Sunday, January 10, 2010

The Idyll will never Curb Your Enthusiasm

Last night I went to Pleyel to listen to this absolutely brilliant Hungarian orchestra (The Budapest Festival Orchestra) and their Maestro Ivan Fischer performing the most extraordinary Siegfried Idyll I've heard in my life. I'll hopefully drop a post about that tomorrow.

Coincidentally today I finally watched the Second Season of the funniest show ever, and guess what happens in the third episode ("Trick or Treat")?!  Larry David spins a good chunk of it around... yes, around the Siegfried Idyll!





On Christmas Day in 1870, Cosima Wagner's birthday, Richard woke her up with the sound of Siegfried Idyll, composed for her and being played on the stairs. This is the most intimate and perhaps most wonderful 20 minutes of music Wagner ever wrote. I also learned that the Idyll was the first music that Arturo Toscanini conducted with his elite orchestra in 1938 during the first Lucerne Festival...

In Trick or Treat, Larry David whistles the main tune from the Idyll outside a cinema and then recounts the story to his wife Cheryl about Richard Wagner offering it to Cosima on her birthday. She found it very romantic and  later, on Cheryl's birthday, he made a small orchestra come to their house to play the magic Siegfried Idyll for her.

At the end of the show he conducts a brass band playing the Meistersinger Overture outside the home of a Jewish guy who had some serious issues with Wagner and whose daughter has covered his house in toilet paper. A Larry David Idyll in the middle of the night :-)

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