When I was in Cow College at Iowa State University I spent most of my study time listening to KLYF Radio in Des Moines. They would eventually transform into an easy-listening music station, but the time I truly lived a K-LYFe was when they played classical music. And it was there that I first fell deeply in love with the Saturday Matinee stylings of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the first incarnation of John Williams of Star Wars fame. Yes, movie music. Classical movie music. And it seemed, mostly movie music for Errol Flynn movies.
My sister was always a lover of Errol Flynn movies, and when KGLO TV Channel 3 would play one on the Saturday Movie Matinee in the early afternoon, we would have to watch it, the whole thing, no matter how many times we were repeating the same four movies. Nancy would memorize the lines from the Olivia deHavilland love scenes. I would memorize the sword fight scenes with Errol and Evil Basil Rathbone (Good Basil was Sherlock Holmes, and we had to watch those too.) Early evenings on those Saturdays were all about playing pirate and Captain Blood adventures. Or better yet, Robin Hood.
But the music of adventure was by the composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold. He did the sound tracks for Captain Blood, Robin Hood, and the Sea Hawk.
I sincerely love the corny old movie matinee music because it was not only genius-level mood music and story-telling in a classical music instrumental masterpiece, but because even now it takes me back to the boy I was at twelve years old, playing pirate on Grandpa Aldrich’s farm. Making Robin Hood bows out of thin tree branches and arrows out of dried ragweed stalks. Sword fighting to the death with sticks with my cousin Bob, who was always Basil Rathbone in my mind. while I’m sure I was Basil Rathbone in his mind.
To be honest, there is much more to Korngold than I have relentlessly gushed about here like a hopeless nerdling fan-boy in the throws of a geeky movie passion. He was a musical child prodigy like Mozart. He wrote a ballet called Der Schneemann (the Snow Man) when he was only eleven, and became the talk of the town in Vienna, Austria in 1908. He became the conductor of the Hamburg Opera by 1921. He wrote some very fine classical music in the 20’s that still rings through orchestra halls to this day before coming to America in the early 30’s with film director Max Reinhardt. He scored his first film in 1935, adding music to Reinhardt’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. He was fortunate to escape Europe just as the Nazis were coming to power in Germany, and also at the right time to team up with new movie star sensation, Errol Flynn. He won his first Oscar for the musical score of the movie Anthony Adverse in 1936 and he won his second for The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938. He died in 1957, a year after I was born. But I promise, I didn’t kill him. I was in college in the 1970’s when his music underwent a revival, complete with renewed popularity.
His music was pure gold to listen to in the fields of corn in Iowa in the 1970’s. It was just as good as that last pun was terrible. So, in other words, really, really, spectacularly good. It was the music that scored my childhood fantasy adventures.
Toccata and Fugue in D Minor
Johann Sebastian Bach may or may not have written his organ masterpiece, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor in 1704. All we know for sure is that the combined efforts of Johannes Ringk, who saved it in manuscript form in the 1830’s, and Felix Mendelssohn who performed it and made it a hit you could dance to during the Bach Revival in 1840 made it possible to still hear its sublime music today. Okay, maybe not dance to exactly… But without the two of them, the piece might have been lost to us in obscurity.
The Toccata part is a composition that uses fast fingerings and a sprightly beat to make happy hippie type music that is really quite trippy. The Fugue part (pronounced Fyoog, not Fuggwee which I learned to my horror in grade school music class) is a part where one part of the tune echoes another part of the tune and one part becomes the other part and then reflects it all back again. I know that’s needlessly confusing, but at least I know what I mean. That is not always a given when I am writing quickly like a Toccata.
I have posted two different versions for you to listen to in this musical metaphor nonsensical posticle… err… Popsicle… err… maybe just post. One is the kinda creepy organ version like you might find in a Hammer Films monster movie in the 1970’s. The other is the light and fluffy violin version from Disney’s Fantasia. I don’t really expect you to listen to both, but listening to one or the other would at least give you a tonal hint about what the ever-loving foolishness I am writing in this post is really all about.
You see, I find sober thoughts in this 313-year-old piece of music that I apply to the arc of my life to give it meaning in musical measure.
This is the Paffooney of this piece, a picture of my wife in her cartoon panda incarnation, along with the panda persona of my number two son. The background of this Paffooney is the actual Ringk manuscript that allowed Bach’s masterwork not to be lost for all time.
My life was always a musical composition, though I never really learned piano other than to pick out favorite tunes by ear. But the Bach Toccata and Fugue begins thusly;
The Toccata begins with a single-voice flourish in the upper ranges of the keyboard, doubled at the octave. It then spirals toward the bottom, where a diminished seventh chord appears (which actually implies a dominant chord with a minor 9th against a tonic pedal), built one note at a time. This resolves into a D major chord.
I interpret that in prose thusly;
Life was bright and full of promise when I was a child… men going to the moon, me learning to draw and paint, and being smarter than the average child to the point of being hated for my smart-asserry and tortured accordingly. I was sexually assaulted by an older boy and spiraled towards the bottom where I was diminished for a time and mired in a seventh chord of depression and despair. But that resolved into a D major chord when the realization dawned that I could teach and help others to learn the music of life.
And then the Fugue begins in earnest. I set the melody and led my students to repeat and reflect it back again. Over and over, rising like a storm and skipping like a happy child through the tulips that blossom as the showers pass. Winding and unwinding in equal measure, my life progressed to a creaky old age. But the notes of regret in the conclusion are few. The reflections of happinesses gained are legion. I have lived a life I do not regret. I may not have my music saved in the same way Johann Sebastian did, but I am proud of the whole of it. And whether by organ or by violin, it will translate to the next life, and will continue to repeat. What more can a doofus who thinks teaching and drawing and telling stories are a form of music ask for from life?
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