# Real and fictional lovers of classical music and their favorite composers...



## Coach G (Apr 22, 2020)

REAL:

*Dwight Eisenhower* (Five star general and President of the USA: I have an old LP called _The President's Favorite Music_ that includes *Beethoven*'s _Coriolan Overture_ and a "symphonic synthesis" of *Gershwin*'s _Porgy and Bess_; as well as the opera singer, *Marion Anderson*, singing _He's Got the Whole World in his Hands_.

*Richard Nixon* (US President): I saw in a TV interview that he liked *Liszt* and wanted to open the Kennedy Center with Liszt's _Les Preludes_ or maybe *Beethoven*'s _9th Symphony_. Nixon hated Bernstein's _Mass_ which was composed and performed at the opening of Lincoln Center which Nixon did not attend.

*Vladimir Lenin* (Russian Revolutionary and first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union): When I was taking a class in Modern Russian History in college, my professor said that Lenin liked *Beethoven*.)

We all know that *Adolf Hitler* praised *Richard Wagner* in _Mien Kampf_, but I have a friend who is an expert on Wagner who said that Hitler was listening to *Lehar* during his final days in the bunker.

I saw in a documentary on the world's greatest physicist, *Stephen Hawking*, that his favorite was *Wagner*; that Hawking was really absorbed in Wagner's musical vision.

I read in more than one place that South African revolutionary and President, *Nelson Mandela*, liked *Beethoven* and *Tchaikovsky*.

*****
FICTIONAL:

Both *Felix Ungar* (played by Tony Randall) from the original TV series, _The Odd Couple_, and *Frasier Crane* (played by Kelsey Grammar) from _Frasier_; were fans of *Italian opera*. Felix belonged to an opera club and produced an abridged performance of *Verdi*'s _Rigoletto_. Frasier had season tickets to the opera and identified his favorite diva as *Renata Tebaldi *(though Frasier also mentioned that he slept through Glass' _Einstein On The Beach_). When Frasier was briefly the narrator of his friend, Roz Doyle's, documentary on space exploration, he also mentioned that he wanted to use the music of *Shostakovich* as part of the soundtrack.

Major *Charles Emerson Winchester* (portrayed by David Ogden Stiers) of _MASH_ has a prolific collection of classical music that included *Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky*, *Wagner*, and *Mahler*. Winchester's love for classical music was a major theme in a handful of _MASH_ episodes, as well as in the _MASH_ finale.

Detective *Columbo* (played by Peter Falk) identified classical music as his favorite genre of music more than once; and a handful of episodes involved a murderer who was also a fan of classical music, including two murderer/conductors (one played by John Cassevetes in the 1970s, the other played by Billy Connolly in the 1990s).

Thurston and Lovey Howell (Played by Jim Backus and Natalie Schaffer) identified themselves as benefactors of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in one episode of _Gilligan's Island_, and Lovey was seen with opera glasses in more than one episode. Thurston was also seen "conducting" a radio broadcast of *Beethoven*'s _Symphony #5_ in one episode.

If Emperor *Palpatine* was the most evil man in the _Star Wars_ universe, his one redeeming quality was that he was a patron of the arts and he even built the *Galactic Opera House* where he was seen in attendance the time he told the story of Darth Plagious the Wise to Anakin Skywalker.

*****

Additions or corrections?


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Music figures large in the Colin Dexter *Inspector Morse* detective series. In the television series, each episode would feature a work, in one The Magic Flute was prominent, in another the Debussy string quartet. Morse would often reference his love of Wagner, and in fact even got his Sargeant Lewis to listen to the operas.


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

SanAntone said:


> Music figures large in the Colin Dexter *Inspector Morse* detective series. In the television series, each episode would feature a work, in one The Magic Flute was prominent, in another the Debussy string quartet. Morse would often reference his love of Wagner, and in fact even got his Sargeant Lewis to listen to the operas.


