out of place in an episode of Dick and Dom in Da Bungalow.

There are some redeeming features - the content seems mostly accurate and therefore informative to anyone unacquainted with certain dates/events etc and the structure is sound, though as the structure is chronological it would be pretty hard even for Mr Lihoreau to louse that up.

These points notwithstanding, my recommendation would be: To anyone wishing to read something written by Stephen Fry - choose any of The Liar, The Hippopotamus, or Moab is My Washpot. To anyone wishing to read a rough guide to classical music - read The Rough Guide to Classical Music and its sister work The Rough Guide to Opera. What's most awful about the Incomplete & Utter History. . . is that it is likely to dissuade the kind of people Classic FM hopes to attract to classical music from listening to anything of the kind; for fear that such people may miss out my final suggestion would be to turn on BBC Radio 3.