Knowing how King Lear ends and that it's only a play makes no difference to me. I still don't want him to die and surely we all have to suspend disbelief otherwise there's very little point in watching drama. I find the original, quiet ending of Prokofiev's 7th very poignant but the happy ending cheapens it and I resent the spoiled effect. I doubted whether it was a good example because it comes and goes so quickly so perhaps it can be easily overlooked. The fact that there's another version around makes no difference. It's rather like King Lear sitting up after dying, winking to the audience and saying: "I'm not really dead." I think the audience would boo something like that.

Poor old Richard Strauss! He really didn@t need, did he(?), to describe himself as a composer of the second rank, since he could always rely upon a plentiful supply of others to do this for him! Whilst not denying what you say about the particular importance of Mahler -and whilst admitting openly that Strauss, even at his very best, seemed incapable of plumbing the kinds of depth that Mahler does in, for example, his Sixth and Ninth Symphonies - I really cannot buy into this idea that Strauss was about technical brilliance and surface glitter and not often much more than these things. Metamorphosen my well be more of a private expression than one that engaged with a more general German feeling of loss, etc., but its every measure is so far removed from triviality and perfunctoriness, as are the Vier Letzte Lieder or that extraordinary choral operatic pendant An den Baum Daphne (exhausting as it is to sing, rather like his Deutsche Motett). I am inclined to agree with the late Norman del Mar, in whose three-volume study of the composer he opines that Strauss went into a kind of till-ready (nom, not THAT Till!) mode in the inter-war years as he waited in hope for better things to come to him, but Capriccio certainly launched him on that Indian summer and there are plenty of works before 1914 that are worth of serious consideration, not least most of the symphonic poems. And surely Salome - one of the great operatic peaks of the 20th century, along with Doktor Faust, Wozzeck and Die Soldaten - is about as non-trivial and unperfunctory as it gets...

Best,

Alistair

Can you tell us why? For you, is it too long per se? or does it have too few ideas for its length? or does it have too many notes for what it has to say? or is it any combination of these things and/or something else altogether? Just curious!

Best,

Alistair

Hope this not too naive a question but can anyone tell me in simplistic terms what 'vibrato' means - saw a large thread about this but have not a clue what it means 

A combination of all those things.

This statement is, I take it, excepting vocal works?

....which thought links in very pleasingly with the Auden poem which Mary C put up on the Poetry thread the other day:


W H Auden, The Composer

All the others translate: the painter sketches
A visible world to love or reject;
Rummaging into his living, the poet fetches
The images out that hurt or connect,

From Life to art by painstaking adaption,
Relying on us to cover the rift;
Only your notes are pure contraption,
Only your song is an absolute gift.

Pour out your presence, a delight cascading
The falls of the knee and the weirs of the spine,
Our climate of silence and doubt invading;

You alone, alone, imaginary song,
Are unable to say an existence is wrong,
And pour out your forgiveness like a wine.

Well I (and Dudley Moore) agree