I appreciate that the offshoot, Inspector Lewis, also features classical music, though not to that degree. In one episode, his detective, Hathaway, almost gets burned to death to the soundtrack of the Firebird Suite.

In one doff of the cap to Morse, Inspector Lewis says his favorite conductor of Parsifal is Knappertsbusch, though I think he was being ironic.

More to the topic, Frazier featured both brothers' love of classical music. Niles spoke wistfully of Sundays with his ex-wife, where he would play Mahler on the piano. Frazier tried to get Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra as his theme until his producer said, "For most people, classical music is a snoozer."


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## aussiebushman (Apr 21, 2018)

Paolo Maurensig's "Canone Inverso" is a particularly fine novel concerning a talented Hungarian peasant and a young aristocrat vying for musical supremacy, but the real hero of the story is the strange violin that links all of the characters. The book (despite what a couple of whom in my opinion are extremely stupid amateur critics have written) is a joy and like the movie on which it was based, breathes the music of Bach, in particular, but also the Paganini Caprice No.9, Dvořák's Songs my mother taught me) and Debussy's Clair de Lune


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Gerald Elias also writes mysteries and the main character, Daniel Jacobus, is a string player, member of a quartet.

Here's a list of other mysteries that feature musicians.


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## Agamenon (Apr 22, 2019)

Popes:

Pope John Paul II: his favourites were Mahler and Chopin.

Benedict XVI: Mozart!,Bach, Beethoven.

Francis: Beethoven!, Bach, Wagner(ring and parsifal).


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## Heck148 (Oct 27, 2016)

we know how much Josef Stalin loved Shostakovich's "Lady Macbeth of Mtzensk"!!
lol!!


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

Heck148 said:


> we know how much Josef Stalin loved Shostakovich's "Lady Macbeth of Mtzensk"!!
> lol!!


Brilliantly depicted with marionettes in the fascinating documentary.


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

Hannibal Lector enjoyed the Goldberg Variations, setting in that respect at least a good example for all of us.


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## chu42 (Aug 14, 2018)

Sherlock Holmes liked Spohr, Paganini, Wagner. Dr. Watson would always request Mendelssohn from Holmes.


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## Coach G (Apr 22, 2020)

As I remember it, the character, *Dr. Daniel Auschlander*, on the Hospital drama, _St. Elsewhere_, was a fan of classical music and I guess on his break he would listen to classical records in his office at the hospital. I do remember one in one episode he was listening to orchestral music by *Sibelius*. In another episode he mentioned that he liked the music of *Aaron Copland*. Dr. Auschlander was supposed to be chronically ill during the series and his ongoing poor health was a common theme in the story arcs. Ironically, the actor who portrayed Dr. Auschlander, Norman Lloyd, is still alive at age 106, and is one of the oldest actors of movies and TV who ever lived.


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## Alinde (Feb 8, 2020)

The Aubrey/Maturin novels of Patrick O'Brian are full of music. In one "the amazed foremast hands saw a blue and gold coach and four, escorted by a troop of cavalry in mauve coats with silver facings, driving slowly along the quay with their captain and a Swedish officer on the box, their surgeon and his mate leaning out of the windows, and all of them, now joined by the lady on deck, singing Ah tutti contenti saremo cosí, ah tutti contenti saremo, saremo cosí with surprisingly melodious full-throated happiness.” 

In another volume Jack attempts Bach Chaconne which had been discovered with other works in the pantry of the deceased J. C. Bach. Also among the mice and blackbeetles was "a vast, great Passion according to St Mark".

The first page of the whole series begins at a concert where a Locatelli quartet is being played.

The amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey is heard playing J.S.Bach and Scarlatti in the crime stories of Dorothy Sayers....

Swann in Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" is obsessed with a piano sonata or piece by a fictional composer, Vinteuil, who has been identified with any number of contemporary French composers - César Franck, Claude Debussy, Gabriel Fauré....


