Dvorak as a LW protagonist?

[Bramblethorn]

Antonin Dvorak's "New World Symphony" is notorious among tuba players: in a work of 40-odd minutes, the tuba has only 14 notes, and even there it's just playing along with the bass trombone. The rest of the time the tuba's sitting there with nothing to do.

Musical legend has it that Dvorak's wife was having an affair with the tuba player, so this was Dvorak's plan to punish the guy, while giving him just enough work to keep him on tour and away from Mrs. Dvorak.

Not quite as violent as some of the LW stories out there, but when you think that Dvorak (allegedly) punished thousands of tuba players for this affair, it starts looking like an unusually refined version of BTB. I'm tempted to use this in a story one day.

(There's also a story that the reason there's no Nobel Prize for Mathematics is that Alfred Nobel caught his wife having an affair with a mathematician, but it seems unlikely since Nobel never married...)

 

[legerdemer]

...
Musical legend has it that Dvorak's wife was having an affair with the tuba player, so this was Dvorak's plan to punish the guy, while giving him just enough work to keep him on tour and away from Mrs. Dvorak.
...
(There's also a story that the reason there's no Nobel Prize for Mathematics is that Alfred Nobel caught his wife having an affair with a mathematician, but it seems unlikely since Nobel never married...)

Great anecdotes. I didn't know the one about Dvorak. Now there's vindictiveness!

 

[Handley_Page]

Great anecdotes. I didn't know the one about Dvorak. Now there's vindictiveness!

It sure beats a .45 . . . .

 

[49greg]

I was told somewhere that the actor Robert Walker was in a film with his wife, Jennifer Jones, who was having an affair with the director, The director made them do multiple takes of a love scene together. Supposedly the affair was common knowledge by then.

Talk about torture. And a sadist.

 

[sr71plt]

Great story and it sounds familiar. Some sort of takeoff on this would be fun to write--"The Tuba Player's Revenge" (I recently finished writing a takeoff on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf--and I have a GM interpretation of "The Fisher's Song" posted here, that, of course, doesn't have much of an audience on Lit.). I have heard that Handel got back at a snotty tenor by leaving the tenors up on loud, high notes in the "Hallelujah Chorus" in The Messiah long enough to tie their vocal chords in knots, and I believe it.

 

[lovecraft68]

Antonin Dvorak's "New World Symphony" is notorious among tuba players: in a work of 40-odd minutes, the tuba has only 14 notes, and even there it's just playing along with the bass trombone. The rest of the time the tuba's sitting there with nothing to do.

Musical legend has it that Dvorak's wife was having an affair with the tuba player, so this was Dvorak's plan to punish the guy, while giving him just enough work to keep him on tour and away from Mrs. Dvorak.

Not quite as violent as some of the LW stories out there, but when you think that Dvorak (allegedly) punished thousands of tuba players for this affair, it starts looking like an unusually refined version of BTB. I'm tempted to use this in a story one day.

(There's also a story that the reason there's no Nobel Prize for Mathematics is that Alfred Nobel caught his wife having an affair with a mathematician, but it seems unlikely since Nobel never married...)

That type of revenge is beyond the idiots in LW....too much thinking, they just rape the women and slice the cocks off their lovers.

That's what they can understand.

I'm putting it on my bucket list to meet and "speak" to at least one crazed LW troll in my lifetime. I want to show them what malice is like in real life and not behind a keyboard.

 

[glynndah]

Great story and it sounds familiar. Some sort of takeoff on this would be fun to write--"The Tuba Player's Revenge" (I recently finished writing a takeoff on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf--and I have a GM interpretation of "The Fisher's Song" posted here, that, of course, doesn't have much of an audience on Lit.). I have heard that Handel got back at a snotty tenor by leaving the tenors up on loud, high notes in the "Hallelujah Chorus" in The Messiah long enough to tie their vocal chords in knots, and I believe it.

Anyone who's spent much time choral singing suspects something akin to this.

 

[sr71plt]

Anyone who's spent much time choral singing suspects something akin to this.

The forte second note high A of the exposed tenor entrance at measure 43 has always been enough to do it for me--and that's at only the half way mark and is followed by a whole bunch of fortissimo Fs and Gs.

 

[Handley_Page]

I have heard that Handel got back at a snotty tenor by leaving the tenors up on loud, high notes in the "Hallelujah Chorus" in The Messiah long enough to tie their vocal chords in knots, and I believe it.

Anyone who's spent much time choral singing suspects something akin to this.

I think this also applies to the introduction to the last movement of Beethoven's 9th [Choral]. He does serious damage to the vocal chords. Try joining in with that Ode to Joy !

 

[glynndah]

Composers seem to have some sort of antipathy toward altos. Sopranos get thousands of notes, varied ones, per measure; altos get two notes, sustained over thousands of pages.

Source: a disgruntled alto who surreptitiously switched to the tenor parts when the director wasn't looking.

 

[sr71plt]

Composers and conductors don't mess around with altos. They go for lyric sopranos.

 

[glynndah]

Composers and conductors don't mess around with altos. They go for lyric sopranos.

Hence the "Oh, hell! I forgot the altos again. Eh. I'll have 'em sing two words drawn out over twenty measures. That'll give them something to do."