Composers have been generating some nutty headlines lately. Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen's Musick, was recently questioned by the Northern Constabulary when a half-eaten swan carcass turned up on his Orkney Islands estate. The swan is a protected bird in the UK, and the police were unamused when Sir Peter offered them swan terrine. (Would this taste good, Amateur Gourmet?) In Russia, Leonid Desyatnikov, a polymorphous composer with minimalist leanings, has written a wildly controversial opera entitled Rosenthal's Children, in which a renegade Nazi geneticist succeeds in cloning Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Mussorgsky, and Tchaikovsky. All five geniuses sing onstage, and there are also fleeting appearances by Stalin, Krushchev, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin. No word yet on whether Stalin and Krushchev have sex, as happens in the novel on which the opera is based.
Rather less nutty, and all too familiar, is another story out of Scotland, this one concerning the composer James Dillon. He threw a public fit when the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, under the direction of Alexander Lazarev, mangled his latest work. Any composer will be able to reel off a few horror stories of this kind: orchestras, who pride themselves on extreme professionalism, do not always include decent treatment of living composers in their job description. Most of the victims suffer in silence, anxious not to bite the hand that offers them crumbs. Dillon has bravely chosen to speak out. Lazarev, by the way, is the same self-righteous twit who mocked and humiliated a Sydney, Australia audience after they applauded the third movement of Tchaikovsky's Sixth.
Woefully underrepresented in this odd litany are American composers. Let's work up some publicity, people! I want to see Aaron Jay Kernis arrested for trying to smuggle zebra meat through LaGuardia; or Jennifer Higdon wiretapped by Homeland Security after writing an opera entitled Condi's Secret; or Richard Danielpour banned for life from Lincoln Center for throwing pies at Lorin Maazel. In my dreams....