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

I remember one of the later episodes from the surreal 1960s UK crime/spy series _The Avengers_ in which agent Tara King (pic below) and a man she is supposed to (unsuccessfully) protect declared their various interests, including classical music. He says he liked Hindemith. HINDEMITH! Now that was surely a novelty for prime-time popular TV?


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## Alinde (Feb 8, 2020)

Obviously, some famous scientists (Einstein being the most obvious example among many) have declared a love of classical music. 

But - some famous cricketers!

The recently retired England captain, Alastair Cook, has a classical music background 

Richie Benaud (Australian captain) was an enthusiast for classical music

Mike Brearley another England captain

Keith Miller (Australian fast bowler) when a pilot in the R.A.F flew off course to dip his wing over Bonn in honour of Beethoven

Don Bradman, the most famous Australian cricketer of them all was a skilled pianist who loved classical music (a 2 CD album of his favourites was put out by the ABC)...


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## Alinde (Feb 8, 2020)

Coach G said:


> REAL:
> 
> *Dwight Eisenhower* (Five star general and President of the USA: I have an old LP called _The President's Favorite Music_ that includes *Beethoven*'s _Coriolan Overture_ and a "symphonic synthesis" of *Gershwin*'s _Porgy and Bess_; as well as the opera singer, *Marion Anderson*, singing _He's Got the Whole World in his Hands_.
> 
> ...


You didn't mention Truman, who got a couple of young musical GIs to play (and himself played Mozart's A Major Piano Sonata) to Stalin, Churchill and their entourages at the Potsdam Conference "to lighten the mood". Churchill was bored stiff.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

As I recall, the author and ideologue *Ayn Rand* professed a great admiration for the music of *Rachmaninoff.* And as has been pointed out, the Aubrey/Maturin books are full of musical references. One of my favorite bits is where Jack Aubrey finds out with his usual wide-eyed innocence from Maturin that "London" Bach had a father also rather good at musical composition.

*Wm. F. Buckley Jr.*, the conservative essayist and publisher, was a big fan of the music of *J. S. Bach*, sometimes playing The Master on his piano, He once became enraged when told that some child of fourteen in an inner-city ghetto environment had said that Bach was "a punk", It was funny and disturbing to see a grown man fly into such a tantrum of indignation over the remarks of a child.


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

Alinde said:


> Mike Brearley another England captain


In one of his books Brearley said he used to hum music (by Haydn, I think) when batting in order to concentrate. When playing for England I'm guessing it wasn't anything too lengthy.


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## Chilham (Jun 18, 2020)

I was searching iTunes yesterday for a recording of John Field Nocturnes. I discovered that Alistair McGowan, British actor (All Quiet on the Preston Front, Bleak House, Leonardo), impressionist (Spitting Image, The Big Impression, Ronnie Ancona & Co.), sometime BBC tennis commentator, and West End star (Cabaret, Little Shop of Horrors, The Mikado), was a life-long hero-worshiper of Erik Satie.

What caught my eye was that McGowan had given-up piano aged nine, and taken it up again in his fifties. Encouraged by friends and family, he practiced six hours a day for nine months, and then released an album. He shows a rare level of versatility. Good for him!


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## Triplets (Sep 4, 2014)

Thomas Mann. Music looms large in many of his books, most notably in Dr Faustus


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## Allegro Con Brio (Jan 3, 2020)

It's been conjectured that the famous "Vinteuil sonata" from Proust's _Swann's Way_, which captured the attention of Charles Swann and his complex, wayward sense of romance; was based off a violin sonata by Franck or Faure.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

1:18


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## Coach G (Apr 22, 2020)

Alinde said:


> You didn't mention Truman, who got a couple of young musical GIs to play (and himself played Mozart's A Major Piano Sonata) to Stalin, Churchill and their entourages at the Potsdam Conference "to lighten the mood". Churchill was bored stiff.


