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....