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Thursday, August 1st, 2013 09:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lethargic_manI was listening to Mahler's first symphony before. I'd wondered beforehand why the third movement, the primary melody for which is a minor-key variant on Frère Jacques, features short snatches of klezmer. Heading off to Wikipedia to find out, I discovered that, by having forgotten the words of Frère Jacques, I'd missed their Catholic import. Mahler is making a point here, contrasting it with Jewish music: a born Jew, he'd had to convert to Christianity in order to progress his career. (That's the way it was in Austria a century ago.)
Staying on a musical theme, is there any music you'd been humming to yourself but haven't heard anywhere else for so long you begin to wonder if you've made it up? Twice when I was a late teenager or in my early twenties I encountered a piece of music which shocked me by demonstrating the theme I'd had going through my head really did exist in the outside world. One was Gounod's Funeral March for a Marionette, the other was Vivaldi's Concerto op. 3 no. 8 (RV 522), which I re-encountered as Bach's setting of it for organ, BWV 593.
Staying on a musical theme, is there any music you'd been humming to yourself but haven't heard anywhere else for so long you begin to wonder if you've made it up? Twice when I was a late teenager or in my early twenties I encountered a piece of music which shocked me by demonstrating the theme I'd had going through my head really did exist in the outside world. One was Gounod's Funeral March for a Marionette, the other was Vivaldi's Concerto op. 3 no. 8 (RV 522), which I re-encountered as Bach's setting of it for organ, BWV 593.