I knew that Harry Truman played the piano. The biggest biography I ever read was _Truman_ by David McCollough, over 800 pages but really not much of a chore because it is so well written. Interesting that Truman played Mozart at Potsdam. After Googling "Stalin's favorite composer" I came up with an article from the Austin Chronicle that says that Stalin's favorite pianist was one Maria Yudina (who I never heard of) and he was moved by Yudina's performance of Mozart's _Piano Concerto #23_ that he heard on the radio.

https://www.austinchronicle.com/music/2004-02-13/196899/#:~:text=Undeterred%2C%20Volkov's%20new%20book%2C%20Shostakovich,was%20Joseph%20Stalin's%20favorite%20pianist.

So Lenin liked Beethoven, Stalin liked Mozart, and Hitler liked Wagner. It's astounding to me how such very bad (possibly psychopathic) men could do horrible things to others, and still be moved and touched by the beauty that is in music. Though back in the 1980s, my professor of Russian history said that Lenin admitted that when he was listening to Beethoven it made him feel so in love with the world that he had to stop listening to it sometimes so that he could get back in the mood to "crack some heads".


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## larold (Jul 20, 2017)

The late columnist and editor of National Review, *William Buckley,* adored J.S. Bach. He once told a story about a rapper that dissed Bach, calling him an old, dead punk. Buckley said this was less the difference of opinions than the difference between human and animal.


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## Coach G (Apr 22, 2020)

SanAntone said:


> Music figures large in the Colin Dexter *Inspector Morse* detective series. In the television series, each episode would feature a work, in one The Magic Flute was prominent, in another the Debussy string quartet. Morse would often reference his love of Wagner, and in fact even got his Sargeant Lewis to listen to the operas.


I'm intrigued by the series you mention. As my OP may reveal, when it comes to movies and TV and movies, I've been content to more-or-less live in the past and stick to the stuff I watched as a kid and as a teenager back in the 1970s and 1980s. Here in the USA, we have METV, which is mostly marketed to baby boomers and high-end Gen Xers like me. My other passion in life, apart from classical music, is chess, and _Queen's Gambit_, that all my friends who know how much love chess is recommending to me, is tempting me to break down and get Netflix. Is _Inspector Morse_ one of those Netflix shows too?


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## Chilham (Jun 18, 2020)

Coach G said:


> I'm intrigued by the series you mention. As my OP may reveal, when it comes to movies and TV and movies, I've been content to more-or-less live in the past and stick to the stuff I watched as a kid and as a teenager back in the 1970s and 1980s. Here in the USA, we have METV, which is mostly marketed to baby boomers and high-end Gen Xers like me. My other passion in life, apart from classical music, is chess, and _Queen's Gambit_, that all my friends who know how much love chess is recommending to me, is tempting me to break down and get Netflix. Is _Inspector Morse_ one of those Netflix shows too?


Available in the US and Canada on Netflix, as best I know.


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## Coach G (Apr 22, 2020)

Heck148 said:


> we know how much Josef Stalin loved Shostakovich's "Lady Macbeth of Mtzensk"!!
> lol!!


I came really late to Shostakovich's _Lady MacBeth of Mtzensk_, which is interesting because I loved Shostakovich from the time I was a teenager back when I was still building my first Shostakovich symphony cycle on vinyl. I still think that Shostakovich's cycle is the finest one composed completely within the 20th century. While i knew the history of Lady MacBeth of Mdzensk and Stalin's reaction to it, and understood it as so crucial to the development of Shostakovich as a composer, I finally purchased a recording of it somewhere around 2010 (The one conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich, with his wife, Galina Vishnevskaya in the lead).

While I know that Stalin was displeased with it, I was not surprised to find out that American critics weren't none too happy with it either, as they saw it as a "dirty opera"; and _Lady MacBeth of Mdzensk_ is crude, vulgar, shocking, and depressing. It also has a socialist theme, indicating that though Shostakovich was deeply affected by the killings of the Russian Revolution and Stalin's purges, Americans shouldn't be so quick and eager to claim Shostakovich as some kind of "closet American". In any case, while _Lady MacBeth of Mdzensk_ is no laugh riot, nothing beautiful along the lines of lovely arias by Verdi or Puccini, I think every Shostakovich fan should hear it once in a while to really understand the full measure of the despair, hurt, anxiety, and even the anger, that I think always comes out just a little bit even after Shostakovich started cranking out the symphonies that we all know and love.

