Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Musical Examples
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Schoeck and the Swiss
- 1 Childhood and Youth
- 2 Wolf amidst the Sheep
- 3 Leipzig, Munich, and an Awful Little Moustache
- 4 Back in the Fold
- 5 Hermann Hesse, via the Dentist
- 6 Look Back in Melancholy
- 7 Chamber Music
- 8 The Art of Counterpoint
- 9 Busoni
- 10 The Picture on the Wall
- 11 Touch of Venus
- 12 Silent Bronze
- 13 Sucking Sweet Folly
- 14 Self Portrait, with Sandwich
- 15 Elegy
- 16 Goodbye to Geneva
- 17 The Bee in the Rose
- 18 Raging Queen
- 19 Storms in the Pigeon Loft
- 20 Into the Vortex
- 21 Wrong-Note Rag
- 22 Hildebill
- 23 Variations and Fugue on an Age-Old Theme
- 24 Put to the Wheel
- 25 Gisela
- 26 Lost in the Stars
- 27 Whores and Madonnas
- 28 “… he can write music all right…”
- 29 Tea with (Ms.) Hitler
- 30 Aryanizing Music
- 31 Arms and the Man
- 32 Castles in the Air
- 33 Goering's Bullshit
- 34 Collapse
- 35 The People at Home
- 36 The Reckoning
- 37 Transfigured Summer Nights
- 38 Silent Lights
- 39 Fair Measure
- 40 Rather Nice Horn
- 41 Sleepless in Wollishofen
- 42 Echoes and Elegies
- 43 Running on Empty
- Epilogue
- Othmar Schoeck: Concise Work Catalogue and Discography
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Eastman Studies in Music
32 - Castles in the Air
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Musical Examples
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Schoeck and the Swiss
- 1 Childhood and Youth
- 2 Wolf amidst the Sheep
- 3 Leipzig, Munich, and an Awful Little Moustache
- 4 Back in the Fold
- 5 Hermann Hesse, via the Dentist
- 6 Look Back in Melancholy
- 7 Chamber Music
- 8 The Art of Counterpoint
- 9 Busoni
- 10 The Picture on the Wall
- 11 Touch of Venus
- 12 Silent Bronze
- 13 Sucking Sweet Folly
- 14 Self Portrait, with Sandwich
- 15 Elegy
- 16 Goodbye to Geneva
- 17 The Bee in the Rose
- 18 Raging Queen
- 19 Storms in the Pigeon Loft
- 20 Into the Vortex
- 21 Wrong-Note Rag
- 22 Hildebill
- 23 Variations and Fugue on an Age-Old Theme
- 24 Put to the Wheel
- 25 Gisela
- 26 Lost in the Stars
- 27 Whores and Madonnas
- 28 “… he can write music all right…”
- 29 Tea with (Ms.) Hitler
- 30 Aryanizing Music
- 31 Arms and the Man
- 32 Castles in the Air
- 33 Goering's Bullshit
- 34 Collapse
- 35 The People at Home
- 36 The Reckoning
- 37 Transfigured Summer Nights
- 38 Silent Lights
- 39 Fair Measure
- 40 Rather Nice Horn
- 41 Sleepless in Wollishofen
- 42 Echoes and Elegies
- 43 Running on Empty
- Epilogue
- Othmar Schoeck: Concise Work Catalogue and Discography
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Eastman Studies in Music
Summary
When Schoeck finished the scoring of Dürande in early October 1941, the premiere was still a long way off. One man at least, Corrodi, had summoned up the courage to tell him what he thought of Burte's text. Early in the year he had offered to write the words into the score for Schoeck, was horrified at its “cataract of trivialities,” and wrote in his diary:
I made no bones about my dislike of the libretto. Schoeck admitted that Burte loved rhymes … and that it was full of awful doggerel. “But you have no idea what I've had to muck out already, what junk!!” But the thing did have its good side, he said: besides many bad verses, Burte now and then wrote a good one, and the verses were fluid, not ponderous … anyway, most of it would not be understood and would disappear in the music. The important things were prominent enough, and the music serves to bind what often doesn't go together or jumps from one thing to another.
It is difficult to reconcile this Schoeck, content with a good line “now and then,” with the man so admired by Hermann Hesse and others for his literary sensibility. The only plausible explanation is that he felt bound to Burte by his quarter-century-long debt to their patron Reinhart. Nothing boded well for the future of the work.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Othmar SchoeckLife and Works, pp. 245 - 250Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009