At 8:39 PM -0500 3/27/02, Theresa Muir wrote:
>I'm sad to have heard of the death today of Dudley Moore after a long
>illness; younger list members may only remember his rather silly
>Hollywood film career, and not his role in the ground-breaking, immortal
>British sketch comedy review "Beyond the Fringe" (with Jonathan Miller,
>Peter Cook, and Alan Bennett), nor his long partnership with the late,
>brilliant Peter Cook.
>
>Moore had originally studied music, and was an excellent pianist; among
>his contributions to BTF were hysterically funny, stylistically uncanny
>parodies of German Lieder.
These parodies are available on CD in an (admittedly rather expensive
and elaborate) boxed set of not only the original commercial
recording of Beyond the Fringe, but also a number of alternate
versions and outtakes. I'm sorry I can't be more specific - my copy,
like the rest of my library, is in transit over the past year, in a
box that has gone from expensive storage in Hong Kong via a ship over
the Pacific to slightly less expensive storage in Los Angeles - but
it's quite a wonderful CD set.
The two famous parodies - from memory, so I may get this wrong - are
the fabulous Fauré/Debussy parody 'La nuit s'épanouit,' which
actually includes the words 'La plume de ma tante...' and is terribly
wispy in a para-Impressionist way; and the Schubertian 'Die
Flabbergast,' an intense dramatic dialogue that ends in virtuoso
tremoli across registers.
I think that, on the boxed set, there are even other parodies.
I keep thinking that, someday, there's some sort of discussion or
research to be done on musical parodies - these, Jonathan & Darlene
Edwards, etc.... the best of them involve so much brilliance, and
reflect so many aspects of the materials parodied, that there must be
some productive way of talking about that...
Cheers,
Paul
-- **************************************** Dr Paul G. Attinello pattinello@chariot.net.auc/o John Phillips 1209 Lower Northeast Road Highbury 5089 South Australia, Australia Tel/Fax (61) (8) 8395 5332 ****************************************
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