And I often wonder that if Stalin hadn't have cracked down on Shostakovich, would the composer evolve along a very different line, a line that would have been more abstract, more disturbing, and less appealing to our notions concerning what is supposed to be artistic and beautiful. In this alternate universe, would Shostakovich be the composer of a series of those "dirty operas" as opposed to being the Soviet Union's answer to Mahler and Bruckner. Along this line, I see _Lady MacBeth of Mdzensk _as Shostakovich's _Guernica_ (Picasso); but the question remains that as Shostakovich went on to create those wonderful symphonies that have been sometimes associated with Soviet poster-propaganda (some of it even used as cover-art on Shostakovich albums, check out the original LP versions of the Bernard Haitink set), does just a hint of _Guernica_ come through?


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## SanAntone (May 10, 2020)

Coach G said:


> I'm intrigued by the series you mention. As my OP may reveal, when it comes to movies and TV and movies, I've been content to more-or-less live in the past and stick to the stuff I watched as a kid and as a teenager back in the 1970s and 1980s. Here in the USA, we have METV, which is mostly marketed to baby boomers and high-end Gen Xers like me. My other passion in life, apart from classical music, is chess, and _Queen's Gambit_, that all my friends who know how much love chess is recommending to me, is tempting me to break down and get Netflix. Is _Inspector Morse_ one of those Netflix shows too?


Morse is available from BritBox one of the British streaming services. Lewis is PBS Masterpiece and Endeavor is Amazon Prime. Unfortunately, they are not available from a single source. But you can subscribe to all of them through Amazon Prime.


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## Heck148 (Oct 27, 2016)

Coach G said:


> And I often wonder that if Stalin hadn't have cracked down on Shostakovich, would the composer evolve along a very different line, a line that would have been more abstract, more disturbing, and less appealing to our notions concerning what is supposed to be artistic and beautiful. In this alternate universe, would Shostakovich be the composer of a series of those "dirty operas.....


I think Shostakovich's pre "Lady Macbeth" works give us a good indicator of what he would have composed.
there are the big ballets - Age of Gold, the Bolt, Limpid Stream, symphonies 1-4, tons of film music, "jazz" suites, etc..
these are all quite flamboyant, flashy orchestration, very colorful....post Lady Macbeth, his works certainly take on a darker hue, a more somber aspect....now, whether he would have naturally developed this without Stalinist pressure is hard to know - the Sym #4 certainly points in that direction...in fact, his brilliant First Symphony already shows the depth of expression that existed in this great composer.


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

The stage-setting event in the film "The Death of Stalin" is a broadcast concert of a woman playing a Mozart concerto, for which the engineers forgot to record an air check. Stalin requested a copy, leading to a comedy of errors in which they tried to recreate the concert for recording purpose.

Lincoln Center opened long before Bernstein's "Mass." I think you mean the Kennedy Center.

Nichols and May recorded a radio ad in the '60s in which they played two agents meeting up at a concert:

-- Do you come here often?

-- Only when they play Szymanowski.

-- Did you say "Szymanowski?"


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## Triplets (Sep 4, 2014)

Heck148 said:


> I think Shostakovich's pre "Lady Macbeth" works give us a good indicator of what he would have composed.
> there are the big ballets - Age of Gold, the Bolt, Limpid Stream, symphonies 1-4, tons of film music, "jazz" suites, etc..
> these are all quite flamboyant, flashy orchestration, very colorful....post Lady Macbeth, his works certainly take on a darker hue, a more somber aspect....now, whether he would have naturally development this without Stalinist pressure is hard to know - the Sym #4 certainly points in that direction...in fact, his brilliant First Symphony already shows the depth of expression that existed in this great composer.


