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Re: query; music and Nabokov
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Thanks for your note, particularly the notion of parallel techniques
between LATH and Ein Heldenleben.
For those on the List who may not be familiar with Strauss's tone
poem, A Hero's Life, Strauss nominates himself as the hero. As A Bouazza
notes, one movement filled with cackling woodwinds represents his
critics, of whom he had plenty, and I read somewhere that the movement
amusingly entitled The Hero's Works of Peace quotes something like 30
of Strauss’s own compositions. If someone out there has added up the
Nabokov references in LATH, it would be interesting to know who is the
self-referential winner.
By the way, after WW2 Strauss and his wife Pauline lived for a little
while in the Palace Hotel in Montreux. A decade later lucrative Lolita
enabled Nabokov and his wife Vera to move in to the Palace for the rest
of their lives. I wonder if the two couples had the same rooms?
All the best
don
>>> "A. Bouazza" <mushtary@YAHOO.COM> 12/9/2010 1:28 AM >>>
Dear Don,
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....
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