Trigons
Trigon for an Old War: Three Drafts
Café Des Westens Kurfürstendamm
1.
where we waited for that Bruckner concert to begin, drinking beer, remembering especially how the great Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted the adagio when Father did it in his study Führer in his bunker muted cellos in Berlin even better than Vienna even back when Rupert Brooke sat writing at our table about Grantchester, the Vicarage the clotted cream on ripe berries, blood a trifle if there's just enough for tea just enough tradition that's behind it all when Isherwood and Auden came out for the boys working class the best ass of course and free of bourgeois English scruples about heavy brass and soaring violins klezmer music too although by that time Jews were you know Schoenberg Britten both wrote songs for cabaret says humm it for me Mr Bowles (Paul, that is, working here with Copland then) or Sally named for him in fiction odd as this may sound but sally forth
Text sources for "Café Des Westens Kurfürstendamn".
Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind
Virginia Spencer Carr, Paul Bowles: A Life
Lillian Hellman, Pentimento
Muriel Gardiner, Code Name 'Mary'
Stephen Spender, Vienna
Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher
O.V. de L Milosz, The Noble Traveller
Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise, "Death Fugue: Music in Hitler's Germany"
Ken Smith, Berlin: Coming in from the Cold
John Hawkes, The Cannibal
Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus
Bruckner. Anton Bruckner (1824 - 1896) Austrian composer whose symphonies are said to embody the final phase of German Romanticism. Bruckner's work was much admired by Gustav Mahler who described him has "half simpleton, half God".
Furtwängler. Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886-1954) Leading German conductor, controversial because he chose to stay and work in Germany throughout World War II.
Adagio. The second movement of Bruckner's Symphony no. 7. Hitler is reported to have favoured this symphony over Beethoven's 9th. A recording of Furtwangler conducting the adagio was played on Radio Berlin prior to the announcement of Hitler's death.
Grantchester, the Vicarage. Brooke wrote his poem "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester" during a trip to Berlin in 1912.
Isherwood. British writer (1904-86) Best known for his fiction set in Weimar Berlin.
Klezmer. Folk music of the Yiddish communities of Eastern Europe, continues to be influential in contemporary jazz and classical music.
Mr Bowles. Paul Bowles (1910 - 1999) American writer and composer. Befriended and collaborated with Aaron Copland. He knew Isherwood and Spender in Berlin in the Thirties, Isherwood used his surname for the heroine, Sally Bowles in "Goodbye to Berlin" because he "liked the sound of it and also the looks of its owner".
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