World War II may also have darkened his view on Life


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## Heck148 (Oct 27, 2016)

Triplets said:


> World War II may also have darkened his view on Life


I'm sure it did...you must remember that Shostakovich lived in Russia, stayed there, thru all of the terrible 20th century turmoil and upheaval that afflicted that unfortunate nation -
the Czarist regime
First World War
Bolshevik Revolution
Terrible Civil war
the Stalinist terror
World War II!!
The Cold War
it would be a gross oversimplification to say that Shostakovich's music expressed all of these huge, traumatic events - but they certainly were a major factor in his development and production as a composer. how could they not be??


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## Haydn70 (Jan 8, 2017)

These are the musicians mentioned in the Sherlock Holmes canon (56 short stories and 4 novels). 

Composers: 
Mendelssohn
Chopin
Wagner
Meyerbeer
Paganini
Offenbach
My favorite mention is Lassus. In the short story “The Bruce-Partington Plans”, Holmes writes a “monograph upon the Polyphonic Motets of Lassus, which has since been printed for private circulation, and is said by experts to be the last word upon the subject.”

An earlier poster listed Spohr but I don’t recall his being mentioned in any of the sixty.

Performers:
Pablo de Sarasate
Wilhelmine Norman-Neruda
Jean Edouard and Josephine de Reszke
And a fictitious one: Irene Adler

Holmes owned a Stradivarius and, according to Watson, his "powers upon the violin...were very remarkable, but as eccentric as all his other accomplishments", and he was a "composer of no ordinary merit."


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## Haydn70 (Jan 8, 2017)

Strange Magic said:


> As I recall, the author and ideologue *Ayn Rand* professed a great admiration for the music of *Rachmaninoff.*


Rand also liked Tchaikovsky and Chopin.


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## Zauberfloete (Dec 2, 2020)

Alex, the protagonist of Burgess's A clockwork Orange, is obsessed with Beethoven.


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## Roger Knox (Jul 19, 2017)

Alinde said:


> Swann in Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" is obsessed with a piano sonata or piece by a fictional composer, Vinteuil, who has been identified with any number of contemporary French composers - César Franck, Claude Debussy, Gabriel Fauré....


I read somewhere that the "little phrase by Vinteuil" that Swann can't get out of his head is the opening theme of Fauré's First Violin Sonata in A major, which I can't get out of my head!


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Coach G said:


> We all know that *Adolf Hitler* praised *Richard Wagner* in _Mien Kampf_, but I have a friend who is an expert on Wagner who said that Hitler was listening to *Lehar* during his final days in the bunker.


Oh God. And I don't mean to derail your thread. But we know no such thing... for the very good reason that it didn't happen.

The word "Wagner" is mentioned precisely three times in the whole of Mein Kampf.

Mention 1: "To this group belong not only the genuinely great statesmen but all the great reformers as well. Beside Frederick the Great we have such men as Martin Luther and Richard Wagner."

Mention 2: "And there were always those people at the speaker's table. I once attended a meeting in the Wagner Hall in Munich."

And Mention 3: "These conflicts, which were constantly repeated in 1919, seemed to become more violent soon after the beginning of 1920. There were meetings--I remember especially one in the Wagner Hall in the Sonnenstrasse in Munich--during the course of which my group, now grown much larger, had to defend themselves against assaults of the most violent character."

This stuff isn't particularly difficult to research. A search engine gets you to *the text of the work*, Ctrl+F and typing in the word 'Wagner' makes it apparent that *nowhere in Mein Kampf does Hitler praise Wagner's music.* He praised him as a reformer, I guess. Of what? The context doesn't make entirely clear. But adulation for _Der Ring_ or _Meistersinger_ is nowhere to be found in a text that is freely accessible to anyone that cares to actually access it.

