Steve Coogan meets Strauss

There's the spectacular Italian scenery. The impressions of famous actors. The delicious-looking food. And then there's the music. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon's The Trip to Italy has been credited with getting Alanis Morisette's first album, Jagged Little Pill, back into the album chart. It's the only CD the Italy-trotting pair have in the car, so it's the soundtrack to their drive from restaurant to restaurant. But there are two other bits of music that keep popping up throughout this second series, Richard Strauss's 'In ambendrot' ('At Sunset') from his Four Last Songs and Mahler's 'Ich bin der Welt' (I am Lost to the World), one of his Rückert Lieder.

The Mahler tends to be played at the start of episodes, as real-life concerns melt away. Brydon and Coogan are 'lost to the world with which I used to waste so much time'. But it's the Strauss that really makes an impression, accompanying a boat at sail, a shot of a dramatic coastline, the closing sequences of several episodes. It's always the start of the song we hear, majestic and glistening. Twinned with these stylish images, it seems to evoke a golden age of luxuriousness, a sense of wallowing in the glories of summer, a taste of how good life can be, even with its bittersweet moments.

It left me yearning to hear the whole song, and the three others that make up the set. It also made me ponder just how Strauss makes such an impact in just a few bars. What's his secret?



Here are a few thoughts. The first chord begins loudly, a blaze of E flat major sunshine that sounds more like an ending than a beginning. It is sustained but instantly softens, piereced by horns and bassoon, before growing into a singing line. Strauss grabs our attention, then holds us in suspense. The harmony doesn't change so we feel something is going to happening, but what? And while he holds us there, there's a chance to take in the grandeur of his orchestra: from the double basses playing the lowest note octaves and octaves below the stratospheric violins, flutes and piccolos. It's on an arresting scale. And it's capped off by those top instruments playing the third of the chord – the third is the all-powerful note that makes a chord sound major or minor – which somehow creates a sense of shimmering optimism.

That block of E flat major continues for five bars, before a shadow crosses the sun, and we get tinges of a minor key. And then the harmony starts to shift and dance, before, a good few bars later, we end up back at E flat major for the first entrance of the voice. The music never then reaches the same heights of that opening, never dazzles us in the same way. By the end, the violins are two octaves lower than at the start, the double basses an octave lower. The music is marked pianissimo. The brilliant sun has faded, and the sunset is poised to give way to night.

While I remain unsure about the self-indulgent nature of the series, the countless cultural references  – Roman Holiday, La dolce vita, Byron, Keats, Shelley, The Italian Job, The Godfather, the list goes on – give it, if not real depth, at least the impression of depth. And I'm sure the music was chosen carefully for its meaning. The 'script' (though a lot is improvised), after all, is so self-aware that at one point while the Strauss is playing, one of the secondary characters, describing a film, says: 'There's that incredible bit of music that keeps playing all the way through, it's romantic and then it kind of gets annoying.' Strauss even went on his own tour of Italy, visiting Rome, Pompeii and Capri, among other places.

So what is this music meant to mean here, if anything? It's a song, so there is, of course, a text. It's by Joseph von Eichendorff. His sunset is not just a time of the day, but a time of life. He takes us to a 'quiet land' where 'two larks soar upwards dreamily into the light air' (here flutes flutter upwards) and there's 'a vast, tranquil peace so deep in the evening's glow'. Is this, asks the poet, 'Is this perhaps death?' In this indulgent Italian idyll, all fine meals and stylish scenery, the two characters are on the edge of life, in a kind of limbo. There's both uncertainty and acceptance in Eichendorff's question, which somehow mirrors the spirit of The Trip to Italy. The series ends on an unanswered question, with Brydon poised between two choices. And, just as in Strauss's song the two weary wanderers contemplate the final sunset, here the final scene is a sun-bleached silver shimmer of sea, with a lone boat and a bird flying across. There's a sense of sublime peace, a sense of reconciliation with the fact that we'll never have all the answers.