I was pleased by your post regarding Richard Strauss, one of my favorite, and the most literary of, composers, because it reminded me of the similarities and analogies I have been entertaining in private for years.
His orchestral piece Ein Heldenleben always reminds me of Look At The Harlequins, especially its fifth movement, Des Helden Friedenswerke, the way he used themes from his previous works (Till Eulenspiegel, Macbeth, Also Sprach Zarathustra, Don Juan, Don Quixote etc), while the second movement, The Hero’s Adversaries, is Strauss’s “Reply to His Critics,” so to speak. Many critics failed to perceive and appreciate its irony and humour.
The opera Salome was his succès de scandale, and stylistically it is as innovative and exuberant as Lolita.
Elektra in its use of dissonance, chromaticism and harmonic parallelism was a forerunner of modernism in music in the same way that Pale Fire heralded postmodernism; and also his extremely complex use of leitmotifs is analogous to VN’s.
Kind regards,
A. Bouazza
Query
Been listening to Richard Strauss, reading about him, and he reminds me of Nabokov. Same sense of humor, interesting letters, full-term marriage, hair-unfriendly forehead and an insistence on avoiding easy aesthetic categories. For example, this Q and A from a press conference with Strauss has a Nabakovian ring:
“What do you think of the American school of composers?”
“There aren’t any schools; there are only talents and geniuses.”
Strauss was a great musician who also loved writing. Nabokov was a great writer who it seems to me doesn’t display much interest in music, surprisingly for a father whose son became an opera singer (maybe something Nabokov has in common with Michael Corleone).
The only significant reference to music I can think of offhand is the aversion to jazz by his surrogate John Shade. Anyway, my query: is music a major factor in Nabokov’s work?
All the best,
don
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