If you're going to mark it "REAL", please keep it real. We know from other sources that Hitler loved _Rienzi_ (because it's a story of an out-of-towner who comes, unrecognised and unheralded, to save the Roman state from the clueless nobles, neatly paralleling his view of his own life and role: one imagines that if Verdi had written it, Hitler would have loved the story exactly as much). But Mein Kampf is entirely silent on the subject of Hitler's regard for Wagner's *music*.


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## Coach G (Apr 22, 2020)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> Oh God. And I don't mean to derail your thread. But we know no such thing... for the very good reason that it didn't happen.
> 
> The word "Wagner" is mentioned precisely three times in the whole of Mein Kampf.
> 
> ...


Well, I _did_ request additions and _corrections_ in my OP. Your posting prompted my curiosity (in Hitler's case, morbid curiosity). According to the attached article, Hitler's record collection revealed a liking for Beethoven and Wagner, but also Lehar; and many Russian composers such as Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Rachmaninoff; which is interesting since Hitler saw the Slavic race as inferior, and his campaign against Russia was about the bloodiest campaign of the bloodiest war in world history.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2007/aug/07/hiltersrecordcollectionexpl#comment-2873774


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Coach G said:


> Well, I _did_ request additions and _corrections_ in my OP. Your posting prompted my curiosity (in Hitler's case, morbid curiosity). According to the attached article, Hitler's record collection revealed a liking for Beethoven and Wagner, but also Lehar; and many Russian composers such as Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Rachmaninoff; which is interesting since Hitler saw the Slavic race as inferior, and his campaign against Russia was about the bloodiest campaign of the bloodiest war in world history.
> 
> https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2007/aug/07/hiltersrecordcollectionexpl#comment-2873774


The perils of reading an early paragraph and reaching for the reply button. You certainly did. I apologise if I sounded more like a polemicist than a corrector or additioner!

Good Guardian article link, by the way. Shame we have no way of knowing if it's actually his collection or not. Chain of evidence problems, I fear. I'm sure he _did_ like Wagner (and much else). I was only going for the 'it's mentioned in Mein Kampf' angle.


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## Doctor Fuse (Feb 3, 2021)

One of my favourite authors, William Golding (Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors, Papermen) had an interesting comment in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, A Moving Target. It was his ruminations on the greatest human achievement. He ultimately chose the material aspect of the book, as a means of efficient memory storage (a primitive hard drive), but his first impulse was "the symphony orchestra".


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

Haydn70 said:


> Offenbach
> My favorite mention is Lassus. In the short story "The Bruce-Partington Plans", Holmes writes a "monograph upon the Polyphonic Motets of Lassus, which has since been printed for private circulation, and is said by experts to be the last word upon the subject."


I wasn't aware of that. Now I think even more highly of the Great Detective.


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## Pat Fairlea (Dec 9, 2015)

Not forgetting, please, Organ Morgan from Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, who was positively obsessed with the works of "Johann Sebastian Mighty Bach!"


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## flamencosketches (Jan 4, 2019)

I just read John Steinbeck's Cannery Row. One of the main characters is a marine biologist whom everyone calls Doc, and he has an extensive classical record collection, especially for the time (1930s), including music by Scarlatti, Ravel, Monteverdi, and he's always putting on Gregorian chant in the early hours of morning while bedding women. What a cool guy.


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## RICK RIEKERT (Oct 9, 2017)

According to his valet Louis Constant Wairy, Napoleon had no ear for music but he loved Italian music. He was "passionately fond" of the operas of Giovanni Paisiello, who he called the greatest of contemporary composers.


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## Axter (Jan 15, 2020)

I cannot say with certainty but I am pretty sure Darth Vader was fond of William’s Imperial March


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## FastkeinBrahms (Jan 9, 2021)

One of the wierdest fictional references to composers is certainly Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf. Who else could have dreamt up Mozart stepping into a murder scene turning on the radio to play some Händel? There is also a scene of a Purcell sonata being played and, if I remember correctly from my whannabe hippie Hesse-reading days, a sax player among the characters.


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