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This is a long book and a slow read; slow not because it is especially difficult, but because it is full of material you really need to savour. I gave myself five days to read it at just over 100 pages a day. I was up to page 218 on day one when I had to leave the house. I needed CDs. Urgently. If Alex Ross, the music critic of The New Yorker, achieves nothing else with this marvellous book, he will certainly cause a big increase in sales of 20th-century classical music.

But he achieves much more than that. His aim is to describe “the cultural predicament of the composer in the 20th century”. This is not easy. The composer’s predicament included the need to accept fundamental redefinitions of his art as well as Stalin and Hitler’s obsessive musical meddlings. In what Leonard Bernstein called “the century of death”, music was required both to reflect with jagged forms and conceal with rabid propaganda the murderous ravages of modernity.

The composer also had to face his own eclipse. As Mahler lay dying in 1911, the Viennese press reported on his body temperature – he was, after all, “Der Mahler”, a god of music. And now, “100 years on, contemporary classical composers have largely vanished from the radar screen of mainstream culture”. If you want a really quiet life, as far removed from the celebrity culture as it is possible to get, then compose classical music. Few will know who you are and fewer still will care. But Ross, a joyful man, takes heart. “Composers may never match their popular counterparts in instant impact, but, in the freedom of their solitude, they can communicate experiences of singular intensity.”

And, for those who still think it all ended with Brahms: “In 20th-century music, through all the darkness, guilt, misery, and oblivion, the rain of beauty never ended.”

Ross’s approach is inclusive. He starts in 1906 with the first performance of Salome in Graz, conducted by Strauss, an event witnessed by Puccini, Mahler, Schoenberg and (or so he was to claim) young Hitler. The book stops with the 1987 premiere in Houston of John Adams’s Nixon in China. Everybody who is anybody, from Sibelius to Lou Reed, is covered. Ross is, mercifully, no ideologue, he has no theory or posture with which to pound his material into shape. He takes art as it should be taken, on its own terms. After a century of musical civil war about the merits of atonalism and tonality, this is a breath of open-minded, fresh air. Nevertheless, he has views that can be pretty crisp. After giving the arrogant Pierre Boulez plenty of rope to expound his philosophy of modern music, he dismisses it briskly as “the rhetoric of taste”. So long, Pierre.

But, on the whole, his approach is good-natured and humane. He sees the act of composition as intrinsically heroic. The twists and turns of Strauss and Shostakovich when harassed and humiliated by Hitler’s goons and Stalin’s apparatchiks are all delicately justified in a sentence — “These composers were neither saints nor devils; they were flawed actors on a tilted stage.” Perfect.

Ross’s method is a curious but entirely successful mix of biography, history and criticism. Characters can be caught in a phrase or line. Schoenberg, for example, was “easily unimpressed”. And of Britten and Shostakovich he writes, “They were grown men with the souls of gifted, frightened children.” Stravinsky’s agonising about faith and his own place in the world is brilliantly caught in the moment when, in old age, he ascends the stairway to Schoenberg’s apartment in Los Angeles. The image invites us to consider which of the two was the real 20th-century master? Schoenberg, the fierce prophet of atonalism? Or the delicate God-struck dandy, Stravinsky? (Having rediscovered both Pierrot Lunaire and the Symphony of Psalms in the course of reading this book, I’d go with Stravinsky.)

It is the superb selection of image and ancedote that makes this book work so well. You will not forget the party at Harpo Marx’s house where Fanny Brice, the star of the Ziegfeld follies, says to Schoenberg, “C’mon, professor, play us a tune.” Or there’s Stravinsky spilling his scotch at Birdland in New York. He’s overjoyed. Charlie Parker spotted him in the audience and has included a motif from Firebird in his sax solo.

Nor will you — nor should you — be able to erase the truly haunting image of Ravel, a soldier behind the lines in 1916, playing Chopin on an Erard piano in an abandoned chateau. And then there is a fearful but proud old man descending the staircase of a house in Garmisch in April 1945. “I am Richard Strauss, the composer of Rosenkavalier and Salome,” he says. Lieutenant Milton Weiss of the US Army, a musician himself, nods in recognition. Strauss just wants to be free and known and, once again, he is. Another musical American officer places an Off Limits sign on the lawn to protect the old guy.

Best of all are the moments when Ross really strikes you dumb with wonder, moments when the author’s passion for the supreme significance of music raises his erudition to a new level. In July 1945, Britten and Yehudi Menuhin visited the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. “Stupefied by what he saw”, Britten proceeded to write a cycle of songs based on John Donne’s Holy Sonnets. On August 6, he set the overpowering Sonnet 14 (“Batter my heart, three person’d God”), a violent demand for violent forgiveness. Earlier that day, Hiroshima had been obliterated.

“There is an eerie coincidence here,” comments Ross, “for J Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the American nuclear programme, cherished the same Donne poem, and evidently had it in mind when he gave the site of the first atomic test the name Trinity.” This is how you write cultural history — with imagination in letters of fire.

Beyond the classical realm, jazz receives respectful but limited coverage, the primary hero being Duke Ellington. This is probably because Ellington is the jazz artist who most comfortably bears the title of composer. Pop and rock, meanwhile, form the climate of the latter third of the book rather than contributing specific works. Ross, rightly I think, picks out the

Velvet Underground’s first album as the work that most successfully adapts contemporary classical innovations.

There is one further theme, out of which we, the British, emerge triumphant (something of a relief as, composer-wise, we barely make the 20th-century cut). This is the profound conflict implicit in all modern culture between local roots and international status. Stravinsky was mighty enough to resolve this within himself: Britten resolved it by being aggressively local in his Aldeburgh ashram.

In fact, Ross concludes, the British are better at this than anybody else and have a musical culture that is “the envy of the world”, because “the internal politics of modern music has never been as fraught in Britain as in continental Europe or America”. And, down at Aldeburgh, Britten has been succeeded by a rather wonderful British composer called Thomas Ades, one of the contemporary masters (along with John Adams, Steve Reich and a whole mass of new composers conscientiously identified by Ross) who preside, often quietly, usually unnoticed, over today’s musical landscape.

Warm, joyful and unfailingly adroit in his evocation of music in words — he writes at one point of “a great steam bath of E-flat major” — Ross, with this book, establishes himself as the supreme champion of modern music, of the art of the “decentred culture”, which is “able to assimilate anything new because it has assimilated everything in the past”. Read this and listen.

THE REST IS NOISE: Listening to the 20th Century by Alex Ross
Fourth Estate £20 pp624

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