[5/6/2011] Sunday Classics preview: What is Larry David doing conducting Wagner outside some guy's house? (continued)

Larry puts this fellow -- who turns out to be a neighbor he doesn't recognize -- in his place. Accused of being "a self-hating Jew," he declares, "I do hate myself, but it has nothing to do with being Jewish." We'll have a fuller version of this scene in tomorrow night's preview..


AMONG THE FEATURED PLAYERS IN THE STORY TOLD BY OTTO OTTO FRIEDRICH ARE BEN HECHT AND CHARLES MacARTHUR

Not that I searched that exhaustively, but this is the only photo I could find of Hecht and MacArthur together. Here's blogger Florice Whyte Kovan's caption (on the benhechtbooks.net website, "devoted Ben Hecht Biography & Works"): "Ben Hecht on violin, right, and Charles MacArthur on sax, left. They worked for rival newspapers in Chicago before writing The Front Page together."


AND NOW OUR BOOK EXCERPT . . .

Here's the Groucho story as told by Otto Friedrich:

Ben Hecht played the violin with amateur gusto, so he decided to organize what he called the Ben Hecht Symphonietta, which was to meet for concerts every Thursday night in Hecht's hilltop home. He recruited a peculiar variety of talents. Charles MacArthur played the clarinet, and Harpo Marx the harp, but only in A major. George Antheil, the composer, was supposed to keep order of a sort on the piano. Groucho Marx wanted to join in, but the others decided that he was ineligible since the only instrument he could play was the mandolin, which the others considered beneath the dignity of the Ben Hecht Symphonietta. It was all partly a joke, but all chamber music players take their obsession seriously.

On the night of the first rehearsal, in an upstairs room of Hecht's house, the musicians had just started to play when someone began a loud banging on the door of their rehearsal room. The door suddenly flew open, and Groucho Marx appeared on the threshold.

"Quiet, please!" he shouted, then disappeared again, slamming the door behind him.

The assembled musicians looked at one another with some embarrassment. "Groucho's jealous," Harpo Marx explained. Hecht thought he had heard strange sounds downstairs, but the musicians all decided to ignore the interruption and let Groucho go his own way. They started playing again. Once again, there came a banging on the door. Once again, Groucho Marx appeared.

"Quiet, you lousy amateurs!" he shouted.

When the musicians still ignored him, Groucho turned and stamped down the stairs. yet again, the musicians turned to their instruments. Then came a resounding orchestral flourish from below. It was the overture to Tannh&aumlo;user.

"Thunderstruck," Antheil recalled, "we all crawled down the stairway to look. There was Groucho, directing with great batlike gestures, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. At least one hundred men had been squeezed into the living room. Groucho had hired them because (as he later explained) he had been hurt at our not taking him into our symphonietta. We took him in."

THIS SOUNDS FAIRLY AUTHORITATIVE,
AND IT'S IN A BOOK, AFTER ALL, BUT . . .

For one thing, in whatever version of the story I heard, I don't recall the orchestra being inside the house. (You mean it was possible to sneak an entire symphony orchestra inside Ben Hecht's house without anybody noticing?) For another, Tannhäuser seems surely wrong. While it's true that later portions of the Tannhäuser Overture get louder, the piece begins thusly:



Whereas the Meistersinger Prelude goes like this:
 
Oslo Philharmonic, Mariss Jansons, cond. EMI, recorded c1991

 Hey, who doesn't get them mixed up? (Larry David, for one. He seems to know the same version of the story I do.)

YOU DIDN'T THINK I'D SEND YOU AWAY WITH JUST THOSE TEASES OF TANNHÄUSER and MEISTERSINGER, DID YOU?

 Here, in the performances we sampled above, are the complete things, or at least as complete as they get with concert endings tacked on. (In their native forms, both lead right into their operas, the Meistersinger Prelude most emphatically so.)

WAGNER: Tannhäuser: Overture



WAGNER: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: Prelude


Oslo Philharmonic, Mariss Jansons, cond. EMI, recorded c1991


IN TOMORROW NIGHT'S PREVIEW

Isn't it interesting that the "Wagner-hating Jew" was able to identify the "Jew-hating Wagner" from that bit of whistling of Larry's? Tomorrow we'll have the history -- and the music, which will be the subject of Sunday's post.


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