Sunday Classics preview: What was Richard Wagner doing conducting Wagner outside his house?

In last night's preview I promised a fuller version of the scene in which Larry David is accused of being a self-hating Jew for whistling Wagner. Here it is. Now here's Wikipedia's somewhat fuller version of the creation of Wagner's Siegfried Idyll.

Wagner composed the Siegfried Idyll as a birthday present to his second wife, Cosima, after the birth of their son Siegfried in 1869. It was first performed on Christmas morning, 25 December 1870, by a small ensemble on the stairs of their villa at Tribschen (today part of Lucerne) in the Canton of Lucerne, Switzerland. Cosima awoke to its opening melody. . . . The original title was Triebschen Idyll with Fidi's birdsong and the orange sunrise. "Fidi" was the pet version of the name Siegfried. It is thought that the birdsong and the sunrise refer to incidents of personal significance to the couple.

We're going to approach the Siegfried Idyll in two quite different ways: one in tomorrow's post, and another in a future week, maybe even next week. (It all depends.) For tonight, though, we're just going to listen to the piece, and in the click-through we've got performances of both the original chamber version and the expanded full-orchestra version.



Here's a chunk of the Siegfried Idyll, played by the Berlin Philharmonic under Peter Eötvös.


TO HEAR THE SIEGFRIED IDYLL PROPERLY, CLICK HERE

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Sunday Classics preview: What is Larry David doing conducting Wagner outside some guy's house?

In the "Trick or Treat" episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David winds up conducting Wagner outside the home of his neighbor Walter who has, shall we say, wound him up.

by Ken

It's a sort of famous Hollywood legend, of which (for reasons I hope will become clear) I was trying to refresh my ancient recollection: a piqued Groucho Marx hiring the Los Angeles Philharmonic to play Wagner's Meistersinger Prelude outside the home of . . . well, somebody or other (that's one of the things I couldn't recall), a somebody who had done something-or-other (another thing I couldn't recall) to get on his bad side. So I started rummaging around online, and stumbled across a page posted online from Otto Friedrich's City of nets: a portrait of Hollywood in the 1940's, containing a version of the story which we'll read in the click-through.

Bur first a quick reminder of what the "Trick or Treat" episode was about:




NOW, FOR OTTO FRIEDRICH'S VERSION OF THE
GROUCHO STORY, AND SOME MUSIC, CLICK HERE

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