Word: beethovens
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Peanuts cocktail napkins lie forgotten in pantry drawers, and Beethoven's face glares up from abandoned Schroeder sweatshirts in musty Goodwill Stores. Charlie Brown calendars are replaced on bedroom walls by Sierra Club gloss, or Playboy Mag. glamour. "Snoopy and the Red Baron" is by now a tarnished golden oldie...
Schroeder (Forbes James Candlish) is another member whose gestures along could make his part. Candlish memorized the finger movements for his scenes of musical virtuosity, and backed by the actual music of the show's combo, he blithely wraps himself in a cloak of Beethoven or Socrates to ward off Lucy's (Jackie Levy's) stubborn attacks. It's hard not to wince at the thought of what little Lucy will be like when she grows up. The strident beginnings of a first-class shrew increase her "crabbiness" ("it's undemocratic if I can't be Queen") to a screeching...
Such unearthly skill called for extraordinary compositions to serve as display pieces. Who better to write them than Paganini himself? He turned out a famous Witches' Dance, a series of caprices, sonatas, quartets, variations and five full-scale violin concertos. The pieces hardly challenged Beethoven's, but they were competently constructed crowd pleasers that bristled with the kind of technical bravura in which Paganini gloried-vertiginous runs and arpeggios, contrapuntal double and even triple stops, a fuller range than any violinist had ever attempted of harmonic overtones (the higher-pitched vibrations of given notes, produced by depressing...
...favorite part of the Wellington Victory overture is when there's musketfire and everybody plays "The Bear Came Over the Mountain." We can just see old Beethoven, deaf as a coffee table, pounding his staff out of tune with the music, having a swell time, and musing over a new piece for that young violinist Kreutzer. Everyone has his bad days. You'll probably want to see The Touch, Ingmar Bergman's first English language motion picture, for yourself: go to an early show with your best friend and a bag of leechee nuts...
...experiment soon led to a bit of unseemly partisan politicking. At one concert at U.C.L.A., members of a local "Schroeder Society" demonstrated for Beethoven, while lads and lasses in Mahler T shirts joined the good-natured battle by passing out "Vote for Gustav" leaflets. When the dust had settled, Mahler was the victor-by a single vote. Analysts pointed out that Beethoven might have triumphed had not his supporters split their vote among the four symphonies...